This is Bruce Sterling’s closing talk from SXSW 2012 Interactive.
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SXSW 2012: The Ultimate Bruce Sterling Talk
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Breaking Down Walls, a Decentralised Social Web?
The web is founded on open, decentralised principles. This means anyone can build a site that can link to any other, without any need for proprietary technology. No one owns e-mail, usenet or http, but social services like Facebook and Twitter are—for the most part—silo’d businesses with their own networks and proprietary APIs. You can join them together in code, but they’re not in any way ‘interoperable’.
This panel will explore why large and centralized seems to dominate, whether it’s a bug or a feature. We’ll take a critical eye at new attempts at building distributed social web products like Diaspora. We won’t be focusing on the technical specifications as much as the end user experience and the business models that could support them. If a distributed service wouldn’t be fun, easy to use or profitable, then is there really any point in building one…?
Evan Prodromou, CTO, StatusNet Inc
Founder and creator of the StatusNet open source social platform, Evan is the co-chair of the W3C’s working group on federated social web technologies.
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Why Mobile Apps Must Die
Mobile apps are on a clear trajectory for failure. It’s just not possible to have an app for every device in my house, every product I own and every store I enter. Much like Yahoos original hierarchy gave way to Google’s search. Applications have to give away to a ‘just in time’ approach to applications.
This talk will explain how applications must give way to a more universal approach to application distribution, one based on the mobile web and cloud services. The problem of course, is that the mobile web has both hands tied behind its back. Any mobile app today is locked away behind a browser ghetto: in effect, a sub OS inside a larger mobile OS.
This isn’t just an arbitrary technology debate, a just-in-time approach to application functionality can unleash entirely new sets of application, ones which are impossible with native apps.
This talk will layout how this problem can be fixed, and what changes need to take place, outside of just HTML5, for it to happen.
Scott Jenson, Creative Dir, frog design
As frog’s Creative Director, Scott Jenson was the first member of the User Interface group at Apple in the late 80s, working on System 7, the Apple Human Interface guidelines and the Newton. After that, he was a freelance design consultant for many years, then director of product design for Symbian, and finally managed the mobile UX group at Google. You can follow frog Creative Director Scott Jenson on Twitter @scottjenson.
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Faster Design Decisions with Style Tiles
With responsive design designers need to rethink the process they go through to work with clients and developers to create successful visual designs. Rather than creating traditional comps, style tiles are a deliverable that help you to communicate with your client, establish a visual language and work iteratively with developers. In this presentation, Samantha will explain how to reinvent your process to leverage Style Tiles as a deliverable.
Samantha Warren is an experienced designer, speaker, and writer who leverages a diverse background in artistic mediums to create compelling and functional web experiences. Focused on designing for content, she is passionate about using the web as a vehicle to tell compelling stories while creating accessible user-experiences. She has been published in .net Magazine and has presented at various industry events, including Design Day in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin Texas.
Currently Samantha is the Design Director at Phase2 Technology where she uses her past experience working with brands like National Geographic and Choice Hotels International to help non-profits, publications, and associations tell their stories online.
In her personal time she talks about design and the web on her blog, BadAssIdeas.com and spends time with her cross-eyed cat, Grace.
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Excessive Enhancement: JavaScript’s Dark Side
Are we being seduced by the animation and rich UI capabilities of modern browsers at the expense of the underlying platform of the Web?
The Web has entered a new phase in its evolution: The proliferation of a JavaScript enabled audience with increased processing grunt in their devices, better and more ambitious JavaScript developers, and users with an appetite for sophisticated experiences, all seem to be helping to move the web in a rich and exciting direction.
Good developers understand about graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, unobtrusive JavaScript and the like, so why are we seeing big companies building web offerings with little apparent thought for their impact on the Web?
We’ll explore this by looking at what the Web was, is now, and might become. We’ll look at examples of exciting user interfaces and sophisticated interactions. We’ll also examine some emerging techniques for providing rich user interactions without hurting the web or killing kittens.
Phil Hawksworth, Technical Director, R/GA
Phil began his career building web applications for financial institutions such as Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, and the London Stock Exchange in the late nineties. A focus on web architectures and real-time data delivery lead Phil to a variety of web development roles with particular attention to emerging front-end development techniques and JavaScript application development.
After several years working on web applications and consulting on web best practices at technology companies such as Verisign, VMware and BT, Phil made the move into the agency world where he managed development teams and architected solutions on projects for clients including of eBay, Sony and BP.
Phil Hawksworth is a Technical Director at R/GA and enjoys talking about himself in the third person.
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CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices
In the early days of CSS the web industry cut its teeth on blogs and small personal sites. Much of the methodology still considered best-practise today originated from the experiences of developers working alone, often on a single small style sheet, with few of the constraints that come from working with large distributed teams on large continually changing web projects.
The mechanics of CSS are relatively simple. But creating large maintainable systems with it is still an unsolved problem. For larger sites, CSS is a difficult and complex component of the codebase to manage and maintain. It’s difficult to document patterns, and it’s difficult for developers unfamiliar with the code to contribute safely.
How can we do better? What are the CSS best practises that are letting us down and that we must shake off? How can we take a more precise, structured, engineering-driven approach to writing CSS to keep it bug-free, performant, and most importantly, maintainable?
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Get Excited and Make Things with Science
The relationship most adults have with science is one of observation: watching government agencies explore on behalf of us, but not actually exploring it ourselves. Science should be disruptively accessible – empowering people from a variety of different backgrounds to explore, participate in, and build new ways of interacting with and contributing to science. By having a fresh set of eyes from those who solve different types of problems, new concepts often emerge and go on to influence science in unexpected ways. A grassroots effort called Science Hack Day aims to bridge the gap between the science, technology and design industries. A Hack Day is a 48 hour all-night event that brings different people with good ideas together in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’. By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups of hackers are capable of producing remarkable results.
Presenters:
Ariel Waldman, Spacehack.org
Ariel Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the creator of Science Hack Day SF, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in one weekend. She is also the coordinator for Science Hack Days around the world, an interaction designer, and a research affiliate with Institute For The Future.
Additionally, she sits on the advisory board for the SETI Institute‘s science radio show Big Picture Science, is a contributor to the book State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, and is the founder of CupcakeCamp. In 2008, she was named one of the top 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley. Previously, she was a CoLab Program Coordinator at NASA, a Digital Anthropologist at VML (a WPP agency), and a sci-fi movie gadget columnist for Engadget.
Jeremy Keith, Web Developer, Clearleft Ltd
An Irish web developer living in Brighton, England making websites with Clearleft.
Matt Bellis, Research Assoc, Northern Illinois University
Matt is a particle physicist by training and is searching for signs of New Physics using data from the BaBar electron-positron collider experiment and the CoGeNT dark matter detection experiment. To these ends he is exploring new computing solutions to these challenges.
He is interested in both data visualization and sonification. He is also involved in efforts to engage the public in science and teach them as much physics as they can handle.
Matt received his PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and later worked at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University. He is currently teaching and doing research at Northern Illinois University.
In the fall, Matt will begin his new job as a professor, teaching and continuing his physics research at Siena College in upstate-NY.