Last night Betsy Weber, TechSmith’s Chief Evangelist, dragged me to MI UPA meeting which I had mixed feelings about going into–I tend to battle some usability folks who seem averse to aesthetics and are always shoving “Windows standards” down my throat. However, I walked away from the event completely inpired. Up until last night I had never heard of Tom Brinck, but after listening to him expound on usability and user-experience–I have to say the man totally rocks! Tom totally gets it. He knows what web / interface design is all about and his presentation was easily one of the best I’ve ever seen at a user group meeting (hell it was better than most of the sessions you see at conferences).
Perhaps the most fascinating part of the evening was his discussion of Wabi-sabi influenced user-experience design. The philosophy is one of elegance through simplicity and utility, but aknowledges there is inherent beauty in such a design. One of his slides was diagram created by Peter Boersma which outlines the relationship between Wabi-sabi and user-experience design which provides a pretty good overview of topic.
Anyways, this was interesting enough that I thought I’d throw it out into the blogosphere for others to nibble on.