michaelfox / tags / dconstruct

Tagged with “dconstruct” (10) activity chart

  1. Letting Go

    Design (or if you prefer—user experience) is at a crossroads. In our globalized, hyper-connected world, users no longer need to wait for us to create experiences for them. As we debate the value of design thinking, the usefulness of the next API, or strive to craft the ultimate cross-platform experience—users are sorting this out on their own, using whatever service or technology is “good enough” for them at the time.

    Strategies and scenarios that made sense mere months ago, are disintegrating as technologies shift, business models crumble, and we watch with dismay as users exchange tips to disable JavaScript on their Kindles, or access multiplayer Flash games on the iPads.

    What happens to your brand, your product, and your bottom line when users choose “good enough”, over your carefully crafted product or service? Is it a sign of failure, a missed opportunity, or a chance to dive head first towards a new reality?

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/bryan-stephanie-rieger

    Bryan Rieger is a designer, writer and reluctant developer with a background in theatre design and classical animation. Bryan has worked across various media including print, broadcast, web and mobile; and with clients such as Apple, Microsoft and Nokia.

    Stephanie Rieger is a writer, designer, and closet anthropologist with a passion for the many ways people interact with technology. With a diverse background, Stephanie’s expertise lies in marrying design, technology, and business goals to craft simple, elegant experiences.

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  2. The Full Stack of Entertainment: Storytelling, Play and Code

    Forget transmedia. Forget alternate and augmented realities. Forget multimedia magazines, tablets, phones and puzzling QR codes. Our challenge lies in figuring out the full-stack of entertainment, designed from the bottom right to the very top: for phones, physical objects—part of the Internet of things or otherwise—tablets and conventional computing devices, where art, code and design mesh together perfectly with directorial vision.

    These teams producing our next generation of entertainment are right at the heart of Steve Jobs’ placing of Apple at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. Where did they come from, how are they evolving entertainment and how are they making storytelling, play, code and technology sing?

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/dan-hon

    Dan Hon is a Creative Director at Wieden Kennedy in Portland, OR, where he works on the intersection between storytelling, games, play and code. A former lawyer, he’s worked for Mind Candy helping to build their first product, Perplex City, and co-founded Six to Start, an award-winning entertainment production company in 2007. He’s most known for being passionately for, and against, ARGs. He does not play World of Warcraft anymore.

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  3. The Transformers

    When you think of a city, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Most likely it is the stuff that it is made up of: its streets and buildings, its parks and squares. But what sets a city apart, aside from its architecture, is how all that stuff is put to use. A city’s nightlife, a city’s cuisine, a city’s culture. In other words, what people make of the space they live in when they are at play.

    Play isn’t limited to the ‘soft side’ of urbanism. In fact, it turns out a building isn’t some prefixed structure capable of doing one thing only. Adaptation and reuse continuously transform what a city’s architecture is for, often from the bottom up. In this way, a city’s people shape their homes as well, quite literally.

    What is at work in this process of city transformation, is nothing less than play. In cities, just as in games, people and the space they inhabit shape each other. Thus, in our Western cities, where reuse is overtaking construction of new space, we are all becoming architects.

    In this session Kars looks at how game culture and play shape the urban fabric, how we might design systems that improve people’s capacity to do so, and how you yourself, through play, can transform the city you call home.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kars-alfrink

    Kars Alfrink is ‘Chief Agent’ of Hubbub, a networked design studio for applied pervasive games. Hubbub works with organizations to create games that take place in public space, engage people physically, and are socially relevant. Amongst other things, these games are used to encourage good citizenship and to facilitate cultural participation.

    Besides this, Kars teaches at the Utrecht School of the Arts, where he mentors students who are pursuing a Master of Arts in Interaction Design or Game Design & Development. He is also the initiator and co organizer of ‘This Happened’ — Utrecht,a series of lectures dedicated to the stories behind interaction design.

    In his spare time, Kars practices a traditional Japanese martial art, and tries to keep up with geek culture.

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  4. What Is the Shape of the Future Book?

    We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.

    This is not what matters. Surface is secondary.

    What are the core systems comprising the future book? What are the tools that need to be built?

    As designers we will need to provide the scaffolding for these systems. The interfaces for these tools. Not just as surface, but holistically—understanding the shifting of emotional space, the import of the artifact, the evocation of a souvenir, digitally.

    How will we surface the myriad data just below the words of digital books in organic, clean and deliberately designed ways? How will we shape the future book?

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/craig-mod

    Craig Mod is a writer, designer and publisher concerned with the future of books, publishing, and storytelling. He lives in a tiny Bay Area village in the California full of dreamers, endless yogurt, and trees that let loose money when shaken just so. His writing appears mainly on his website, but has also appeared in the New Scientist, The New York Times, and A List Apart. He works as a designer for Flipboard.

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  5. Pocket Scale

    I punch in a keycode and enter the office. Three steps through the door I swipe my travelcard against an old wooden box, which starts spitting out a radio station based on forty million people’s answer to the question ‘What songs would a Joy Division fan like?’ The sexyfuture arrived yesterday, and it colonised my pockets.

    Even on the days you leave your phone at home, you carry enough hacked objects to unlock space and time, provided you find the right door. What should we be thinking about as we bring our products to life? What are we strapping to our keyrings? And what does all of this mean for a scale we’ve been familiar with for centuries?

    Matthew will empty his pockets live at dConstruct to find out, revealing the five things he’s carrying around with him in Brighton and why.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/matthew-sheret

    Writer and editor Matthew Sheret is Last.fm’s Data Griot, using everything from tweets to radio scripts to tell stories about Last.fm’s numbers.

