wud

So, I survived another World Usability Day. It was my turn to pick up the slack, after skipping last year while my coworkers bore the brunt of bored kids at the Museum of Science. This year, things were drastically different 'cause we've had to change venues - ending up at South Station, a pretty busy stop on the Red line / commuter rail.

What preceded the event were a dozen or so hectic meetings where we tried to figure out how in the heck we could tie usability to this year's theme - sustainability. If you think about it, if you set out to create something perfectly usable, you may end up wasting more materials/energy/money than you would otherwise. It's all about finding that sweet spot between designing something that works and not destroying the planet in the process.

In any case, we actually ended up with a few fairly coherent activities/posters. Folks from Farm Design had examples of sustainably-built yet usable medical implements. Somebody discovered that Boston has a place called the "Institute for Human Centered Design" that produces nifty items for everyday use. We even recruited a local bike shop to demo their foldable bikes.

The star of the show was your truly (of course!). I stuck about a million ideas on my poster, but the gist was that a) companies that make products that are designed to fail / become obsolete / you can't repair yourself should be avoided (I'm looking at you, Apple!); b) DIY'ers that either fix things or repurpose their components are cool; and c) think before you buy. I even had a hands-on activity - I took apart an unusable and very much broken vacuum cleaner, and invited passersby to come up with novel uses for the parts. You can see the plastic bits under the poster:

Surprisingly, people that did stop by were very interested in the message. It may have helped that they had nothing to do while they waited for their train, but hey, we'll take 'em in any shape or form.

All in all, I thought things went much better than they have in some of the previous years. As a bonus, all the participants got to imbibe at will at the reception held inside MIT's Stata Center. And let me tell you - that's one weird building all right... talk about usability...