Roundup: recent events I’ve attended
In the past three weeks, I’ve attending a few excellent events. Rather than try for posts that may not ever happen, here’s the standby roundup:
- Interact! Games meets interaction design was another wonderful AIGA Experience Design event coordinated by Nico MacDonald. Ben Cerveny, previously from Frog Design and Ludicorp, discussed the historical and theoretical background of play, describing games as pattern languages along with a ton of other ideas that I couldn’t begin to describe but were extremely fascinating. Afterwards, Durrell Bishop of Luckybite provided a few notes on how interaction design can move towards play, citing the iPod click wheel as great example of how playfulness meets interaction. He encouraged the audience to avoid falling into interaction design preconceptions and use play more often to encourage interaction and increase the pleasurability of products.
- Next was Creating value: Exploiting design innovation in the real world, another event chaired by the omnipresent Nico MacDonald. Chris Downs of live|work and Nina Warburton of Alloy gave some nice presentations on the importance of developing intellectual property in order to establish your design business, but the meat of the event was presented by Mat Hunter of IDEO. This is probably nothing new to those who know anything about making money from design, but for newbies like me, it was creating design IP in a nutshell. Some of his most useful points: making money from design is very expensive; ideas have a shelf life so go as fast as you can and focus on the business value of the design; you must prototype your ideas to make money from them; and most importantly, if you have an idea, you or a business partner needs to be able to speak to its business value, i.e. don’t focus on the design, focus on the value of design.
- Finally, after hearing that Simon Willison was in London, I told him I’d like to meet up sometime. To my delight, a gathering of web geeks had already been planned for that very evening! Besides Simon, I was also able to meet Mark Norman Francis of Yahoo UK and Richard Hallows of Tonic. Great fun was had by all. Let’s do it again sometime, shall we?
