Category: design-and-ideas

D.construct 2007

d.construct 2007

So I'm at d.construct the community focused conference from the guys at Clearleft. BBC Backstage are official sponsors and all the mens's Tshirts have gone within a hour of opening. In the dome, the venue is large and cool enough. The wireless seems to be operating pretty well even with 600+ people. These are my notes from D.construct.

The Dawning of the Age of Experience by Jared Spool. Talks about how the ipod is technically inferear but the experience of owning a ipod blows the rest out of the water. Jarad points out that everyone is watching the rise of Apple's experience product. Blockbuster vs Netflix. 85% of new subscribers say an existing subscriber recommended them. 93% evangelise Netflix to friends and family. Its been their success and they have done little advertising. Boardrooms have taken noticed.

Changing the experience can be good and can be bad if it doesn't intergrate the user and the business. Jared, talks about the chicken sexing phenomena as an example of something people just do but can't really explain the process of. Just like Midwives estimating baby weight and sex. Sushi chef's also don't know how to make

No one mentions Netflix as a pioneer of social networking or information archeture. Good experience design is Invisible! Hard to show good design.

Experience design applies to everything, even the terms and conditions which people should read but often gets over looked.

Experience design is cultural, need to understand both the audience and business cultures. Need a culture of failure. celebrate failures because people learn from their mistakes. www.uie.com/brainsparks – blog and podcast

Experience Strategies by Peter Merholz. Its all about the experience, even Microsoft in Office 2007 started back at scratch. Tivo could have just done another video recorder but they decided to rethink the whole experience. The Wii decided not to do the technology and feature battle.

I didn't make notes during the rest of d.construct because I was in and out of the main conference quite a bit. But it was a great conference and I look forward to next year. Well done to Andy Budd and the rest of the clearleft team who put on d.construct with the community in the forefront of their minds. It was well attended, had some great speakers and some up and coming new speakers. For example Tom Coates was fantatstic as the last speaker of the conference. He's really pulled things together and will be showing up in more expensive conferences soon.

Above Audio is closed for a private party

This year like last year d.construct had an after party. This time it was sponsored by BBC Backstage and Yahoo. And this time there was plenty of food and drink for everyone. At one point the venue (Above Audio) was so busy we had just over the limit of people. Lucky that was quickly sorted out and people still had an excellent time. The proper food meant few people left the bar till it was time to go home. I don't know when the Yahoo sponsored drinks ran out but it seemed to last about 3 hours which was great. The BBC Backstage sponsored food lasted long enough for about 95 percent of people to get a decent amount of food. Food, Drink, great venue and not bad music. Yep I think everyone had a great time. Fantastic end to a excellent day.

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Is Design really seedy?

Blackbelt Jones wrote this great post about Seedcamp and the lack of design involvement.

From the Seedcamp about pages:

“There will be a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that will help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business.”

How about designers?

Technology plays alone are starting to lose their distinctiveness in many of the more-crowded areas of the marketplace.

Great service and interaction design are on the rise as strategic differentiators for products as diverse as the iPhone and Facebook.

He's right, The only thing desiresable about the iphone is the interface, the technology is under powered or frankly from 2005. Thankfully its not all bad.

The line between hackers and interaction designers is blurring as they start small businesses that are starting to make waves in the big business press.

As I mentioned, my experience of HackDay Europe was that

“It really does seem that the hacker crowd in London/Europe at least is crossing over more and more with the interaction design crowd, and a new school of developers is coming through who are starting to become excellent interaction designers – who really know their medium and have empathy with users.”

This reminds me of my made up position name while at Ravensbourne, Designer/Developer. At the time I design was far too form based while development was far too programming based. Web designer meant you created HTML pages, Information designer meant you didn't actually touch any data or apis and Interaction designer meant you were too focused on art, hanging out in Hoxton and convince your clients they were always wrong. Things have changed for the better. The grey area between design and development
has been intersected by a 3rd force the hacker. So now you get pursuits like hardware hacking, alternative reality games, product user interface hacking. The fact is that its not about the titles, its about what vision you have in your head and how much effort your willing to put in to it.

Business-wise I think we have yet to see what affect the greying of design, development and hacking will have on startup culture.

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To the BBC Ariel and beyond

Ian Forrester and Matthew Cashmore on stage at Hackday

I'm not the kind of guy to ring my own bell (I bet you liked that one Adam) but finally backstage made the Ariel newspaper. Ariel is the newspaper/magazine which is published every week about whats going on inside the BBC. Its really for internal use only, but you can get it pretty much everywhere now. Anyway the point is that its read by tens of thousands of BBC staff from across the board.

Well finally Backstage made it in, from the work at Hack day to the innovative work we do with the backstage community daily. Its finally made its way into the mainstream. We've become the media darlings of BBC Research and Innovation. But never fear, I'm throwing Cluetrains out when needed and will not be spending time with press unless its necessary (*big smile*).

I hoping when my parents see this, they might understand a little more about what I do at work.

You can zoom in closer on this picture to read what the article actually says. Where's my OCR application gone… No need Leeky worte it out in the comments. So here's the full text.

