The Gel Conference was created by Mark Hurst. Mark has been running Gel since 2003 and continues to bring in incredible presenters like Seth Godin to the annual event.

Gel (“Good Experience Live”) is a conference and community exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, art, society, technology, and life.

From products and services to signage, Seth provides several comical and frustrating examples of how the many things we interact with on a daily basis are, in fact, broken!

This presentation illustrates the key challenge for all of us within the User Experience profession – to convey clarity to those who know nothing about your organization while providing appropriate context to ensure understanding.

You can find more images of products, signage, and services that are broken, over on flickr. As well, you can check out other videos from Gel.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

While attending the IA Summit in Memphis this year I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Baty (@docbaty) who is the Principal at Meld Consulting in Australia.

Along with his many other efforts to promote best practices in the User Experience fields Steve is one of the “big kahunas” over on Johnny Holland.

I’m proud to announce that I’ve been invited to write for Johnny Holland and I’m also the first Canadian to be published with my article, Understanding Critical to Being Understood.

The article includes a short video of me outlining a framework about how we can start to think about advancing the conversation beyond definitions and titles with a goal towards choosing the best tools based on our clients’ understanding …not our own!

Thank you again to Steve and of course the “cheif kahuna” Jeroen van Geel for this opportunity. I look forward to sharing more experiences with the global community!

Thank you ClickTale for your continued sponsorship of the i.a. podcast! Finally a web analytics tool that provides context to data including the ability to watch movies of visitor behavior, as well as Scrolling Heat Maps, Form Analytics and many more features to help your organization make intelligent decisions to improve the User Experience of your site.

Idea 2009 Social and Experience Design is coming to Toronto – first time north of the border speakers include Leisa Reichelt, Christina Wodtke, Luke Wrobluski, Christian Crumlish, Nathan Curtis and many more.

You can hear presentations from last year where Idea was in Chicago over on boxes and arrows podcast.

Registration for UX Australia is up and running! Steve and Danielle Baty, Donna Spencer, and Andrew Boyd have put together an incredible line up of speakers including: Daniel Szuc a past guest on the i.a. podcast where we talked about UX in China, Gerry Gaffney from the User Experience Podcast, Will Evans, Alex Wright Director of UX and Product Research at the NY Times and author of Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages and many many more.

A big thanks to Johnny Holland for inviting to me to share ideas on that great webzine! My first article is due to publish early next week and includes a video of sharing a framework about how we can move our conversations in the UX communities back to the people for whom we are designing, rather than getting hung up on definitions and titles.

Interaction ‘10 is ramping up with that conference coming in February 2010 to Savannah, Georgia. I’m looking forward to future conversations with Jennifer Bove and Bill DeRouchey about what they are working hard at creating. Shaping up to be the best IxDA conference to date!

UXPanama is coming up as well! Jorge Arango, current President of the IAI is putting together the UX conference in Panama. You can check out videos up on YouTube put together in part by BootStudio Jorge’s UX design group in Panama.

On today’s show I chat with Chris Pallé about The UX Workshop. We talk about our work and the generous support of various communities of practice and individuals who have supported our efforts to date. This is a light-hearted discussion about how we got started, where we’re at now, and our genuine desire to engage the global UX community in conversations and sharing ideas.

We genuinely want the community to help us build The UX Workshop and look forward to helping people around the world move from theory to understanding by sharing experiences.