Yves Béhar talks at Cusp 2011 on his company’s projects including the Puma shoebox, NYC condoms, Herman Miller Sayl Chair, One-Laptop-Per-Child, and many others. With every project, Yves team strives to make long-term partnerships with their clients and are keen to strive for innovative, sustainable, and ethical designs.

Scott Farquhar, the co-founder and CEO of Atlassian talks about his experience growing the company to $100 million with no sales team. Nothing short of a must-see for entrepreneurs, Scott presents 10 commandments for startups at the Business of Software event. A few of the commandments are ‘Use your own product’, ‘measure everything’, ‘think long term’, and ‘build somewhere that you want to work’. For a full writeup, check out Mark Littlewood’s notes.

Hans Rosling, famous for his lectures which explore enormous amounts of public data and presents it in a storytelling fashion, presents data on 200 countries in 200 years. Weatherman and sports commentators can step aside as Hans presentation style is both exciting and engaging and for the first time steps it up with the use of augmented reality. In this video Hans shares the story 200 countries have moved from being poor with low life expectancy to wealthy and high life expectancy using over 120,000 data points in the process.

Salman Khan, renowned voice from the amazing library of 1,400+ online videos posted at the Khan Academy, speaks at GEL 2010. His talk focuses on how his accidental approach towards teaching online has struck a chord with students. While teachers are quick to say that classroom instructors can’t be substituted for by online videos, Sal wonders if that is really true. Among the many reasons discussed, perhaps the one that goes unsaid most often in classrooms is the intimidation factor. Peer pressure, eagerness to impress, and desire not waste others’ time can inhibit students from taking advantage of the benefits offered by personal attention. Several other factors Sal mentions that have led to success include him not appearing in the videos, keeping the video durations to 10 minutes, and the ability for students to pause, rewind, and jump around to topics in any order they desire.

David McCandless, award winning designer, writer, and author, speaks at TED on his passion for exploring data and creating meaningful visualizations that convey information in the form of a story. With a plethora of examples from his latest book, Information Is Beautiful, the talk is both facinating and inspiring. In one example he displays the carbon output from the Icelandic volcano that grounded thousands of flights over Europe in 2010. By comparing the carbon output that those flights would have produced themselves, the eruption was the first carbon-neutral volcanic event the world has seen. David posts his visualizations on his website and it is worth diving in to take a look.

Don Norman, one of the fathers of user experience (now 75 years old), gives an excellent talk at Business of Software 2009 on the ten rules for successful products. Throughout the talk, Don stresses the importance of creating positive experiences with many anecdotes and provides many tips along the way. For example, make sure to have a strong beginning and strong ending to an experience, because that is what people remember. By placing the undesirable or painful parts in the middle, even if that requires creating a false beginning or ending, people will come away with a more positive memory of the experience. And it is that memory that they will share with others and remember long after the actual experience.

The 10 Rules:
1. It is all about the experience
2. Design systems
3. Everything is a service
4. Everything is a product
5. Don’t be too logical
6. Memory is more important than actuality
7. Complexity is okay
8. Design for the real world
9. Design for people
10. It is all about the experience

Philip Zimbardo, the man behind the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, talks at RSA ( Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) about how people perceive time differently. This perception is sometimes faith based, geographically based, or may be indicative of one’s age. The result of which directs one’s behavior in the world. The presentation is fascinating to say the least and Philip recommends first recognizing how other’s perceive time and then take that into account to better understand where they are coming from. RSA has posted a brilliant 10 minute animated featurette, and the full 41 minute talk can be found after the break as well.

Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We’re trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
- Philip Zimbardo

Photo Credit: Manolis Thr

Jesse James Garrett, president of Adaptive Path, speaks at UX Week 2009 on The State of User Experience. The field of User Experience has changed much over the years and Jesse does a good job at both finding insights into the past, such as its then narrow scope, as well as projecting forward with the incorporation of emotion. The talk is excellent for those practicing in the field and is one of the better talks out there discussing the current field of user experience as a whole.

Mark Baskinger, an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses the importance of Interaction Designers learning to draw better in order to better communicate ideas. With Interaction Designers coming from many different backgrounds to the relatively new field, it is rare that they have been classically trained in sketching like their counterparts in Industrial Design. Mark also talks about the advancement of Interaction Design as a discipline and how through confidence in purpose, Interaction Designers can build report in the business world.

Kathy Sierra, famous for curating the website Creating Passionate Users, talks at Business of Software 2009. In the past companies have been able to out-spend each other to gain new customers. In today’s social media culture, Kathy is seeking to reveal a more algorithmic approach for gaining product adoption (‘Step 2: magic happens’ isn’t appealing to her). To do so, Kathy says to stop focusing on selling users upgrades and features, but rather focus on making users better in the overarching area your products exist within. Ultimately it is about getting users to say “I’m Awesome”. It is at that point, users will upgrade, and non-users will desire to be like the ‘Awesome Users’ and sell themselves on purchasing the product.