Not so much a department, more a state of mind. That's how Ian Forrester and Matthew Cashmore describe their innovation award-winning backstage.bbc.co.uk. This self-styled 'comedy duo' may be tucked away on the fifth floor of the Broadcast Centre in W12, but their influence on the corporation's online future surely stretches to infinity and beyond!

“Historically people wanting to develop internet applications independently for the BBC didn't know how to talk to or how to access a server on which they could demonstrate their work”, says Forrester. “So our job has been to break down the old barriers and build up new relationships.”

Backstage.bbc.co.uk is a prime example of the BBC's commitment to the growing open source community.

“Our motto is 'Use our stuff to build your stuff'”, chuckles Cashmore. A genial Welshman with a list of website and podcasting innovations to his credit, he claims his first foray into coding came when he created a Dungeons and Dragons dice throwing programme on a Commodore 64 while still a schoolboy in the late 1980s.

Forrester and Cashmore were also British brains behind the Hack Day event which took place at Alexandra Palace in June. Here the BBC joined forces with US-based service provided Yahoo and invited 500 of EUrope's top 'hackers' to take advantage of existing public data and previously unavailable API (application programming interface) codes to deisgn brand new products to enhance or expand the BBC's existing online offer.

“Some of the things these guys mashed together in just 24 hours, especially regarding the interface between mobile phones and computers, were really thrilling”, says Cashmore. “We hope to bring the best of them forward in the very near future.”

Backstage.bbc.co.uk also used Hack Day to launch the new Wild West rapid development server for which the pair received their innovation award two months ago.

“Wild West is somewhere outside existing BBC servers where anybody with an interesting idea can try it out and we can qucikly and cheapily assess whether it's worth supporting”, says Forrester.

meta-technorati-tags=bbc, backstage, bbcbackstage, ariel, article, cluetrain

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CC Salon talk from July

Last week I attended my first CC Salon. Had a great time but the highlight of the night was the discussion started or hosted by Paula LeDieu. I filmed most of the round table discussion which I thought was great. Its quite long and the audio is sometimes quite low but generally its audiable.

Part one is here and Part two follows a couple of minutes afterwards.

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New London Geekdinner logos

 

I forgot to mention I've updated the non-exist geekdinner logo. These were changed before the Girl geekdinners but I never actually blogged about them. This is the old logo per-say

 geek dinner banner

and heres the new logo.

All the logos are on flickr under a Attribution Creative Commons licence.

The thinking behind the logo is to combine the current greyscale block on the site with a logo which says London. I thought it would be cool to use the same logo for Manchester, Yorkshire, LA, New York, etc but with different skylines. Comments are welcome…

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Trusted places.com new design

Trusted places new design

If you want prove design can make a huge difference, check out trustedplaces.com's new web 2.0 design. Its something very beautiful and ever so sweet to use. Also very clever putting the survey in after you login. My drink selection says it all. Good work guys, now I feel so much happier logging in and using the site.

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Molly interviewed for bbc backstage



Click To Play

I shot this video with Molly earlier in the week, which I shared with Backstage but I received a great comment which I thought was good enough to quote here.

Interesting interview, thanks.

It's interesting to hear Molly's views on how it can be technologists versus the business with regards to standards. I think this has been true of everywhere I have worked, and it's understandable. I think the points about businesses understanding the ROI from standards is also valid, they are waking up to this, however the biggest set back seems to be legacy issues and timescales. Often there are old systems that are difficult to replace, but also a great many of the contemporary tools that offer faster creation
do so at a cost to the code quality. Can we please get some good standards compliant .Net components?

Also the mention of uneducated educators. This is so true for a great many areas of IT still it is shocking, even university level courses are behind the times, especially where IT is not the primary focus. I remember how quickly as a class at uni we knew more than the lecturer about Photoshop. The problem is made worse when the teacher is too proud or arrogant to acknowledge their lack of ignorance. Which gets me onto a whole seperate rant about the quality of teaching staff and the under appreciated nature
of the job. It should be a desired occupation (like being a doctor) where the rewards are high, but you are held to account harshly for not being up to the task.

I haven't really seen the use of divs as table cell replacements, but it has been along time since I made the transistion from table based layout to CSS driven layout. I can easily believe it though, they are such different ways of working and require you to think so differently about you build a website. I've been made aware of this transistion again recently when learning Flex and WPF, where although some principles carry across, there are different rules and what you thought was the best way of doing it isn't
necessarily the case.

Thanks for the interview though, I hope Molly can engage the business guys at Microsoft

Elsa from Elsa

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Live and Direct at Volume

Volume at the V and A, London

I spent some time experiencing Volume today. I took 256meg of pictures and almost 2gig of video (which I'm uploading now). The video is in 720p but medium quality High Definition Mpeg4. If you really want to get a feel for Volume, do check out the non-flash versions which are as smooth as it really gets online. And of course do actually go and experience it yourself. Here's some of best shots with my new
Camera. Its great having a Digital SLR with 12x zoom!

Volume encorages you play

Volume in action

Walking across the grid of Volume

Somone looking up at a pole

People look on



More Camera shots

Look into the light

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