I made a list and was initially just going to share it with Martin, Tom and Ken but then realised that it needs to be seen by everyone so we can all get working at it and there is a democratic process in deciding the priority of action.

London IA is our community and we need to make it grow and be useful to everyone that visits it.

1. London IA film night needs a location
2. RSS feeds from blogs of London IA members and a London IA bog roll
3. What other RSS feeds can we pipe in? Johnny Holland, what else? What are you reading. Sharing Instapaper starred items. Google Reader shared items
4. Integration with activity on UX Exchange (http://uxexchange.com/) – an RSS feed of current activity
5. Should we set up Twitter or Facebook integration on the Network? (I don’t use Facebook and don’t know the level of use by London IA members. I obviously realise that Twitter use is endemic.)
6. We need to integrate how our sponsors, Zebra People, are threaded through the network
7. RSS feed of the LBi and Johnny Holland events calendar. (Coming Soon is an event site from Zebra People and UX People that can also be integrated.)
8. We Need Help. Would anyone like to help with organising London IA events? Get in touch with me to discuss.
9. London IA is starting a new Workshop strand. First up is a EuroIA Predux event where the five sets of London speakers who are presenting at EuroIA in September get the chance to rehearse their presentations in front of each other. (More details on London IA in the next couple of days.)
10. As a resource a page collecting together member’s past presentations – maybe powered by Slideshare
11. Philip Winwood is keeping London IA Jobs going. Shall we put up a link to the group pages (or maybe even integrating a feed of the latest opportunities.
12. A general resource section linking to great resources for sketching tools, research practice, interview techniques and guidelines, guerilla usability testing (ie Martin’s posts on this subject on Currybet)
13. Magazines we like
14. A virtual bookcase: Who’s writing a book. Upcoming books of note. Shared Amazon wishlists. Who’s reading what.
15. Someone needs to post about UXBrighton events please (especially their big event next month)
16. Someone needs to post about London Web Standards events and maybe South London Geeks. What else? Any ideas
17. Shall we integrate London IA members Flickr accounts? What other type of user activity from the internets can we integrate?
18. London IA Mentoring

No one sketches enough (apart from maybe Eva-Lotta herself, Dave Gray and Mike Rohde) and many don’t sketch at all. (Can you call yourself a designer if you don’t sketch?) You have to do it, there is not an excuse in the world that is reasonable. There is no rhyme or reason that sketching won’t improve your design process and the work you produce. Thinking is easier, expression is easier, communication of ideas is easier – and best of all (and I can promise this) you will feel better, in fact you will feel great. There may well be an initial pain barrier to get through but persevere and it will be worth it. You will feel proud and a real sense of achievement. You may well begin feeling deeply unsatisfied staring at your efforts but sooner or later you will begin crafting stuff that you will be happy with and will be useful. And I can again promise that you will improve – how can you not?

No one is too big, important, or busy to sketch. This is important to remember.

I hope more agencies, companies, organisations (&etc) will take the initiative that UX designers at Lab49 have taken after attending last week. (Yes I do work there, yes I may have influenced them slightly, but no it is not my proposal). Straight away they have organised fortnightly sketching workshops for everyone in the UX team (they have made it compulsory). It is initially for just the UX team but the intention is to then include developers and all members of the agile teams. The thinking is that sketching will provide everyone with better communication skills. I say so.

I’m calling it sketchedelity

On 30 June London IA will host an evening at Sense Loft with the following talks and audience interactions. The evening is supported by Sense Loft (and the folk at Sense Worldwide) and Zebra People.

EVA-LOTTA LAMM Visual Note Taking

This session will give a quick introduction to the main principles and building blocks of visual notes, answer the question why sketchnoting is a great tool for designers and disperse all the reasons why not to pick it up.

There will be lots of examples and practical exercises that will help you to jump straight into taking you own visual notes.

CENNYDD BOWLES Emotional Lego

Movable, stackable Gestalt psychology fun. Ages 3 and up.

TYLER TATE Simple is not better

We’ve all had puzzling encounters with wristwatches, microwaves, and remote controls that leave us asking: “Why can’t they make it simple!?” But in areas where we’re experts (photography or investing, for instance), we desire the added complexity that puts us in complete control. We’ll consider two criteria for selecting the optimal level of complexity in a product.

