I’ll be in Melbourne next month as part of UX Australia, leading my
Soft Skills Are Hard workshop. I’ve been iterating this workshop for the past 18 months and have been very impressed with the people who have come and worked hard to assess their own goals and to work together to design processes, tools and habits for themselves and each other in order to improve those soft skills. I see that people have found it to be a profound experience that has made a difference in how they think about their work and their careers.

We’ve looked at literally hundreds of soft skills, such as

• Collaboration
• Permission to fail
• Communication
• Pattern recognition
• Thinking broadly
• Critical thinking
• Listening
• Focus
• Respect
• Coping with ambiguity
• Visual thinking
• Managing stress

For the areas that people find most relevant, they’ve developed a set of best practices to help improve that skill. For example,
Be More Patient

• Give another person benefit of the doubt
• Practice being patient at home or with friends
• Listening – give others a chance to speak regardless of if you think they’re right or wrong
• Breathe, pause mentally before offering your own point of view
• Acknowledge that there are many ways to do one thing
• Remember that people need/want to be heard
• Reference past experiences when having patience has worked in your favor

If you’re around Melbourne at the end of next month, please sign up for the workshop!

Bonus: here’s some more examples from past workshops

Last month I led a session at Service Design Melbourne about Skill Building for Design Innovators. You can find a lovely writeup of the talk here and the video is here and embedded below.

I’ll also be presenting a similar talk this Friday at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Mice as Stand-Ins in the Fight Against Disease [New York Times] – Looks like this has been happening in some measure for a while, but some new methods are increasing the usage. The most science-fiction thing you’ll read all week.

In what could be the ultimate in personalized medicine, animals bearing your disease, or part of your anatomy, can serve as your personal guinea pig, so to speak. Some researchers call them avatars, like the virtual characters in movies and online games. “The mice allow you the opportunity to test drugs to find out which ones will be efficacious without exposing the patient to toxicity,” said Colin Collins, a professor at the University of British Columbia.

Australia 2012 [Flickr] – My complete set of pictures from Australia earlier this month.

Chinese families’ worldly goods in Huang Qingjun’s pictures [BBC] – We’ve seen other projects like this, but the focus on China captures a material culture in transition.

Amid China’s tumultuous dash to become rich, one man’s photographs of families posing with their worldly goods will soon seem like records from a distant era. Huang Qingjun has spent nearly a decade travelling to remote parts of China to persuade people who have sometimes never been photographed to carry outside all their household possessions and pose for him. The results offer glimpses of the utilitarian lives of millions of ordinary Chinese who, at first glance, appear not to have been swept up by the same modernisation that has seen hundreds of millions of others leave for the cities. But seen more closely, they also show the enormous social change that has come in a generation. So the photo of an elderly couple of farmers outside their mud house reveals a satellite dish, DVD player and phone.

Four Big Things, a phrase dating from 1950s for most sought-after goods for newly married couples: sewing machine, bicycle, watch, radio. It’s since come to refer to whatever is most fashionable at the time. By 1980s the four big things were: TV, washing machine, rice cooker, fridge. Now, consumer goods flood China’s cities, it tends to be used to describe people’s aspirations for the latest thing.

Must-See Video: How a Woman With No Arms Dresses Herself. What Assistance Can Design Provide? [Core 77] – I love the reaction; that excitement of discovering how current solutions could be improved. Designers are so great at bringing that creativity and know-how to bear to make change for the good. But let’s remember, we don’t need videos to be posted by users to uncover what things aren’t working for them. Are designers waiting for broken products to appear in front of them so they can spontaneously improve them, or are they out there looking at current behaviors and solutions in order to proactively find opportunities. Designers: you don’t need the disabled (or anyone) to post their own videos, go and shoot your own!

I hope that more folks with disabilities make videos like this, not just to share with others what their particular trials are, but to enable us designers to improve upon the objects they use.

FILMography – a Tumblr with an incredible series of images where a printout of a still from a film is held up in the actual location where that scene was shot. It’s a “trick” I’ve seen before but mostly as a one-off; the breadth here is fascinating.

FILM + photography = FILMography.

Here is the last post with highlights of my trip to Australia (see parts 1, 2 and 3, previously). Meanwhile, all my pictures are making their way to Flickr.

At the tram stop for the Children’s Hospital, the platform is filled with various cute “Dr. Jake” signs. I especially like transforming the transformer box into a height chart. Someone is thinking broadly about reframing the hospital from scary into welcoming and using the first point of entry – the tram stop – as the place to begin doing that.

Patience is a virtue. A post-design attempt to mollify confused users.

I could not figure out what the heck “Teady” referred to on this first truck. It wouldn’t be my first time encountering a word I didn’t understand (see “showbag” in an earlier post, say). But no, the adjacent truck says “Steady.” I went back and checked – did the initial S wear off? No, it was never there to begin with. The design – sans S – fits perfectly in the designated area on the first truck.

Bold language boldly presented.

Once again, weird people sculptures.

Free WiFi at the train station. Nice visual reference to many memes (e.g., Star Wars kid, the dancing baby, keyboard cat) as well as Facebook and Twitter.

ACDC lane. Yes, the official City of Melbourne lane commemorating ACDC.

Reminded me of a similar sign in San Francisco.

The menu at this restaurant offered beer in a pot or a beaker. I was further charmed by the use of familiar words with shifted meanings, as part of my foreigner’s journey. But no, the beaker is exactly what you’d think: a beaker.

More 8-bit-videogame streetart, although Mario instead of Space Invaders; stickers instead of tiles.

Many many flavors of hot chocolate at Chokolait. I must go back!

Indoor nighttime climbing wall.