Top 7 in order to survive and grow peacefully

1. Let go, to control is absolutely an illusion, instead adjust or improvise fast
2. Do not plan too much. Leave some space for serendipity.
3. You cannot heal or help someone all the time, you cannot solve all problems, but you can genuinely walk witj someone thru challenges.
4. Nothing lasts. Enjoy the small things even if they will not last.
5. Continuity facilitates psychological balance in humans. Any abrupt change destabilizes.
6. Look forward for life beyond physical pain.
7. Know when to start.

CC Salon Montreal in Retrospect, a year later

Turn off the Lights!

Welcome everyone! Me, the host of the Salon.

All the CC goodies.

Catering by 1000 Oysters

Debugging…

Preparing for our first talk by Mark Surman, Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation on Skype from Toronto.

We gathered on this cold snowy day over 250 people at la Sala Rossa!

Martha Rans presenting Artists Legal Outreach.

Gilles de St-Exupéry.

Karl Dubost, Let’s Get Digital.

Michelle Thorne.

Christine Préfontaine & Émily Rose-Michaud

Also on staged was Christopher Adams, Freesouls and Sharism Presents & Jeremy Clarke, Global Voices of whom I don’t have photos…

PRESS RELEASE – -

Creative Commons Salon Montreal 1.0

Montreal, December 13th, 2010

Sharism presents the first ever Creative Commons Salon in Montreal on Tuesday, December 21st, 2010. Calling all creators, internauts, jurists, and educators: this event is for you.

Entry to the event is free and open, as are the ideas that will be exchanged among us!

The first CC Salon Montreal, which will take place at the Sala Rossa (situated at 4848 St-Laurent Boulevard), is an excellent opportunity to learn about Creative Commons licenses and how they can help you. The Salon is a wonderful occasion to gather the artistic, internaut, and legal communities of Montreal to discuss issues such as intellectual property, open culture, and copyright in the age of the Internet.

The evening will commence with a conference on the question of Creative Commons and intellectual property in Canada, including the most recent copyright reform bill – Bill C-32. The line-up of guest speakers includes Martha Rans, Project Lead for Creative Commons Canada, and Mark Surman, the executive producer of Mozilla Drumbeat. Several other artists and web developers will share their experiences and answer your questions. This is a Creative Commons event and is co-sponsored by Université de Montréal chaire en droit de la sécurité et des affaires électronique, and by Mozilla Drumbeat.

Doors open at 5:30 pm. Free music, DJing, and live cinema are on the agenda after 10pm.

Whether you are a defender of free culture and believe in the spirit of sharing, or if you have a peaked interest but are not quite sure what it is all about, then come join us and learn more, share your ideas, or simply come join the fun.

Will upload the slideshare talks very soon. Hopefully I can get a helping hand editing / uploading the videos of the talks for CC Montreal.

Special thanks to Geneviève Danfort who helped us with this successful event! (^____^)

The manifesto is still a work-in-progress and cannot wait to upload our thoughts. Until then a little sample.

The Arab Awakening is above all a youth revolution.The wall of fear and oppression has fallen.
The wall that restrained the creativity and self-esteem of Arab youth for far too long has fallen.
The wall of paternalism which considered women as the property of men, and youth as the executors of their elder’s, has fallen.

The wall has fallen.

The veil has fallen.

We are here. Now.

The revolution has just begun.

This is an old video I made a few years ago. Since I lost all data and art work for a full decade, I have only bits and pieces left online. This is an expression of perceptions, between different identities, and the quest to find balance in all of them. Traveling, and moving to different places, mixed with video experimentation’s, stories collected, recordings of phone calls with my mother, field recordings in Beirut, drawings and thoughts…

Tomorrow I will be 29.

C.O.N.N.E.C.T.I.N.G.T.H.E.D.O.T.S

Traveling back and forth.

Screen Printing posters for Creative Commons Salon in Montreal

Keith Murray’s hands when he visited Montreal. Pink tattoos.