    He has worked for the likes of Newspaper Club, 4iP, Thomson Reuters and Dentsu London and in 2008 co-founded We Are Words Pictures, an ad-hoc team of comic book creators who promote the work of up-and-coming creators.

    In his spare time he edits and publishes the anthology Paper Science and plays with Lego.

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  6. Reality is Plenty — Kevin Slavin — dConstruct 2011

    Lately, Augmented Reality (AR) has come to stand for the highest and deepest form of synthesis between the digital and physical worlds. Slavin will outline an argument for rethinking what really augments reality and what the benefits are, as well as the costs.

    Rather than considering AR as a technology, we will consider the goals we have for it, and how those are best addressed. Along the way, we’ll look at the history and future of seeing, with a series of stories, most of which are mostly true.

    AR may be where all this goes. But how it gets there, and where there is, is up for debate. This is intended to serve to start or end that debate, or at a minimum, to bring the conference to a close by pointing at the future, perhaps in the wrong direction.

    dConstruct 2011 brings together leading thinkers from the fields of interaction design, mobile design and ubiquitous computing to explore how we can bridge the gap between physical and digital product design.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kevin-slavin

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  7. Oh God, It’s Full of Stars — Frank Chimero — dConstruct 2011

    The relationship between digital and physical products is larger than if it exists on a hard drive or a shelf. It’s the tension between access and ownership, searching and finding, sharing and collecting. It’s a dance between the visible and the invisible, and what happens when we’re forced to remember versus when we are allowed to forget. How does this affect us—not just as makers, but as consumers of these products? Does collecting things matter if we don’t revisit them? We may download, bookmark, tag, organize, and star, but what then?

    A digital Zen master would say that if everything is starred, nothing is. We’ve optimized the system for getting things in, but how do we get something good out? How can we make meaningful connections between all of this stuff, and make constellations out of all these stars?

    ——-

    dConstruct 2011 brings together leading thinkers from the fields of interaction design, mobile design and ubiquitous computing to explore how we can bridge the gap between physical and digital product design.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/frank-chimero

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  8. Boil, Simmer, Reduce

    The actual process of design, the path you take on the way to creating something, is in many ways a “meta object” that can be applied to any design problem.

    Ever since his first experiences with the humble ZX81 back in the early eighties, Brendan has continued to explore the interplay of people, code, design and art both in his role leading the team at mN and on brendandawes.com, a personal space where he publishes random thoughts, toys and projects created from an eclectic mix of digital and analog objects.

    In this session Brendan talks through his three step process: boil—filling your head with many ideas and possibilties, simmer—taking time to consider, and finally reduce—removing things till there’s nothing left to take away.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/brendan-dawes

    Brendan Dawes is Creative Director for magneticNorth, a digital design company based in Manchester, UK. Over the years he’s helped realise projects for a wide range of brands including Sony Records, Diesel, BBC, Fox Kids, Channel 4, Disney, Benetton, Kellogg’s, The Tate and Coca-Cola.In 2009 he was listed among the top twenty web designers in the world by .net magazine and was featured in the “Design Icon” series in Computer Arts.

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  9. Information Is Beautiful

    In an age of high-speed living and info overload, visualized information has incredible potential to help us quickly understand, navigate and find meaning in a complex world.

    The use of infographics, data visualisations and information design is a rising trend across many disciplines: science, design, journalism and web. At the same time, daily exposure to the web is creating a incredibly design-literate population. Could this be a new language?

    In his session, David will share his passion for this merging of design, information, text and story to unveil some of the interesting, unexpected and sometimes magical things that happen when you visualise data, knowledge and ideas. And, admitting that his book is as full of mistakes as it is successes, he’ll also explore some of the common pitfalls, traps and FAILS that dog this young design form.

    Using examples from his book and blog, he’ll share thoughts on what makes a successful information visualisation and journalistic tips, especially for designers, on how to zero in on interesting data and subjects—and how designing information can expose your own biases and change your views about the world. Oh yeah!

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/david-mccandless

    David McCandless is a London-based author, data-journalist and information designer, working across print, advertising, TV and web. His design work has appeared in over forty publications internationally including The Guardian and Wired. He champions the use of data visualisations to explore new directions for journalism and to discover new stories in the seas of data surrounding us. His blog and book ‘Information Is Beautiful’ are dedicated to visualising ideas, issues, knowledge and data—all with the minimum of text.

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  10. Everything The Network Touches

    The work we’re collectively doing—opening up gradually all of human information and media, making it recombinable, helping people create and share their work—is a huge unspoken, sexy, world-redefining mission.

    It’s a mission that many of us have become blasé about, almost unaware of. It’s a project so large that it’s hard to get a grasp on. And the next few years are going to get even more interesting as the network pervades physical objects and environments, sensing and manifesting information in the real world.

    It’s time to recognise the scale of the project we have in front of us, the breadth of the material we have to work with, and the possibilities of design within it. All of human knowledge, creativity—even the planet itself—is our canvas.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/tom-coates

    Tom Coates is a technologist and writer, focused on the shape of the web to come and on developing new concepts that thrive in it. He’s worked for many prominent web companies including Time Out, the BBC and Yahoo! where he was Head of Product for the Brickhouse innovation team. He’s most known for the Fire Eagle location-sharing service, and for his work on social software, future media and the web of data.

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    —Huffduffed by michaelfox 2 years ago