Narration X

My Top 5 things to do in Dublin

There is quite a lot to do in Dublin and something to suit everybody! There is always some kind of cultural festival or another going on so theatre, music and art stuff us always going on. I use this site to find whats going on be it movie listings to exhibitions. Also Hot Press is the hip music and culture magazine with music listings:

Here are my top 5 things to do in Dublin

1. Visit the National Museum of Ireland - Archaeology - some fantastic ancient Celtic jewellery and “bog” people

2. Visit the brand new developed area called docklands: Samuel Beckett Bridge and the Liebskind designed Grand Canal Theatre are completed now.

3. The Guinness Storehouse
This is a must see, with a free pint of Guinness in the 360 degree glass “gravity Bar” at the top floor of the storehouse - great view

4. Trinity College and the Book of Kells Exhibition - a must see in the centre of the city

5. Dublin Beaches and coastal walking (one of my fave outdoor activities). Did you know that Dublin has a ton of beaches, in fact it has the most beaches of any capital city in the Northern Hemisphere. Pity we don’t normally get the weather. The DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) runs along the coast

Highlights: Walk around Howth Head; Climb Bray head, Day trip to Dun Laoghaire harbour, pier and town; celebrity watch in quaint Dalkey and hilly Killiney.

Other Stuff

* A really good book called “Secret Dublin” has some really cool walking tour ideas

Daytrips from Dublin:

Newgrange was constructed over 5,000 years ago (about 3,200 B.C.), making it older than Stonehenge

Glendalough National Park Monastic Site with Round Tower, scenic lakes and valleys, as well as a selection of walks and trails in the area including The Wicklow Way.

Pix from my presentation at UX-LX 2010

Review of my UX-LX talk

I was quite surprised to discover one of the people who saw my presentation at UX-LX had written a review of her experience at the conference which included a synopsis of my talk.

This was a first for me. I have been mentioned in print before, but never reviewed!

A big thank you to the author Theresa Neil, who wrote positively about my talk and even included an embed with my slides.

But it does make me think how things have changed. I guess my head was down, focusing on the presentation itself and I wasn’t expecting to crop up anywhere afterwards. Now, I can see the bigger picture aspects of public speaking that stretch beyound the prep and presentation itself.

“What’s the Story?” Slides from UX-LX

There has been over a thousand views of this presentation on Slideshare, so I thought I should share it here. Its funny, recently I have been finding more applications of Storytelling when working with our clients to build great experiences. More on that soon.

Ux-Lx Talk Description and Bio

Spent ages today constructing my talk description and bio for Ux-Lisbon. I had most of the content already but I set about rewriting everything from scratch. I was long overdue a rewrite, not to mention the fact that the longer you are in this business the more compelled you are to get things perfect – which is of course an impossible task!

Here they are anyway!

What’s the Story? Infusing experiences with the craft of storytelling.

Join Séamus T. Byrne on a journey through the world of storytelling as he explores our innate human predisposition to story, the evolution of narratives with emerging technologies (from cave paintings to twitter) and the efficacy of storytelling as a tool to create better user and customer experiences.

As humans we are hardwired to a good story and digital storytelling is no exception to this! Best practices found in other disciplines for constructing a good story form can be applied to an online strategy, a multimedia piece, a user interface design or a brand campaign. Creating the right narrative is a vital step in building lasting, trusting relationships between your company’s offerings and your constituents (customers, users and advocates). Applying best practices of storytelling throughout the customer-to-user lifecycle can increase desirability, discoverability, clarity and usability.

With the advent and proliferation of interactive technologies, story has new challenges to face. Storytelling will once again evolve as it strives to maintain its immersive qualities in a world obsessed by user choice, as it adjusts to accommodate the scale of available channels, where narratives can literally be found everywhere and to embrace non-linearity, where a user walks away from an experience with a mosaic of truth

Bio
Séamus T. Byrne is founder and creative director at Graphic Mint, a design studio based in Dublin, Ireland that specialises in user centered design and customer focused marketing. He has over ten years experience as a designer of brands, interfaces, products, services and multimedia experiences for web, mobile and applications for a multitude of clients with the U.S. and Europe.

Séamus is one of the original founders and organisers of IxDA Dublin and is a member of the Irish Internet Association’s User Experience Working Group.

He was co-creator of the The Organic City, a critically acclaimed community storytelling project, encouraging locals to find and tell stories about local places through a website. These stories formed the basis for mobile media that could be re-experienced while walking around the city.

When he gets a moment to spare, Séamus likes to write songs and record music, reading about myth, traveling to new capital cities and shooting video.