Screen Shot of Mark Surman speaking on Skype at the Creative Commons Salon Montreal

More practicing at drawings.

Arab Spring.

Arab Revolution.

Drawing of Mona Eltahawy

Co-Founded a record label. No Weapon.

WAEL GHONIM.

Uprising.

Swag made in montreal for Growing Global Movements at sxsw

Discussing the Arab Identity. sxsw talk: Growing GLobal Movements.

Lots of back and forth to NYC

Promoting/organizing the Libre Graphics Meetings in Montreal

At Pecha Kucha

April 2010

Oshazuke <3

Vj set for CC Qatar Official Launch.

Packed, and moved from HOMA to Mile-End.

Our friends got married on Île Ste-Hélène in Montreal, magical.

Ate with my family in Lebanon <3

Became a mobile blood vessel for a new human.

Spoke about the wisdom of the web at ParisWeb.

Keeping lists for future projects, Hopes & Dreams, …

W.H.E.R.E.D.O.E.S.T.H.I.S.L.E.A.D.

It is not an amorphous cloud of equals, where nobody gets any decision power. Neither is it a traditional hierarchical organization where commands are issued top-down and people are expected to follow them. A Swarm may look like this from the outside, but that’s not what it is.

Rather, it is a scaffolding set up by a few individuals that enable tens of thousands of people to cooperate on a common goal in their life. These tens of thousands are usually vastly diverse and come from all walks of life, but share one common goal.

As all the people in the Swarm are volunteers — they are there because they think the Swarm can be a vehicle for change in an area they care about — the only way to lead is by inspiring others through action.
…

In a Swarm, nobody gets to tell anybody else what to do. (People can take on roles and deliverables voluntarily, though.)

What is a Swarm.

Let us focus on What We Can Do!

Why am I referring to a Swarm?

Lately I have been thinking a lot about a sort of collective around our craft in my city. I currently live in Montreal, and I am a user experience designer. I find myself isolated. Although I used to be part of the group UXMTL, I quickly lost interest in it because it was actually the opposite of what I could do, or even wanted to do. My goals were not met, and I did not meet other designers of other fields. Rather I got into arguments with very comfortable bureaucrates working in small agencies who came to our meetings to mostly argue about our existence.

My goal was to get to know our ever growing community of practitioners, and share methods, books, knowledge and best practices. Rather we were a few meeting in a closed room, complaining about our every day battle — making our boss understand why he/she hired us in the first place. Help our craft be accepted in a design process that is too centered on making things look nice, but not very useful.

This was Montreal back in 2009. And unfortunately, things have not change that much. BUT this post is not to rent about this small city, rather to try once more to fit it.

Why a Design Swarm?

I think that if we gather around a common goal and inspire each other through action and cooperation, we can make a good change. I am part of big collectives, and movements that I deeply believe in and have found myself very inspired, active and motivated when I felt we were all making something better, or doing something together without planning too much. Just getting things done. I’d love for a Design Swarm / Collective to exist in Montreal and to gather people who are working in a design field that is centered on the end user. They don’t have to be making screens, or wireframes, or sitemaps. They should be the new kind of designers who not only care about how sexy the font is, but if the font is accessible/readable, web friendly, and if the message the font is drawing; is understood. Designers with a soul. I am throwing this out there and hope to reach at least one or two other Montrealers who, like me, believe in change, believe in purpose, love their jobs, love people and want to be better at what they do by sharing / collaborating / and occupying their world.

a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website.

[1] The wireframe depicts the page layout or arrangement of the website’s content, including interface elements and navigational systems, and how they work together.

Why a wireframe?

• To nail down requirements, goals, priorities, functionalities
• To help all stakeholders to make decisions, take a position
• It is faster to update than a finished designed, iterative process and design thinking
• It is a technical blueprint reference for developers

What are the steps needed before wireframing?

• Clear Brief
• Vision Document
• Feature Lists
• Research and Analysis Results
• Sitemaps
• Scenarios
• Content Strategy

An Overview of wireframes at different stages of a project

The Sketch

When to hand a sketch?

