SXSW 2007 - Day 1
I’m over at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas and having a good time. I thought I would post the workshops I went today for those of you wanting to know what’s going on.
Terraforming the Internet: When 3D Models Meet Business Models
This panel will explore the rise in popularity and sophistication of online virtual worlds such as Second Life. The discussion will probe the (somewhat contentious) idea that participatory online worlds offer a glimpse of the way people will interact with information and with each other in the future. The panel will highlight the competitive necessity of developing a strategy for moving web work into virtual worlds.
Getting to Consistency: Don’t Make Your Users Think
Making software predictable and consistent makes it much easier to use. This session will explain UI consistency and point out examples of failures and their consequences. We’ll discuss when it’s appropriate to break consistency, and how to build tools and process to ensure applications are consistent with human interface guidelines and real-world practices. Specific attention will be paid to consistency in your everyday tools: Mac OS X and Adobe applications.
Kathy Sierra Opening Remarks
By merging technology and cognitive science, Sierra brings an entirely fresh perspective to the challenges faced by today’s new media professionals.
Stop Designing Products
The world of business and product design is changing. In fact, we have seen a number of trends taking shape that we believe are all pointing to the end of “products.’ There is a growing realization that we are no longer designing single, stand-alone, centralized, static things, web sites, or systems. As the internet and digital networks in general become more ubiquitous, more distributed, and more integrated in our lives, we’re finding that it’s hard to find a “product” that is not also, or even mostly, a service. These service design projects generally involve multiple touchpoints or channels (i.e. the web, mobile devices, and physical spaces, etc.), a focus on long-term relationships, and the need for consistent experience across throughout. In fact, consumers expect more variety, more control, more interoperability, more adaptability, and more consistency in experience than ever before. This has serious implications for business, design, and development.
When Your Partner Is Your Partner: When Home & Office Collide
“Honey, let’s work together!” sounds like a good idea at first — but how does it actually work in practice? In this session, you’ll hear what succeeds, what doesn’t, and what (nearly) brings couples to the break-up point as several successful programmers, designers, and writers talk about how they work with the person they love and love the person they work with. Their site is: backupbrain.com.
From Tags to Riches: Life After Code
You know web standards backwards and have redesigned countless websites. You don’t want to do it forever, but you don’t need to start from scratch either: what you have is an excellent foundation. In an industry where career paths and professional development options are yet to crystallize the array of choices can be bewildering. Where to? Fivepanelists discuss the challenges of their diverse journeys out of the xhtml trenches.