Activity: You and your teammates will have the opportunity of a lifetime: sketch ideas for a new “As Seen on TV” kitchen utensil.

(follow @evalottchen)
(follow @cennydd)
(follow @tylertate)

Richard Rutter

The Future of Web Typography

Glenn Jones

Re-using data people have left around the web

Claire Rowland

The Psychology of Creativity

Andy Budd

The Cult of Innovation

Below are full details of the evening’s activities, how to sign up for a free ticket and the presentation deck for the evening:

The Future of Web Typography

Richard Rutter

For too long typography on the web has been stuck in the dark ages, but web type is now undergoing a renaissance. Richard will take us through recent innovations, revealing the highs and lows of font linking with its minefield of design, technology, ethics and business models. He’ll tell the story of Fontdeck, a proposed solution to these issues, and wax lyrical on the shiny future of fonts and web type.

Richard is production director at web consultancy Clearleft. User experience designer by day, he’s a web typography evangelist by night and runs the much-cited Webtypography.net. Seeking to provide a webfonts solution that works for type foundries and professional web designers alike, Richard co-founded Fontdeck in 2009.

Re-using data people have left around the web

Glenn Jones

Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We fill in profiles, upload photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks.

This session will explore the practical reuse of social media data and how it can create better user experience. How to exact social graphs and profiles information from open data sources like RSS and Microformats to provide a wealth information about your users.

Glenn Jones is the Creative Director and a founder of Madgex. Equally as passionate about interaction design and coding, he is currently addicted to exploring ideas of the semantic web and data portability. His latest project Ident Engine allows front-end developers to create new user experiences from a blend of identity and profile data. Glenn has given talks about data portability at many events and has written for sites such as ALA.

Innovation requires creativity

Claire Rowland

A lot of hot air and expensive business consultancy time is sold in pursuit of facilitating creativity but the creative process is still thought of as a mysterious black box, often the preserve of certain people and not others. But what’s the actual science behind it? Are some of us more creative than others, and if so, why? What can all of us do to help ourselves have more and better ideas?

Claire Rowland is a service design lead at Fjord, where she heads up UX research activities. She’s been working in UX since 1997, when a duff recruiter put a psychology/philosophy and interactive media graduate forward for a software developer role at the Press Association despite her only having 20 minutes of the required 2 years’ Unix experience. Thankfully, a curious manager decided she might be useful to have around anyway, and let her figure out how for herself. The answer quickly turned out to be IA, IXD and UX research, and since then she’s been working on web, mobile, PC and multi-channel services for companies such as Razorfish, Flow Interactive and Seren.

She has conducted hundreds of user research sessions with participants from 8 year old Lego fans to the directors of BP, and these days mainly focuses on finding ways to help her awesome creative design colleagues get inside users’ heads.

The Innovation Trap!

Andy Budd

Businesses constantly strive to gain competitive advantage through “innovation”. However, is innovation a legitimate business strategy or a misguided and often misunderstood buzz-word?

Is it really possible to innovate within a large organisation to a budget and deadline, or is corporate innovation a myth. Can innovation be planned or is it something that grows organically from a particular mind set and way of working?

The myth of innovation is seductive. However, it can often take effort and resources away from the less sexy but more productive task of finessing existing ideas. As industries strive to create new products, are we forgetting that some of the best selling and most iconic designs are actually incremental improvements to existing products?

In this session Andy will argue that innovations isn’t just a bad strategy; it’s no strategy at all. Instead of crossing our fingers and betting the farm on a sudden and uncontrollable burst of luck, we need to be sensitive to the world around us and focus on solving immediate problems in a more intelligent way.

Andy Budd is one of the founding partners at User Experience Design Consultancy, Clearleft. As an interaction design and usability specialist, Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like The Web 2.0 Expo, SXSW and An Event Apart. Andy curates dConstruct, one of the most popular design conferences in the UK. He’s also responsible for UX London, The UK’s first dedicated Usability, Information Architecture and User Experience Design event.

Get a free ticket

Slides