An ending and a beginning
Yesterday was the end of an era in the design world at MS: Our beloved design training manager, Scott Berkun, gave his last talk. He'll be cleaning out his office over the next week, but he's effectively gone.
There had been other talented people in that job, but none of them took to it with the same energy that Scott did. He was always excited about the possibilities of getting Design deeper into the product cycle, and he helped us get excited about it when we felt like we were faced with impossible odds. (And the odds ain't good, folks -- 50,000+ employees worldwide... roughly 200 designers... and you wonder why some of our products don't make any damn sense to human beings)
As a last lecture, it was a doozy. It had a classic Berkun title: "Ten Golden Rules: Thoughts on Software from Voltaire, Willy Wonka, and Microsoft Postmortem archives." It was also clearly a "whaddya gonna do, fire me?" talk: He had a beer, he said f*ck a couple of times, he sang a song about the product cycle, and he (jokingly) yelled at the training coordinator who asked him to repeat questions for the tape.
If you're involved in UI design at all, I'd check out the essays on his site, and bookmark it. He's going to do as little as possible for a couple of months, and then is planning to do a bunch of writing. I'm looking forward to it.
