UsabilityNJ
The New Jersey UPA Chapter
Meeting Details for May 12, 2008
The next meeting of UsabilityNJ will be held on Monday, May 12, 2008 at Logical Design Solutions, 131 Madison Ave., Morristown, NJ (click for directions).
Please note: This meeting will be held on Monday not on our usual day.
Social hour starts at 6:30 PM. Presentation starts at 7:00 PM.
| Topic: |
The Power of Storytelling:
The Most Usable Tool on the Planet |
| Speaker: | Kevin Brooks |
This event is free and open to the public. As a courtesy to our speaker and host, please RSVP to rsvp [at] usabilitynj [dot] org if you plan to attend the meeting.
Talk Summary
We listen to stories for enlightenment; we tell stories for education and entertainment. Story is one of the oldest ways humans interface with each other, communicating complex and critical information. Everyday people are convinced, impressed, discouraged, encouraged and swayed by the stories they hear. Good storytelling is often invisible while influential, yet bad storytelling is painfully obvious. In business, time may be money, but the power of a good story, well told at the right time, has changed the course of individual careers, corporations and entire industries. Our nature is to be storytelling creatures and that effects us, at work as well as in the rest of our lives.
This talk will be about the power of storytelling and some of the many ways it can be used to tell the stories of users and the stories of usability professionals. It will also cover ways to improve one's storytelling for work and entertainment.
Speaker Bio
-
Kevin Brooks
Principle Staff Researcher, Motorola Labs
Kevin Brooks is a Principle Staff Researcher for
Motorola Labs
and a professional oral storyteller. At Motorola Kevin researches new user interface technologies and expresses these technologies as connected user-centered experiences. As an experience designer, written language, audio, video, graphics and computer programming are all elements used in his technology stories for both the research and product divisions of Motorola. As a writer and performing oral storyteller, Kevin tells personal tales from his urban childhood of the 60īs through to his present day parenthood. His stories for adults and family audiences resonate with humor and poignancy, and he has been featured performer at many storytelling festivals, conferences and other venues.
Kevin received his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where his area of research was computational narrative and interactive cinema. Kevin has also studied engineering, computer science, creative writing and film production as an undergraduate, receiving a BS in Communications from Drexel University and an MA in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University. Kevin has several published papers and has given numerous workshops on storytelling and interactive story design. In 2006 he released his first CD of stories entitled "Kiss of Summer".
Downloads and Additional Information
- Kevin's 2006 UPA Conference keynote talk including a link to Kevin's storytelling resources.
- Information about Storytelling for User Experience Design, Kevin & Whitney Quesenbery's book in progress.