Every few months, the blogosphere addresses the matter of gender diversity of speakers at conferences about design, technology, and the web. The latest such incidents revolved around the lack of women speakers at the the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco last September1 and the Creativity Now conference put on by Tokion in NYC last October. Each time this issue is raised, you see conference organizers publicly declare that they tried, that diversity is a very important issue, and that they are going to address it the next time around.
With that in mind, I collected some information2 about some of the most visible past and upcoming conferences in the tech/design/web space. I'm reasonably sure that the organizers of these conferences were aware of at least one of the above recent complaints about gender diversity at conferences (they were both linked widely in the blogosphere), so it will be interesting to see if those complaints were taken seriously by them.
Future of Web Apps - San Francisco
September 13-14, 2006
0 women, 13 men. 0% women speakers.
Tokion Magazine's 4th Annual Creativity Now Conference
October 14-15, 2006
6 women, 30 men. 17% women speakers.
PopTech 2006
October 18-21, 2006
8 women, 30 men. 21% women speakers.
Web Directions North
February 7-10, 2007
5 women, 16 men. 24% women speakers.
LIFT
February 7-9, 2007
10 women, 33 men. 23% women speakers.
Future of Web Apps - London
February 20-22, 2007
1 woman, 26 men. 4% women speakers.
TED 2007
March 7-10, 2007
12 women, 41 men. 23% women speakers.
SXSW Interactive 2007
March 9-13, 2007
147 women, 378 men. 28% women speakers.
164 women, 373 men. 31% women speakers. (updated 2/22/2007)
165 women, 379 men. 30% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
BlogHer Business '07
March 22-23, 2007
43 women, 0 men. 100% women speakers.
An Event Apart Boston 2007
March 26-27, 2007
1 woman, 8 men. 11% women speakers.
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
March 26-29, 2007
9 women, 44 men. 17% women speakers.
12 women, 79 men. 13% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
Web 2.0 Expo 2007
April 15-18, 2007
17 women, 91 men. 16% women speakers.
Future of Web Design
April 18, 2007
2 women, 12 men. 14% women speakers.
4 women, 16 men. 20% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
GEL 2007
April 19-20, 2007
2 women, 11 men. 15% women speakers.
1 woman, 16 men. 6% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
MIX07
April 30 - May 2, 2007
0 women, 4 men. 0% women speakers.
8 women, 89 men. 8% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
The New Yorker Conference 2007
May 6-7, 2007
3 women, 21 men. 13% women speakers. (updated 2/28/2007)
6 women, 29 men. 17% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
Dx3 Conference 2007
May 15-18, 2007
5 women, 48 men. 9% women speakers. (updated 3/2/2007)
5 women, 70 men. 7% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
An Event Apart Seattle 2007
June 21-22, 2007
0 women, 9 men. 0% women speakers.
1 women, 9 men. 10% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
From this list, it seems to me that either the above concerns are not getting through to conference organizers or that gender diversity doesn't matter as much to conference organizers as they publicly say it does. The Future of Web Apps folks seem to have a particularly tin ear when it comes to this issue. For their second conference, they doubled the size of the speaker roster and added only one woman to the bill despite the complaints from last time. This List of Women Speakers for Your Conference compiled by Jen Bekman is a little non-web/tech-heavy, but it looks like it didn't get much use in the months since its publication. Perhaps it's time for another look. (If you think this issue is important, Digg this post.)
Update: To the above list, I added An Event Apart Boston 2007 and corrected a mistake in the count for GEL 2007 (they had one more woman and one less man than I initially counted.) Ryan Carson from Carson Systems, the producers of The Future of Web Apps conferences, emailed me this morning and said that my "facts just aren't correct" for the count for their London conference. He stated that the number of speakers they had control over was only 13. Some of the speakers were workshop leaders (the workshops "are very different" in some way) and others were chosen by sponsors of the conference, not by Carson Systems. I'm keeping the current count of 27 total speakers as listed on their speakers page this morning...they're the people they used to promote the conference and they're the people at the conference in the front of the room, giving their views and leading discussions for the assembled audience. (thx, erik, mark, and ryan)
Update: I added the Future of Web Design conference to the above list. (thx, jeff)
Update: Hugh Forrest wrote to update me on the latest speaker numbers for SXSW Interactive 2007 (he keeps close watch on them because the issue is an important and sensitive one to the SXSW folks)...the ones on their site were less than current. In cases where counts are updated (and not inaccurate due to my counting errors), I will append them to the conference in question so that we can see trends. I plan to update the above list periodically, adding new conferences and keeping track of the speaker numbers on upcoming ones.
