I’ve submitted an XTech 2007 proposal

Togeth­er with Edgar, I’ve sub­mit­ted a pro­pos­al for the upcom­ing XTech 2007 in Paris, France. The talk we’re aim­ing for would basi­cal­ly be a large­ly war sto­ries from our work design­ing and devel­op­ing large scale web­sites that adhere to web stan­dards and acces­si­bil­i­ty guide­lines and are pub­lished and man­aged using an enter­prise CMS’s (such as Trid­ion, GX, IBM LWWCM or what have you). Not the sex­i­est of sub­jects, but one we’re well versed in and can give plen­ty of prac­ti­cal advice on. Feed­back from the review com­mit­tee is due Feb­ru­ary 2007. Wish us luck!

On presentations

One of the most enjoy­able things about attend­ing con­fer­ences is see­ing a lot of peo­ple pre­sent­ing in var­i­ous ways. A while ago I chal­lenged my own pre­sent­ing skills by doing a Pecha Kucha. Today, I attend­ed a class (part of a didac­tics course) on giv­ing lec­tures. Two promi­nent lec­tur­ers (Giep Hagoort and Jeroen van Mas­trigt) from with­in the Utrecht School of Arts gave us a taste of their own unique pre­sen­ta­tion for­mat and the way they pre­pared for a talk. 

This trig­gered some things in my head, such as stuff I’d seen before on the web and that could be help­ful to the peo­ple attend­ing the class. A lot of them did­n’t seem to be too famil­iar with it, so I’ve decid­ed to col­lect them here. Maybe they’ll come in handy to those who pass by here:

My Mobile Game Directions Pecha Kucha

Yes­ter­day I pre­sent­ed my talk on mobile gam­ing at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Rotterdam’s Off_Corso. I was pro­grammed as the first speak­er, which was excit­ing (and also allowed me to ben­e­fit from the pri­ma­cy effect, as my girl­friend point­ed out). Col­league Iskan­der was kind enough to record the whole thing on his N70 (fit­ting­ly) and I present it here for your enjoy­ment or aggra­va­tion, whichev­er you pre­fer (please take note that the talk is in Dutch). The slides I used are over at SlideShare.

I’m still not sure the sub­ject mat­ter was appro­pri­ate for the event, con­sid­er­ing the major­i­ty of speak­ers were either graph­ic design­ers, autonomous artists or archi­tects. The crowd might’ve been a bit under­whelmed by my com­mer­cial and pop cul­tur­al ref­er­ences. Oh well, I had fun, I guess that’s the most impor­tant thing. 

Many thanks to Nadine and Bart of Hunk Design for let­ting me loose on stage. ‘Nuff respect to all the pre­sen­ters for tak­ing the trou­ble of prepar­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion. There were plen­ty of cool and inspir­ing ideas on show. Final­ly, thanks to the cre­ators of all the images I used, you can find the cred­its in the SlideShare show.

Update: I’ve delet­ed my YouTube account so here’s an embed of the video on Vimeo:



Mobile Game Direc­tions @ Pecha Kucha Night Rot­ter­dam from Kaeru on Vimeo.

See me Pecha Kucha on mobile gaming

Mobile Vader

Next Wednes­day, see me do a pre­sen­ta­tion on mobile game design at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Off_Corso, Rot­ter­dam. Pecha Kucha are super short pre­sen­ta­tions con­sist­ing of 20 slides. Speak­ers have exact­ly 20 sec­onds per slide to do their thing. Quite a chal­lenge! I’ve fin­ished my slides and a first draft of the talk, now to prac­tice the hell out of my lines… Here’s an Upcoming.org entry I made for the event, here’s the Dutch and inter­na­tion­al site and final­ly, here’s some cool Pecha Kucha tips by Yongfook.

Mobile gaming directions

Yes­ter­day we had anoth­er fun and inter­est­ing IA Cock­tail Hour. Thanks to the kind folk at Media Cat­a­lyst for the hos­pi­tal­i­ty and Olly and Boyd for their pre­sen­ta­tions. I thought I’d put up the slides of my short talk on where I think (non-con­sole) mobile gam­ing is or should be head­ed. I’ve added some notes, so there’s more than just pret­ty pic­tures to look at. If you have any thoughts to share, don’t hes­i­tate to do so!

Sxip — Indentity 2.0

I final­ly got around to watch­ing this great pre­sen­ta­tion on the future of iden­ti­ty on the web. The con­cept is explained in an excel­lent way and the style is dynam­ic and humor­ous. I’d love to pull of a pre­sen­ta­tion like this some day.

Tech­no­rati: , , , ,

Landing Pages: Merging Differences

Our poster pre­sen­ta­tion at the Euro IA Sum­mit was a lot of fun. We had some good spir­it­ed dis­cus­sion on our con­cept of Land­ing Pages. If you’re inter­est­ed, have a look at the poster here (A4 PDF, 420 KB), or have a look at the shot on Flickr…

Merging Differences

Tech­no­rati: ,

Keynote Speech – Andrew Dillon — Euro IA Summit 2005

Here’s my notes from Andrew Dil­lon’s keynote at the Euro IA Summit:

Big IA has a future; lit­tle IA does not. Geen IA vs. UX – niet jezelf definiëren aan de hand van wat je niet bent. Data is stored, infor­ma­tion is expe­ri­enced. Design to lever­age nat­ur­al ten­den­cies. Din­gen hoeven niet direct bruik­baar te zijn. Web 2.0: van iets wat gemaakt is, naar iets wat je zelf maakt… User: from recip­i­ent to par­tic­i­pant, co-own­er and co-design­er. User Human. UX design – niet: this is how I like it. Weg bewe­gen van craft-based werk, geen con­sis­tente kwaliteit, geen sys­tem­atiek in werk, weinig vooruit­gang, bedreigd door snelle veran­derin­gen in omgev­ing. Ambi­gu­i­ty has it’s mer­its. You don’t have to strict­ly define it (IA). No more heroes, some peo­ple may even think Jakob Nielsen’s a lia­bil­i­ty… Organ­i­sa­tion, cura­tion and inter­ac­tion of infor­ma­tion. Cura­tion is a prob­lem. The archi­tec­tures are our the­o­ries. Find­abil­i­ty is the new usabil­i­ty – but where’s the archi­tec­ture in that? Beyond nav­i­ga­tion: pat­tern­ing, wrap­ping, anchor­ing, emer­gent struc­ture. ‘Virus of the mind’; infor­ma­tion breeds. Cohill, 1991, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture & the design project – IA as a new kind of project man­ag­er. Real design: respect expe­ri­ence – aug­ment life. Usabil­i­ty is a design val­ue, like accessibility.

Tech­no­rati: , , , ,