A truly Juicy dconstruct 2009 for tomorrow
Introduction
This years dconstruct had the theme of ‘Designing for Tomorrow’ which in all honesty I was expecting new tech HTML5, CSS3 etc. So by about half way through the day I was feeling a bit confused but as the day drew out I started to understand and realise the angle that everyone had taken to the subject.
This dconstruct was more about where the current and past designs have come from and who/what influenced these designs. This then really made me think better from the whole conference, ok its not a session of showing off cool and audience capturing graphics and animation, but it should of hopefully made them think of new and unlikely paths to take when gathering inspiration for their next project.
The Talks
Elements of Networked Urbanism – Adam Greenfield
This talk I wasn’t so interested in but did give a small insight into what the world could be like if everything right down to the kitchen sink had an IPV6 address with an open API to communicate. His thoughts one how car shares could work I didn’t like, I’m reasonably attached to my car and would not want to share it or give it up to share someone else’s car.
Let’s See What We Can See – Michal Migurski and Ben Cerveny
This was more of a showing session where they looked at some of the projects they had done in the past. These where all to do with ways of display data and how they had taken their ideas from, some of the design came clearly because they needed to the data in such a way that would make it possible and others from other areas.
Links:
What’s Next? – Brian Fling
Possible one of my favorite talks of the day. One of the main thoughts that he had, is if we create web content today in the right way according to W3C then this will be the content for the mobile future, Mobile phones started off with WAP, different content had to be created for these then more recently it got slightly better, now we have devices like the iPhone which can view websites very similar to what we get on a full screen device.
He was also talking about what he called Generation Z being the generation that are just starting to use technology, actions like touch screen swiping is natural to them and they will come to expect it these features in new designs in the future.
Make It So: Learning From Sci-Fi Interfaces – Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel
This talk had a lot of video clips from films as you might expect from the title but did show how a lot of films influenced design and in the same way technology influenced how Sci-Fi designers made there sets. I won’t go into a lot of detail as a pdf can be downloaded here if your interest and want to read on follow the link. www.nathan.com/thoughts/MakeItSo.pdf
Loving Your Player with Juicy Feedback – Robin Hunicke
Notably one of the most rememberable talks if only for her love of the word Juicy, she had a game designer background and understanding from what works in games and the feedback you get when you complete something or the interface needs to tell you something, if this feedback is how she put it Juicy meaning bright and happy then some dull tasks can be made more fun. One thing she mentioned was maybe if you do an auto-sum in Excel then drag it down columns then it might make a little bring sound and maybe that sound is able to changed to what ever the user wants.
She also made a few enemies in the audience by doing a spoiler for a film called moon.
Experience and the Emotion Commotion – August de los Reyes
This is the guy that designed the windows Key, he also works on the Microsoft Surface team http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ you would of expected a 45min session of showing off how cool the Microsoft Surface is from an MS employee but it was completely different. He talked about about what influenced his work over the years, how ideas come from different domains of thinking and technology. he finished off with a very interesting video of what the future could hold for interface design.
Dematerialising A Web of Data – Russell Davies
One of the big things I remember about this guy is how he made newspaper from peoples blog posts and gave them to the writers with a few spare, but then in making a video of making the newspaper using different music for different target audiences.
He also threw kinda eggs into the audience and then got one back which probably made the biggest laugh of the day.
Conclusion
A good day worth going to, I believe that I’ve been to better dconstucts, ideal audience would be people that in the business of developing online services but still gave me a lot to think about when I’m next designing a new system or website.
Special mention to powertraveller’s PowerGorilla to which I would not have any notes, it pretty much kept my MacBook Pro alive throughout the day even though my battery says it needs replacing.