• Brandstorming
• To visualize and communicate clearly to other team members
• Communicating high-level concepts with client
• Iterative design work that is already in visual design

High-level but refined Wireframes

When to hand a high-level but detailed wireframe?

• Taking the hand sketch to the screen
• Specifying functionalities
• Visualizing detailed interactions
• Building out a prototype to test in user testing
• Communicate to the client more directly what the page layout will look like
• Setting the client’s expectations of the functionalities

Visual Design Hybrid

When to hand visual design hybrids?

• When we have the need to blend the interaction design with the visual design in order to communicate faster/clearer with more efficiency
• To make quick revisions to the client
• Building or tweaking on an existing website
• When collaborating closely with the dev team in a very agile process

All these examples are ALL Wireframes. The main goal is to provide enough information for your team and the stakeholders to make decisions.

“… research is a way to make a designer’s gut instinct/intuition better. “

Jared M. Spool

When meeting with a potential client most of the time designers are asked to show up with moodboards, mockups or design directions before even knowing WHO they are designing, or WHAT it is they are designing. Clients look at the early mockups that a designer might have done some guessing / astrology / voodoo to come up with. Then the client chooses a design direction, not really knowing WHY he is choosing a particular design or not, since the research has not yet been made…

This is dangerous.
It’s dangerous because the client sets the production on a designer’s vision of something that is still unknown, the design direction chosen might not yet be the one needed, and off goes the whole production… Sometimes in very risky waters… Sometimes in the wrong direction.

After my Paris Web conference, a lot of designers asked me to write about how we can improve that process in a design environment.

It took me a while to tackle the subject because in the meantime, in another context, at the College I teach Interaction Design at, a Designer Teacher raised a debate around what is a wireframe, and the role of an Interaction Designer in an agency.
(I will respond to that debate soon on this blog.)

There isn’t one way of doing things. We all agree. But there are some best practices several successful companies have shared during the past decade that have proven to be successful.

Data is information.

We are going to keep coming back to this idea. Since we are Information / Interaction Designer / Architects, we have to know the information of the site we are asked to re-design for a goal or another. Yesterday I attended Lou Rosenfeld’s web seminar: 8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture: Closing the Findability Gap What I have learned was that research should always be a constant milestone within our process.

We design for the experience, yes. But the experience can be good or bad. Design should be focussed on engagement. What is the motivation for a person to use / contribute / re-use your site’s content? Why? is one of the most important question. And the answers can help make the experience a success.

How can we answer the question Why?

First, we must research. This is inevitable. We could guess why, or do tarot cards, meditation, or just talk to the genius inside us. But even the genius inside us needs information in order to grow, learn and develop. So best thing you can do for your client, is to know more about how their brand is being perceived, how their users are interacting with it, where is the brand living outside the website, …
There are many user testing techniques you can find out there that will allow you, with different level of accuracy, to leverage that research.

I’m stealing this screenshot from Lou Rosenfeld about gradual engagement model :

An important question was asked during the seminar : “How many audiences can a site handle?”

Keep in mind your end users, the audience you are addressing this site or service to. Learn who they are, and observe their behaviours on the site or on similar sites when researching about your competitors.

A great way to represent the data collected and analyzed can be by making a data visualization with it. It can be easy to understand, using the colours of your client’s brand. The goal is to communicate clearly your findings, and to come up with a series of actions to follow.

These actions can be a heuristic evaluation of the site in order to clearly find out what works and what doesn’t work. With this type of evaluation and doing gap analysis, the business goals might change, and the client’s vision of its own site might also change to meet what actually is in reality.

Sometimes a client comes in and wants a mobile app, or a blog, or something they heard other brands had that they also really-really-really want too. After doing some research and analysis, the client realizes that what he needs might be something else in order to make an effective progress in his business and ensure his ROI.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, or want to add to my post, feel free to comment, and I’ll keep in touch!

* This is a great way to illustrate the data collected to present to a client.

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