He shares his thoughts everyday on twitter, and less frequently on his blogs Graphic Mind and Narration X

Rodrigo and Gabriella return to Dublin

Vicar St. Dublin, Sunday the 15th of November 2009

Few artists have the ability to transcend genre by attracting such a wide spectrum of followers from different walks of life as Rodrigo and Gabriella do.

Vicar St. last Sunday was like a who’s-who of Dublin demography. Representing emos, office monkeys, rockers, yuppies and even a few chavs, all-present with one common goal: To watch and listen to the entertaining, magical tour-de-force that is Rodrigo and Gabriella.

My jaw must have dropped at least thirty times during what must have been one of the tightest sets I have ever seen. RodGab have come along way since their debut album that we all love, having transformed themselves into musical legends at such an early stage in their career.

RodGab opened the set with lots of new tracks, many quite short, but all punchy with fresh and exclusively unique rhythms. They were full of energy, standing for most of the gig, occasionally turning to face one another to have a quick “set” related conversation. They cascaded from one track to another with flawless ease taking us on a musical journey infused with majestic classical guitar melodies, uplifting latin-esque movements, riffs from the heavy tomes of metal and descents into atonal vignettes that would make even Radiohead proud.

The new use of new effects, especially the “wa-wa” was a welcome addition to their already riveting sound. Gabriella was on form with her signature guitar drumming, which at points has evolved into a rave-like dance beat that really got the crowd amped.

Rodrigo and Gabriella bring people together. In an era of depressing global economic deluge, their sheer tenacity, intense passion and nonchalance for convention sheds a glimmer of hope, by showing us a innovative and mature worldview not driven by faux-faced commercialism.

Welcome home to Dublin RodGab!

Happy 2009!

Hello my lovelies,

2008 was a very busy year for me. I have been completely neglecting Narration X (not by choice), got sucked into the facebook universe and of course twitter. It is a little overwhelming being a part of so many communities but at the same time very exciting. I have decided to use twitter for my little interesting tidbid links and have returned to plain old blog land to start writing more wordy content about the new things I learned in 08. I actually feel that I have alot to write about again.

I officially started a new company called “Graphic Mint” with Julian Becerra. Its focus is on the visual and interaction design side of branding, products, and services. We care about providing experiences that look-and-feel great.

Multimediawise, 2008 was probably my most prolific to date. I really learned to crank stuff out and that sometimes you have to cut corners even though you don’t want to. This was a big shock for my perfectionist side as I always wanted more time to finesse. But thats what your learn when you work for a start up.

Thats all for now, but I hope that 2009 will be a year where I can publish more useful stuff about what I learned in 2008. Yeah right! I just started up a company. Oh well! Heres to even longer hours

Flashy Friday Interface Fun

A couple of engaging interfaces I stumbled upon this week:

Don’t Click looks like its been around since 2005 but has been getting some mixed reactions on an IxDA community thread this week! Garish design but innovative concept!

Legends telegraph is Nokia’s latest product newsletter offering. The interface emulates an old fashioned newspaper that you can ramble around by dragging and dropping your mouse. The page is dotted with digital video vignettes that give the overall impression of something from a Harry Potter movie.

Check ‘em out!

Faster than wireframes

Today at work I spent six hours in a room with a product manager reworking the flow and interface design of a product demo. This may seem like a long time to be in a room, but we were paper prototyping, an activity that is commonly used in user-centered-design because of it’s fast and cheap nature.

A key benefit that I derived directly from this activity was the ability to quickly and directly update the designs, iterating on the input provided by the sales and dev teams during many lightning feedback sessions. This process saves so much time as it facilitates faster group-consensus-building around a design and provides a low-tech medium to elicit a range of opinions from the stakeholders.

Developers tend to overlook the fact that the final artifact that you hand them looks like a stack of hard-to-read scrawl written by a seven-year-old, when you explain what the point of it all is. In an agile environment paper prototyping can really unclog bottlenecks, encourage communication and promote rapid iterations.

But don’t take my word for it – use the following links to prove that your not crazy next time you start paper prototyping at the office!

http://alistapart.com/articles/paperprototyping
http://www.paperprototyping.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_prototyping

An Introduction to Information Design. . .

. . .but not by me

How could anyone sum it up as well as this downloadable booklet I came across at backspace.com. Although the booklet’s theme relates to the use of Information Architecture within the Advocacy realm, it features a concise yet detailed summary of the subject, including definitions, methodologies and examples, that will be of use to all.

Brilliant!