I want to take a moment to have a deeper, more reflective conversation about the role that sketching plays in my professional work, and how it has evolved it over time. A lot of sketching advice tends to be too general (“You should sketch!”), too superficial (“You need to buy these pens!”), or too self-congratulatory (“Look at the sketches I made!”) to be useful for those of us who have already incorporated sketching into our everyday design practice. For me, sketching tends to be a surprisingly philosophical endeavor, and I'm curious to hear how other designers think about their own sketching.

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In September I had the opportunity to travel to New York City and take the stage with U.N. Global Pulse to talk about our work on HunchWorks. Together with Chris van der Walt and Sara Farmer we spoke at the O'Reilly Strata Conference, an event dedicated to the emerging field of data science and the brilliant developers, analysts and researchers who find themselves working with petabytes of unstructured data on a daily basis.

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I had the pleasure of speaking at the Oregon Transit Conference this week in sunny Seaside, OR. This was the conference for representatives of Oregon's many transit agencies. Topics ranged from grant writing how-tos and leadership to the future of public transit itself. 

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Last week saw the latest release of Instapaper, a service for saving web pages for reading later. It seems like a simple thing, but Instapaper has embedded itself into my life surprisingly deeply, and is a must-have for folks who find themselves with dozens of tabs in their browser of articles they want to read, but don't quite have the time for right now. Instapaper also proves quite instructive of how to deliver great experiences.

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One of the challenges of investing in a great user experience is the concern that it can be easily copied — you do a lot of work to find the perfect experience and then your solution is out there in the world for anyone else to copy. So if UX can be easily commoditized, you just invest in it as a commodity, right? Wrong, dude, wrong.

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Tireless and timeless software commentator Dave Winer recently declared that “web browsers are done. Feature complete.” His point is that product categories stop evolving, and when they reach that point of maturity, all that's left are the occasional tweaks to maintain compatibility with the latest platforms.

I don't know if I agree.

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I'm currently working on a project looking at the future of commerce. One area of interest, particularly after the announcement of Google Wallet, is payments. In our research, we've paid particular attention to the payment act, and it's interesting what it reveals about the broader commerce experience.

Most current point-of-sale setups are directly descendent from ye olde cash registers. As such, they provide a distinct division between the buyer and the merchant. Such a division may not have been a big deal when all that a cash register did was tally up items. But recently, I returned a rental car, and was faced with…

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As Jesse tweeted earlier today from the awards ceremony held at MIT, he and we are excited, pleased, and humbled that Adaptive Path is one of the winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge for our iWitness project.

With funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the iWitness project will bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media by creating a web-based tool that aggregates user-generated content from social media during big news events. Whether a parade or protest, election or earthquake, iWitness will display photos, videos and messages in an easy-to-browse interface. iWitness will make it easier to cross-reference first-person accounts with journalistic reporting, opening up new avenues for storytelling, fact-checking and connecting people to events in their communities.

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Imagine you're a researcher working with farmers in Uganda. Your years of experience tell you that something is not right this year. It's not unusual for the harvest to be a week late, but this year, it’s three weeks later than usual. If only there was a way for you to share this hunch and investigate it with your peers.

This is where HunchWorks comes in…

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Since you last heard from us, we’ve been busy tackling the many aspects of the HunchWorks design as part of our four week volunteer efforts for Global Pulse. There is a lot of work to do and we’d love some help from you, the design community.

What is HunchWorks, again?

HunchWorks is a place where people can create and discuss hypotheses about what’s happening in the world to help solve global problems. These ‘hunches’ allow researchers to discover anomalies that trigger further investigation and analysis work. We’re helping shape the product by identifying the core needs of HunchWorks and collaboratively designing solutions through four weekly design sprints and specific challenges.

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