BarCampLondon4
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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Comments
Hi Cennydd, I agree with your last point, and that of the previous comment. Events like BarCamp are inevitably more focussed on the technical aspects of the web, and similar events aimed primarily at the field of UX are needed here in the UK. It’s also a bit frustrating that there are specific IA / UX events, but they’re all in the US.
Maybe we just need to get off our collective backsides and sort something out. I know it’s something i’ve been considering for a while.
Yes, I think you’re both right - the onus is probably on us as enthusiastic design types to try to drive this change. I see from the BarCamp wiki that Vancouver and Toronto are at least looking at a DesignCamp, perhaps it’s worth investigating for London?
Once things have settled down for me I’ll give it some proper thought. Any further suggestions quite welcome!
I totally agree about the lack thereof of design discussions at Barcamp. Maybe we need a Barcamp that is aimed at designers/ux people rather than developers?
I enjoyed your presentation, look forward to seeing the slides.