[1] Sadly, when I Googled "future of web apps women" while doing some research for this post, Google asked "Did you mean: 'future of web apps when'"? ↩
[2] All statistics as of 2/22/2007. Consider the gender counts rough approximations...in some cases, I couldn't tell if a certain person was a man or a woman from their name or bio. ↩
[3] This conference has released only a very incomplete speaker list. ↩
Juan Enriquez had a nice idea for rebalancing the priorities in the voting booth: proxy votes for parents of children under 18. That is, if my wife and I have two kids, the family gets four votes, not two. Juan's rationale for this plan is that the voting public is currently made up of a lot of baby boomers, who are going to begin to vote for things that benefit their age group, which can be thought of as an investment in the past. By voting on behalf of the 0-18 year-olds, the parents might support issues that benefit that age group (education, etc.) and invest in the future instead. Here's a quote from Juan in CIO Magazine:
Why not give parents of kids under 18 one proxy vote per child? Only then will there be a strong voting block to counter growing gray power. It is also time to quit spending more than we earn. And above all, it is time to realize just how fragile countries can be.
If you missed his talk on PopTech Live, the CIO article covers some of what he talked about.
Since my internet access has been somewhat spotty at the conference (I'm trying to pay attention and power is hard to come by here so the laptop is closed most of the time), I'm going to do rolling wrap-ups as I go, skipping around and filling in the blanks when I can. Here we go, soundbite-style:
Alex Steffen: Cars equipped with displays that show gas mileage, when compared to cars without the mileage display, get better gas mileage. That little bit of knowledge helps the driver drive more economically. More visible energy meter displays in the home have a similar effect...people use less energy when they're often reminded of how much energy they use. (Perhaps Personal Kyoto could help here as well.) At dinner, we discussed parallels between that and eating. Weighing yourself daily or keep track of everything you eat, and you'll find yourself eating less. In the same way, using a program like Quicken to track your finances might compel you to spend less, at least in areas of your life where you may be spending too much.
Bruce Sterling is the Jesse Jackson of technology. He has this cadence that he gets into, neologism after neologism, stopping just short of suggesting a new word for neologism. Wonderful to experience in person. Perhaps not as upbeat as the Reverend, though.
Bruce also related a story told to him by an engineering professor friend of his. The prof split his class into two groups. The first group, the John Henrys, had to study and learn exclusively from materials available at the library...no internet allowed. The second group, the Baby Hueys, could use only the internet for research and learning...no primary source lookups at the library. After a few weeks, he had to stop this experiment because the John Henrys were lagging so far behind the Baby Hueys that it is was unfair to continue.
Kevin Kelly noted that the web currently has 1 trillion links, 1 quintillion transistors, and 20 exabytes of memory. A single human brain has 1 trillion synapses (links), 1 quintillion neurons (transistors of sorts), and 20 exabytes of memory.
Kelly also said that technology has its own agenda and went on to list what it is that technology might want. One of the things was clean water. You need clean water for industrial manufacturing...so water cleanliness is going to be a big deal in China. In a later talk, Thomas Friedman said, "China needs to go green."
Hasan Elahi, during his ordeal being mistaken for -- what's the term these days? -- an enemy combatant, learned that language translates easier than culture. That is, you can learn how to speak a language fluently way easier than to have the cultural fluency necessary to convince someone you're a native. In his interrogations, Hasan liberally sprinkled pop culture references in his answers to questions posed by the FBI to help convince them that he was a native. Workers at call centers in India for American companies are not only taught to speak English with an American accent, they also receive training in American geography, history, and pop culture so as to better fool/serve American callers.
