It’s been a busy few months, but I’m back into blogging mode and I’d like to share my experiences about attending and presenting at UXCampLondon.
This was the first time I presented to the wider User Experience community and it was a great feeling have done that. My presentation was entitled ‘Tentacles of an Octopus’ and it was on the benefits of group thinking, specifically when it comes to brainstorming. I ran a small activity where I got the group to make their own egg-cup from a limited amount of materials. Afterwards we would discuss our creations and if it would give the group a chance to see everyone else’s creations.
Here’s are my presentation slides in PDF format:
Tentacles of an Ocotopus (presentation slides – PDF 7.9MB)
One of the participants, Jessica Hall even wrote a blog post about the presentations she attended at UXCampLondon 2010, here’s what she had to say about mine:
“Tentacles of an Octopus by Mehul Hirani – this was a bit different! We had to create an egg cup out of some random materials (paper plates, staples, sticky tape) and the results showed that even with the same brief everyone had come up with something different, demonstrating the power of unleashing creativity. Mehul talked about different brainstorming techniques he found useful and others shared their ideas. One that stuck in my mind was a technique where you think of all the things a product shouldn’t do (e.g. be impossible to use, be prohibitively expensive) and then reverse them to come up with a list of the things it should do.”*Read the full blog post over at Jessica Hall’s blog:
It’s been a long time since I last went to an exhibition in London. Last night I went out to see the Decode exhibition at the V&A Museum in South Kensington. With my trusty 2-for-1 Time Out voucher the incentive of seeing a ‘free’ exhibition was too good to miss out on.
The exhibition was made up of three areas – Code, Interactivity & Network. It was great fun and I’d definitely recommend it.
What a year! Well I guess, alot of people start off their summary of 2009 that way.
There have been some great moments including:
- Passing my karate grading
- Celebrating my niece, Eesha’s 1st Birthday
- The birth of my nephew – Rahul
- The birth of my niece – Jasmin
- Hugging my grandma after 9 years and visiting India twice in one year
I’m really lucky to achieved so much in 12 months. I hope I can equal that in 2010, it’ll be hard but I like challenges.