Notes & Reflections on IxD10; Day 2
Liveblogging IxD10, and conferences in general is very hard. The wifi is really the best over in the Theater, and if you’re elsewhere, you’re pretty much screwed unless you’re on a 3G data connection, like on an iPhone. Plus, my workflow for the photos in the RWTW article was pretty crappy and timeconsuming.
Lots of people were tweeting #ixd10 during the talks. I have a hard enough time paying attention to the message, let alone keeping up to write notes, so I don’t even bother with the in-the-moment reactions to a talk in progress. I prefer to let something sit, structure my thoughts and then reflect upon it later.
Anyway, I have a ton of hand-written notes, some practical, some non-practical ideas from the various talks over the past couple days. If I’d tried to document and tweet everything as it happened, it wouldn’t have turned out good.
Now that I’m a couple days in, here are a few thoughts, structured :)
I raved about the RWTW workshop, and I think for me, at least, it was because it was practical and hands-on. I learned something, and it was interactive. I find it hard to learn by just being spoken to. I need to do something to learn. I tend to be a pretty practical guy, and while I can appreciate theory, I prefer concrete things.
I managed to make some more connections and meet some more people today. Conferences are great for networking and escaping from the fishbowl of your normal routine.
Some notable things from the past couple days:
Friday
- Remote Design Research tools & techniques(very applicable to my current situation)
- Agile UX meetup/discussion
- Designing failure into systems to see what happens. Make something break to see how people react. Failure is cool.
- Some stuff on sustainability that I’m not sure my brain was ready to digest quite yet.
Saturday
- Designing for the web of the world. Networked products and services. Ubiquitous computing. RFID, GPS. Things and interactions that don’t take up the person’s entire visual field (think someone using an iPhone & walking down a street).
- Augmented Reality. Lots of cool stuff here, funny “ghostbusting” AR game. I’ve seen some examples. South Korea is HUGE on AR and mobile. Spoke briefly with the speaker, Kevin Cheng.
- Livia Labate’s talk on Key Performance Indicators. I’d like to measure our UX, and I can see how it would appeal to management. Not sure if I’m quite at that level of need or expertise yet. Interesting nonetheless.
- Denise Wilton of moo.com (they print business cards) spoke about copywriting and the personality of a website (or software, for that matter). I think she got through the whole thing without mentioning content strategy. Good references to Cluetrain.
- Student competition was interesting, although I thought they could use a little work on their presentation skills. Then again, I wasn’t the one up there showing my work to 500 people :)
- Paola Antonelli’s keynote, which touched on everything from AR, to Tamagochi, to portable gaming devices, to painting graffiti on buildings with lasers. Some of the more theoretical stuff went over my head, but an entertaining talk.
So there you have the past two full days of Interaction 10. One day to go, and that’s it. I’ve met a bunch of people I’ve come to know online over the past year or so, and I think I’ll come out of this conference with a different perspective on things. I want to come home with something “new” in the works, or some sort of collaboration or project, and I have some ideas I need to throw towards the wall and see what sticks.
There’s also a lot of space to explore between the worlds of UX and development, which I hope to expand upon sometime.