"The best laid plans of mice and men turn into a nonlinear system." -- Will Wright, with apologies to Robert Burns.
Speaking of Wright, a couple of Spore trivia bits. The data for a creature in Spore takes up just 3K of memory. And entire world: just 80K. And these worlds are amazingly complex.
Brian Eno: With large groups of people, the sense of shame and the sense of honor that keeps the members of small groups from misbehaving breaks down. The challenge for larger groups is to find ways of making honor and shame matter in a similar respect.
Stewart Brand: "We are terraforming the earth anyway, we might as well do it right." Stewart also noted that cities are very effective population sinks. When people move to cities, the birthrate drops to the replacement rate (2.1 children per family) and keeps on dropping. Combine that with the fact that by early next year, more people in the world will live in cities than in rural areas, and at some point in the next hundred years, the earth's population will start to fall.
The Brian Eno/Will Wright session kicked things off quite well at PopTech. Lots of interesting stuff to say about this one, but I quickly wanted to highlight two things that Eno and Wright said independently in their presentations. Eno:
Art is created by artists so that the viewer has the opportunity to create something.
Later, Wright said in relation to games:
The real game is constructed in the player's head.
Eno started his presentation by wondering about a overall system for describing culture, from high to low. He and Wright may be onto something here in that respect.
Postings around here may get a little sporadic because I'm heading up to attend the PopTech conference in Maine. PopTech is near the top of the heap of all the conferences I've attended and I'm really looking forward to this year's event, especially since I didn't get to go last year. Speakers include Thomas Barnett, Richard Dawkins, Homaro Cantu, Juan Enriquez, Stewart Brand, Thomas Friedman, Will Wright, and Ze Frank, as well as the sleepers that I've never heard of that inevitably knock everyone's socks off.
If you didn't get yourself in gear to make it to PopTech this year, no need for despair. For the first time, they're broadcasting the whole thing, live and for free. I will also be doing some blogging from the audience (as will others, I imagine), so stay tuned for that as well.
On Friday, September 1, I'll be speaking at the 2006 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. I'll be taking part in a symposium on simplicity organized by John Maeda (schedules: part 1, part 2). I've been furiously preparing my slides in Keynote for the past week or so. It's my first talk using either Keynote or Powerpoint and I'm having fun messing around in Keynote. It's a great little program. Thanks to John and the folks at Ars for including me...it's a real honor.
Updates for the next few days will be spotty at best; the internet connection situation at both the conference and our hotel is unknown and I'll likely be busy preparing for my talk1. And after the conference, we're heading into the Alpine wilderness for a few days (maybe Salzburg, Munich, or Zurich as well) during which my internet status will likely be "offline" and my sausage intake status will be "every 6 hours". See you when I get back.
So, now's your chance to catch up on some recent doings around the site. Here are some of my favorites from the past few weeks/months:
[1] "Preparing for my talk" may or may not be a euphemism for "throwing up repeatedly in worry about my talk". (Actually, practice is a wonderful thing. It makes perfect, builds confidence, and reduces abdominal discomfort.) ↩
I was fortunate enough to attend the Taste3 conference in Napa Valley, CA over the weekend. What a nice change from technology conferences. Instead of software demo CDs in the schwag bags, there were bottles of wine and chocolate and instead of BOF gatherings on podcasting, there were dinners with fine wine and yummy cheese. As you would expect, the folks in the hospitality industry are a lot more outgoing than the nerds; except for me, there was a distinct lack of people standing in corners looking down at their shoes.
For the next few days I'll be posting some thoughts and links from the conference; I hope they'll be as interesting as the conference was.
