London…

Steve and John start to get their groove on as they discuss design thinking with Samantha Warren, patterns in Information Architecture and the new Drupal 8 Design Initiative with Jeff Burnz.

Introduction:
In this episode we kick off a series on design thinking with future episodes to include Jared Ponchot of Lullabot and Jen Simmons from Palantir.net. Jared, Jen and Samantha were all part of the design thinking panel that Steve put together at DrupalCon Chicago. We also introduce a two part series on IA where John breaks out his thinking on IA patterns and how they impact Drupal theming. Plus there's some talk about beer.

Look for us at these events:
Steve will be speaking at the Future of Web Design in London, England and running a UX workshop at the Interlink Conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Both John and Steve are planning on being at DrupalCon London this August. As a note, session submissions close May 15th and then the voting begins. Feel free to vote for our sessions or just give us a hug once we’re in London.

• The path to a Mobile Drupal: techniques, tools and failure
• Making the Complex Simple: Designing for Mobile
• CSS: If you're not using Sass, you're doing it wrong
• Keep Ideas Open
• Become an IA superstar: building essential navigation in Drupal

Samantha Warren on Design Thinking:
Steve talks to Samantha Warren about how she uses design thinking through her life. They reference Gary Hustwit and his thoughts about how design thinking can really be used to improve so many areas of society from politics to healthcare. For Samantha, much of design thinking comes down to the process and how that works.

IA Patterns:
John's starts the first of his series on Information Architecture by discussing the 4 basic structural patterns in IA:

• Hypertext
• Linear
• Database
• Hierarchy (Strict or polyhierarchy)
• Combinations of the above

An in depth discussion of these IA patterns (and much more!) can be found in Donna Spencer’s A Practical Guide to Information Architecture.

Next episode John will start sharing how to build presentational IA patterns using Drupal.

Future Episodes:
We're working on some great episodes with the likes of Lisa Rex from the Drupal.org redesign (and so many other things!) and Jeremy Keith from Clearleft. We'd love to hear what you'd be interested in having on the Using Blue podcast so follow us on twitter and send us your ideas!