Archive for June, 2008

Reboot10

Monday, June 30th, 2008

The concept of “free” was, in retrospect, a little incongruous with Copenhagen. Although, according to the locals, Denmark is the cheapest of the Scandinavian nations, £6.50 for a pint is still something of a sting. Plus, of course, there was the irony of the Free Beer, released under a Creative Commons licence but which, at £9 a bottle, was particularly hard to swallow.

Price of beer aside, Reboot10 was enjoyable; relaxing yet stimulating, and a great chance to meet old friends and new.

Most of the presentations seemed to have been written specifically for the conference, focusing as they did on the concept of freedom, openness and collaboration. I didn’t have the energy for that, so I reheated my old BarCamp presentation “Beauty in Web Design”. It seemed to go well. Standing room only in a sweltering upstairs room, and several vague, rambling follow ups from keen audience members. We are told videos will be up shortly, although I have some doubts given that last year’s aren’t yet up either.

At the risk of nepotism, I have to say I did enjoy my fellow Clearlefters‘ talks the most. Reboot is undoubtedly an intellectual conference and there are some undoubtedly clever people there. However, the presentations varied wildly – some swimming in philosophical rhetoric and way above my head, some pitched rather too low, and others quite entertaining.

I can’t say it’s a conference I learned much of practical value from, but it has given my brain some new questions, which makes it the perfect antidote from the entry-level stuff I’ve been fed at recent conferences. So I do hope to go again next year, by which time perhaps the exchange rate will have swung in our favour.

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dConstruct buttons

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

I’m very fond of what Paul‘s done with the dConstruct 2008 buttons: in addition to the usual branded colours, you can also supply your own background image (from Flickr, or elsewhere on the web) to create some a sort of social mashup button. Here are a couple of my attempts:

I’m also rather starstruck at the prospect of meeting one of the speakers. Can you guess who?

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BarCampLondon4

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Despite some early WiFi problems (which prompted me to finally go out and buy the broadband dongle I’ve been considering for a while), I’d say BCL4 was a big success. I was particularly pleased to find many people bucking the geek trend and choosing not to watch Dr Who, instead joining in the beery Werewolf games long into the night. Overall it all went swimmingly, for which many thanks go to Ross Bruniges and GCap.

I gave two presentations: Beauty in web design and How to beat your dad at chess. I’m hoping to give a rerun of the former at Reboot in Copenhagen in a few weeks, so I’m holding off posting the slides for now. It seemed to go down well, despite an unfortunte clash with Natalie‘s IE6 bugfest.

Although my personal presentation style is heavy on planning and lofty cerebral topics, as a BarCamp audience member I also really enjoy the unscripted sessions. Paul Johnston‘s session on 101 Uses For Friendfeed was a good example, with the presentation soon melting away into a free-for-all on identity, signal/noise, OpenID and user-created walled gardens as a means to cope with information overload. It’s heartening to be reminded how a conversation with just a handful of intelligent people can set cogs turning and new thoughts emerging for weeks to come.

I also enjoyed a chance to review eyetracking data from a university website, which confirmed a few things about male genital fixation, banner blindness, where not to place primary navigation and so on. I’m still far from convinced that eyetracking gives sufficient design insight to justify the cost, but I’ll gladly look at someone else’s expensive data if they’re showing it…

As a final thought, I must confess I sometimes wish that the level of design discussion at large events was a little higher. Perhaps it’s because many conferences are still largely developer-heavy that ‘Why UX matters’ presentations are still prevalent, but I find this approach faintly condescending and I struggle to get value from it. This isn’t a criticism of BarCamps per se, where the amateur status of many participants is a reasonable excuse: I’ve also been disappointed recently by a few paid conferences and the rather basic level of debate, and I worry that the UK conference scene has grown a little stale. There are exceptions (dConstruct, of course!) but increasingly I’m looking overseas for my dose of mind-blowing knowledge. I’ll certainly kick myself if I miss SXSW and the IA Summit next year.

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