A key member of the Observing the 80s team is leaving Sussex University for pastures new next week so I thought I’d just take a minute to mark his contribution, thank him and wish him all the best.
Stuart Lamour, the User Experience Manager in Sussex’s E-Learning team, was absolutely central in the development of the OER and helped us to push the possibilities of Observing the 80s further than we had first imagined.
As well as having all the techie knowledge you could possibly need, Stuart’s contribution was definitely creative. His explanations of information architecture and why the shape of information matters struck a lot of chords with me as a historian. I knew that historical meaning is constructed through what a document looks like and how it is positioned in relation to other documents as much as by what it ‘says’, but I lacked a language to explain how that might impact the way in which a document is received.
Not only did Stuart help make the OER work, he has really helped me think visually in two ways that took Observing the 80s in new directions.
Firstly he made it clear how information architecture constructs meaning through the relationships we created between documents. Secondly he really helped us all to think about the ways in which the structures of the digital outputs (youtube playlists, infographics, facebook timelines etc) we produced have added meaning to the documents.
He also has excellent music taste and is a very nice bloke. (image from Study Direct team)