Clearleft’s Cennydd Bowles on why a little personality in technology would go a long way. Recorded in Brighton at Skillswap on Speed on Wednesday 29th October 2009.
A follow-up blog post here: http://www.cennydd.co.uk/2008/why-is-technology-so-dull/.
We’ve got pretty good at helping people find their way through today’s digital world. Information architecture, taking cues from physical architecture, has built a toolkit of wayfinding aids including menus, breadcrumbs, signage. But things are about to get a lot more interesting.
Talk given by Cennydd Bowles.
Whatever we design - products, services, environments, systems - we have an opportunity to influence user behaviour. Bringing together ideas from different disciplines, ‘Design with Intent’ aims to give designers a way of addressing areas where influencing behaviour would provide benefits for users and for society in general - particularly, reducing the environmental impacts of product use. Slides available here: http://bit.ly/Vyn44
Browser support for the typographical aspects of CSS is gradually increasing. Things are on the up.
Richard will be trouncing the myth of web-safe fonts, demonstrating how to go beyond bold, detailing the technicalities of font embedding and exploring the commercial and ethical minefield therein.
The introduction of font embedding in particular is a long-awaited step in the right direction. However it brings with it a host of complications; technical, ethical and aesthetic.
This session will explain all.
Web typography is a toddler in the big bad world of competing displays, browsers and operating systems. Jon takes it by the hand, and discusses the science that comes before the art.
It’ll be a celebration with lots of opportunity for questions and discourse. From exploring how fonts are rendered, to a quick refresher on typesetting and with a little history thrown in for good measure, it’s time to get your glyph on!
Crushed into submission by the weight of impending deadlines, battered and bruised by insane client demands, and reduced to a quivering mess by technical problems, how does the web designer inject care, passion, and polish into a project? When and how is it possible to add that extra layer of TLC when all you want to do is get it finished? Elliot Jay Stocks looks at the motivation behind great design, and attempts to inspire by removing the client from the picture and focus on the importance of design evolution.
The concept of Data Portability is one of the most widely talked about topics in the ongoing development of social media. Glenn will take us through his current research work, building experimental interfaces to allow users to freely and securely exchange their data between sites. From Google’s Social Graph, Portable Contacts API and new concepts in data discovery to the future user experience design patterns.
Pet projects: everybody’s got them. But how many of them never see the light of day? In this talk, Tom Armitage looks at some of the obstacles that impede such projects, and how to get over them. The talk also considers some ways to streamline the process of releasing software when you’re your own client, and perhaps might give some ideas to improve not only your personal projects, but your work projects as well.
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Led by Simon Willison. The Ajax revolution has increased user expectations for web application interactivity, and resulted in a growing demand for real-time information. Comet is an umbrella term for a set of techniques that enable live updates of web pages as soon as a significant event occurs. On the server-side, a different set of technologies is needed to handle the challenges of event-driven applications.
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With every passing day, we entrust more and more of our personal information to the Internet. And as each week passes, we see more and more online services launching new APIs, opening up the information silos and letting our data flow freely. But some data should not be freely available, merely portable. To do this securely requires that users prove their identity and authority. Typically this is done via username and passwords, or sometimes OpenID. Often, though, users want to appoint computer agents to access and work with their data on their behalf. These agents may not be entirely trusted, and should not be given the user’s logon credentials.
Enter OAuth: an open standard for simple, secure, delegated authorization. With OAuth, a user can give a social network just enough access to their address book to connect them with their friends, or can allow a photo shop access to just the few photos they want printed onto canvases.On the Web of Data, OAuth puts the user back in control.
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