A little while back Lou Rosenfeld conscripted me to be the Ann Arbor area local ambassador for a group called the User Experience Network – or UXnet. From the UXnet website:
UXnet creates effective, functional, and strategic networks to enable cross-disciplinary collaboration between user experience professionals. We connect people, organizations, resources, and ideas to enable the growth and maturation of User Experience as a practice, a community, and eventually a discipline.
A few of the other local UXnet ambassadors – Keith Instone [Toledo], Anthony Viviano [Detroit], Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus [was the Detroit dude], and Bob Hale [Columbus] and myself have been doing a couple things to knit UX people in the region together so they can get to know each other, better coordinate, and expose the locale to the mighty good thing that is “user experience”.
After the IUE 2008 conference in Ann Arbor, we had a meeting with as many leaders of local UX-related groups as we could muster. We introduced ourselves and basically got a sense of who is who in the area and what our interests and challenges are. We plan to have similar meetings over the next few years in other local cities (Lansing, Detroit, Toledo, etc.) with the intent of establishing or strengthening the bonds between the different groups.
I am also planning on talking with many local UX practitioners and sharing short interviews with them here in this blog, and on the Ann Arbor page of the UXnet site. Watch this space…
