I was asked to talk at the Takeaway fest yesterday. My talk was after a total of 9 different talks, so I knew I was going to have to keep it super short anyway. But as usual everyone ran over and I had less that 6 mins to explain why Hackday was going to be ever so great for the audience of artists and designers. I even created some slides for the purpose. I felt I did a good job in the short amount of time till I put on the video of Becks puppets and no one laughed. I'm hoping it was just tiredness setting in or something…
Something also struck me about the different stages people were at. For example Briony Greenhill was talking about the new site which encourages people to be a little more greener every month. She demoed it and I was amazed at its lack of (if I had a better word I would use it) Web 2.0ness. First of all it seemed to be built totally in Flash and seemed very unaccessible and somewhat unusable (but I was wrong, its using elements of Flash and lots of images with no alts). Then I looked for other web 2.0 type things like the ability to have friends, take elements away, a feed, an api, openid, microformats, etc. Nope nothing. Maybe I'm being over the top and its not fair to just pick on Briony but it strikes me that there was quite a bit of re-engineering instead of building on whats already there. Another silo to get wrapped up in.
Generally there were some very good speakers and good presentations. I specially loved the OScar project, which I've heard of before. I have to be honest and say Swarm of Angels is becoming less and less interesting to me everytime I read about it.
Anyway, I filmed a good selection of talks
and they should be up on Blip.tv in the next few hours, I'll replace the links once they appear.
- Swarm of Angels – Matt Hanson – Video
- Change through lifestyle: the Anti-Apathy way – Cyndi Rhoades and Briony Greenhill – Video
- TheOScarproject – Markus Merz – Video
- When a long tail swings towards politics – Alexandre Nako – Video
- OpenTheFuture – Jamais Cascio – Video
meta-technorati-tags=takeaway2, festival, diy, talks, conference, design, interaction, art, time, danacentre