In the beginning, there were engineers making software.

Just as there were inventors who came up with the idea and “just made the thing” for centuries before there were industrial designers, so are the origins of software punctuated by programmers who made ugly and inefficient things. But, those “things” were novel, and they worked. Design, as a separate priority, came later. Apple Computer, Inc. became an immediate and substantial hit because they looked beyond what the computer could do and focused on making the hardware accessible and how the software was presented. The focus on color graphics and remarkably usable software (for the time), such as the groundbreaking VisiCalc, gave design a front-and-center priority it hadn’t enjoyed before.

“Posters are dissent made visible—they communicate, advocate, instruct, celebrate, and warn, while jarring us to action with their bold messages and striking iconography. ... Without a doubt, the poster remains the most resonant, intrinsic and enduring item in the arsenal of a contemporary graphic designer.”
Elizabeth Resnick

“Despite the fact that we’re the ‘lower’ 99 percent, we’re still the 99 percent, and acting together we can make change.” Sarah Kaiser

Nearly two years ago, we blogged about “Wake Up!” the poster created by Invo designer Sarah Kaiser and Chief Creative Director Juhan Sonin, and its inclusion in Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for the Digital Age 2001-2012” which features over 122 posters from artists in 32 countries.

Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for the Digital Age 2001–2012 comprises a significant collection of empathetic and visually compelling messages for our time. The third in a series of socio-political poster exhibitions, Graphic Advocacy has been shown in Korea, Mexico, Bolivia, and numerous galleries across the United States, and will continue to tour in 2015.

Graphic Advocacy will be on exhibition at Towson University until December 20, 2014. (Towson is a short distance from Baltimore, Maryland.) See the Schedule for upcoming showings.

Graphic Advocacy creator Elizabeth Resnick is Professor and Chair of the Graphic Design Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts. She is a passionate design curator who has developed and organized design exhibitions since in 1991. In a 2013 TEDx talk, Resnick describes how her own early experiences in art school during the Vietnam War era contributed to the work she does today.

Because I’ve been a little slow learning to use Slack, I realized today that I missed some awesome links being shared around the studio and across the country. Here they are.

MakerBot Ghostly Vinyl Challenge

If you know what an LP is...or a turntable?

Design a printable, win a 3D printer! All for the love of vinyl. (Thanks, Ben Listwon!)

Episode Summary

What role should user experience play in your organization?

The answer to this question depends very much on who and what you are. Say you’re a bootstrapped startup founded by experts in technical issues and sales. You should try to get free advice and help, or maybe trade some equity for UX design, or perhaps even rely on your own intuition until you can raise some capital. On the other hand, a large software company such as Oracle or Microsoft should make user experience a key focus and investment for every business unit, and have a strong advocate and visionary in the C-suite. Between these extremes lie many different models for deploying user experience appropriately.

The Halloween leftovers are already dwindling to the candy nobody likes. We’ve had our first snowfall. And I'm ready to knit another pair of wristwarmers for our beautiful but drafty old studio.

It is hard to believe that only two weeks ago our entire Invo team was in Camden, Maine at the 18th annual Pop!Tech conference. We braved a nor’easter, sampled chowder and local beers, downed countless oysters, and met more fascinating, brilliant, quirky, and funny people than any of us can remember. I canvassed the group last week to see what rose to the surface.

Eric Benoit: would have liked more show than tell

 Here’s what caught our attention this week.

Image source and credits: Senior Designer Brian Gartside on Behance.

Water is Life has partnered with researchers at Carnegie-Mellon and University of Virginia on the Drinkable Book Project to help provide education about and access to clean water. The pages of the Drinkable Book are treated to become water filters and also include information to educate people about the dangers of contaminated water.

Kalong-drawing Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons 

We haven't forgotten about the Ebola crisis, especially after reading Bats, Trees and Bureaucrats: Ebola and How Everything, Positively Everything, Connects. Disturbing but well researched.

We heard a heartwarming and fascinating story on NPR earlier this week when host David Greene interviewed author Judith Newman, about how a talking phone made life easier for her 13-year-old son, Gus, who has autism.

Episode Summary

Like wildfire, word of the demise of UX agencies is spreading through the community.

Sparked by the acquisition of Adaptive Path, the closing of Smart Design in San Francisco, and an analysis by UX influential Peter Merholz, the intelligentsia are hailing the decline of UX and design agency work in technology. Exacerbating the situation are rumors that a variety of other agencies are in trouble, trying desperately to get bought as they prepare for a shutdown.

We recently published a series of six articles looking at the future of experience design for emerging technologies. For those of you who like to sit down and think for awhile about things, we've packaged them up right here so you can take them all in at once, or find any you may have missed.