I got back last week from two weeks in Australia, traveling around as well as speaking at UX Australia and Service Design Melbourne. Here is the second of four posts with some of the highlights. Part 1 is here.

All my pictures are making their way to Flickr, as well.

Nice combination of cultural iconography.

I liked seeing the range of medical services laid out like this. Not very confidence inspiring, however.

Manners poster.

Asian preferred.

A really awful brand name and sign. What does crocodile have to do with thai? And what is added by making him or it senior? It’s a puzzle.

Father’s Day is September 2.

Milk for the workplace. At last.

360Àö Self-Portrait at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Although there are no visual cues, the artist is in some contraption that moves her around, through a complete circle. As she moves, gravity deforms her face slightly while she essentially remains expressionless. The net effect is compelling and disorienting.

The 18th Biennale of Sydney was chock full of astonishing spectacle. Really wonderful. And I only heard about it because I checked in (via Foursquare) at the museum and a kindly person on Twitter suggested I head over to the island and see it.

A crushed car was on display and yet needed to be marked before and after with warning signs so that traffic going by would not be alarmed. Are the signs part of the work or something that is imposed on the artist in order to allow their work to proceed? And what does it mean to have a sign announcing “End Artwork” anyway? Is that an observation or an imperative?

• This isn’t the page of a magazine, this is my desktop [Reddit] – (With link to screenshot of PC desktop at http://imgur.com/QIhqe.jpg) The tv plays youtube, the middle speaker controls volume while the one on the left and right open up Rhythmbox and VLC, the cabinets are notepads, the trashbin is clearly a widget, the clock and alarm clock actually work, the books also serve as launchers, the top bar with the date lets me know of future events. I created the desktop for fun, but don't really recommend it as screenlets seem to use a lot of RAM.
• Bob and Beyond: A Microsoft Insider Remembers [Technologizer] – [Tandy Trower relates several – ultimately unsuccessful – attempts at Microsoft to ship a UI that leverages key research from Nass and Reeves about the social interactions people have with any technology. In his view, there is tremendous value if it's done right and it wasn't ever done right.] The Office team picked up Microsoft Agent for their next release, but opted not to use the characters I had created as they preferred their own unique ones. To avoid the past user-reported annoyances, they gave users more control over when the character would appear, but did little to reform its behavior when it was present. So, you still had the same cognitive disconnect between the character’s reaction to your actions in the application’s primary interface. The character just became a sugar coating for the Help interface, which, if it failed to come up with useful results, left the user unimpressed and thinking that the character was not very useful.
• Japanese Food Companies Seek Growth Abroad [NYTimes.com] – [What will this mean to collectors/fans of Foreign Groceries 🙂 ] Ichiro Nakamura, spokesman for Lotte in Japan, said that the 400 versions of Koala’s March cookies — some smile and some cry, some hold musical instruments and some play sports — are much more challenging to manufacture than people might think. “We have a special technology that puffs up the koala-shaped cookies so there is hollow space inside where soft chocolate can be injected later,” Mr. Nakamura said. “And unless you have the right technology, the cookies are going to break easily when packed into boxes.”