Tag: conferences

See me talk on mobile social play at Reboot 9.0

I got awesome news the other day: my proposal for a talk at Reboot 9.0 has been accepted. I’m very honoured (and a little nervous) to be presenting at a conference with so many smart attendees. Now to get my act together and create a kick-ass presentation.

If you have anything related to this (pretty broad) topic that you’d want me to address, please do leave a note in the comments.

One thing’s for sure: I’ll try to build upon what has gone before at previous Reboots, such as Ben Cerveny’s mind-blowing overview (MP3) of how play is essentially becoming a new language for us to communicate with and TL Taylor’s great talk on the dynamics of virtual worlds.

What I will be addressing is still slightly unclear to me, but the direction I’m headed is:

  1. Games can be social play, which means they can be used to forge and experiment with social relations in a ‘safe’ way. This happens whether you design for it or not, but can be nurtured.
  2. When games go mobile, the borders of the space and time in which a game is played are blurred. In this way, games bleed over into culture in a gradual way.

Enough to chew on for one talk, I guess. Again, any questions, comments and suggestions are more than welcome. See you all at Reboot 9.0.

Web of data — third of five IA Summit 2007 themes

(Here’s the third post on the 2007 IA Summit. You can find the first one that introduces the series and describes the first theme ‘tangible’ here and the second one on ‘social’ here.)

Typically, IAs have concerned themselves with the design of web sites. The metaphor most suited and used for the web so far has been space. Even the term ‘information architecture’ points to this. Nowadays, besides having to tackle the social dimension (as per the previous trend mentioned) IAs are forced to rethink the spatial metaphor in favour of a new one: the web as platform. This means designing for a web of data, where sites become data sources and tools to view and manipulate that data. This is a far cry from the old hierarchical model. Like design for social software, IAs are still exploring this new territory.

There was an excellent panel on this subject (notes and audio at The Chicken Test), with amongst others Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph (both previously employed by the BBC). Coates’ presentations (Native to a Web of Data and Greater than the sum of its parts) are essential resources. He gave a super short overview of what designing for the web of data is all about. Matt went beyond screen based media into the realm of physical computing (see the first trend) showing some cool examples of Arduino prototypes feeding into Second Life.

Jared Spool talked about the usability challenges of web 2.0 and focussed on (among many things) the shortcomings of RSS and the dangers of mash-ups. RSS as a technology is pretty cool, but no normal user intuitively understands its application. This is a technology still looking for a killer app. Mash-ups are typically made by enthusiastic amateurs looking to combine available data sources or interfaces. This means we’ll see a wave of sites with serious usability issues. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing per se, but still something to look out for.

Social — second of five IA Summit 2007 themes

(Here’s the second post on the 2007 IA Summit. You can find the first one that introduces the series and describes the first theme ‘tangible’ here.)

The recent web revival, that I will not name, pushed one trend to the forefront – social software. The most challenging aspect of designing social sites and applications is that you’re not ‘just’ designing for single users, but also for groups as a whole. The IA community is still in the beginning phases of creating a body of knowledge about how to best go about this.

Andrew Hinton gave one of the best talks of the event, first describing the unique properties of network-like communities of practice and how to design for them. From there he made the point that IA itself is a community of practice, not a formal discipline, which means it should try to stay open and flexible.

Bonus: Gene Smith took a stab at the building blocks of social information architectures and came up with this nice model.

Tangible — first of five IA Summit 2007 themes

I’ll be posting a top 5 of the themes I noticed during the past 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas. It’s a little late maybe, but hopefully still offers some value. Here are the 5 themes. My thoughts on the first one (tangible) are below the list:

  1. Tangible (this post)
  2. Social
  3. Web of data
  4. Strategy
  5. Interface design

1. Tangible

The IA community is making a strange dance around the topic of design for physical spaces and objects. On the one hand IAs seem reluctant to move away from the web, on the other hand they seem very curious about what value they can bring to the table when designing buildings, appliances, etc.

The opening keynote was delivered by Joshua Prince-Ramus, of REX (notes by Rob Fay and Jennifer Keach). He made some interesting points about how ‘real’ architects are struggling with including informational concerns in their practice. Michele Tepper, a designer at Frog talked us through the creation of a specialized communications device for day traders where industrial design, interaction design and information architecture went hand in hand.

More to come!

IA Summit 2007 — Leaving Las Vegas

I’m sitting in the North West Airlines World Club in Detroit using my eleven hour (!) lay-over to work away all the email and RSS feeds that have been piling up during the past days of being (mostly) off-line.

I had a great time at the IA Summit. It was definitely worth the trip. Attended lots of thought-provoking talks and met a whole bunch of inspiring people. It’s interesting to now be able to put the European IA scene in context of the ‘international’ one.

I’m single-quoting international, because to be honest, I think the IA Summit is a North American event. Of course there were quite a few visitors and even speakers from outside the US & Canada, but I can’t help but feel that the majority of attendees really are not very aware of the truly international character of the IA community.

That’s a shame.

One example is something I really should have fixed during 5 minute madness: the announcement of the European IA Summit. Apart from mentioning the event’s name and URL, people weren’t exactly persuaded to come over. It wasn’t even mentioned that this is in the beautiful city of Barcelona!

Anyway, I’ll just use this opportunity to invite all my American colleagues to make the trip and get a taste of how we do things in Europe. Seriously, I’m sure people will enjoy learning about the unique issues we’re dealing with (I did the other way around). Like Jesse James Garrett said: “embrace ambiguity”.

On a different note, I’ll probably be doing a series of posts over the coming weeks like I did for the last Euro IA Summit, once I get my notes ordered and filtered. Stay tuned.

Packing for the IA Summit

Just firing off a quick post while packing for the IA Summit. Tomorrow morning I’m taking off on my flight to Vegas. For anyone curious about my doings while in the states, your best bet is Jaiku1. SMS-ing the occasional update should be affordable and won’t take too much time. No live blogging I’m afraid, I will be taking plenty of notes2 and promise to do a proper write-up when back.

1. Although all the crazy Americans are hooked on Twitter like an addict on crack, so to keep up with what’s going on there I’ll need to switch between two presence apps. Grumble.

2. A fresh squared Moleskine pocket notebook is ready for action.

IA Summit 2007 — one week to go

IA Summit 2007 logo

While we’re on the topic of attending events: I’m lucky enough to attend this year’s IA Summit. It’s all the way in Las Vegas (a long flight from my humble country) so there’ll be plenty of jet lag to cope with. Also it’s just the conference for me, no time to attend the pre-conference workshops (which is a shame really, because there’s plenty of interesting stuff). Regardless, I’m looking forward to experiencing the mothership conference after two years of being at the Euro IA Summit and meeting lots of new interesting people. Perhaps I’ll see you there?

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:

Chris Heathcote @ Design Engaged 2005

Chris Heathcote will be at Design Engaged 2005 in Berlin. I saw his excellent talk on tangible computing at Reboot 7. His being in Berlin this year is reason enough to go. The rest of the line up looks good too.

In November, I’ll be at the Design Engaged conference, probably talking about personalisation, craft and pro-am

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