Through an improbable series of clerical errors, I am scheduled to participate in a "keynote conversation" about professional blogging with Heather Armstrong at SXSW in Austin, Texas next month. Armstrong, so the story goes, got fired for blogging at work and was rewarded with a loving husband, cutie-pie daughter, photogenic dog, several television appearances, hundreds of media mentions, and a new job -- talking about poop all day -- that supports her entire family. And so but by the way, she's also headlining the entire SXSW Festival along with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Neil Young. Which makes me approximately chopped liver. When I told Meg about the headlining thing, she said, "boy, that conversation had better be good". Pressure's on, Heather.
To sum up, a piece of chopped liver will be having a chat with a nice lady from Utah next month about blogging for groceries. Should be fun.
If you happen to be in NYC on November 3rd, stop by Eyebeam in the evening and check out a panel that I'm on about criticism called "Everybody's A Critic, Or Are They?" Here's a description:
With 9 million blogs, umpteen online message boards, thousands of shows on hundreds of cable channels, and an increased number of magazines on the newsstand, the number of outlets for expressing criticism has never been higher and the barriers to would-be critics have never been lower. Is this devaluing evaluation or does the shotgun approach result in better criticism? YOU be the Judge!
Joining me on the panel are Emily Gordon, Village Voice film critic Michael Atkinson, and Columbia professor & author Duncan Watts. The wonderful Steven Heller will moderate and no doubt bring the conversation to a higher level. Details:
November 3, 2005
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Eyebeam (map)
540 W. 21st St.
New York, NY 10011
The AIGA has podcasts and presentation materials up for some of the speakers from the Design Conference (my full coverage here). Several of the main stage speeches are up, as well as backstage interviews with some of the participants. In particular, I would recommend:
- Audio of the main stage presentation and interview with Juan Enriquez.
- Audio of the main stage presentation by Bill Strickland on The Design of Leadership.
- Audio of the main stage presentation by Milton Glaser and Nicholas Negroponte.
- Audio of the main stage presentation by Murray Moss, although I'm not sure how well this one would work if you listened to it without the slides.
- The PDF of Stefan Sagmeister's presentation doesn't make too much sense without the audio, but the last 50 or so slides are worth checking out for the design candy.
These aren't just for designers; they're perfectly fine for non-designers as well. Here's the RSS file with all the resources...it should work well with your favorite podcasting software or newsreader. It's great that the AIGA is making these presentations freely available...you're getting a lot of the conference for free here. If I remember correctly, not even O'Reilly offers the presentations or podcasts for download after their events like Etech.
Update: Wrong again! IT Conversations has several podcasts from the last Etech conference. (thx tim)
Here's a sampling of the rest of the AIGA Design Conference, stuff that I haven't covered yet and didn't belong in a post of it's own:
- Juan Enriquez gave what was probably my favorite talk about what's going on in the world of genetics right now. I've heard him give a variation of this talk before (at PopTech, I think). He started off talking about coding systems and how when they get more efficient (in the way that the Romance languages are more efficient than Chinese languages), the more powerful they become in human hands. Binary is very powerful because you can encode text, images, video, etc. using just two symbols, 1 and 0. Segue to DNA, a four symbol language to make living organisms...obviously quite powerful in human hands.
- Enriquez: All life is imperfectly transmitted code. That's what evolution is, and without the imperfections, there would be no life. The little differences over long periods of time are what's important.
- Enriquez again: The mosquito is a flying hypodermic needle. That's how it delivers malaria to humans. We could use that same capability for vaccinating cows against disease.
- Along with his list of 20 courses he didn't take in design school, Michael Bierut offered some advice to young designers:
1. Design is the easy part.
2. Learn from your clients, bosses, collaborators, and colleagues.
3. Content is king.
4. Read. Read. Read.
5. Think first, then design.
6. Never forget how lucky you are. Enjoy yourself.
- Nicholas Negroponte: If programmers got paid to remove code from sofware instead of writing new code, software would be a whole lot better.
- Negroponte also shared a story about outfitting the kids in a school in Cambodia with laptops; the kids' first English word was "Google", and from what Negroponte said, that was followed closely by "Skype". He also said the children's parents loved the laptops because at night, it was the brightest light in the house.
- Christi recorded Milton Glaser's mother's spaghetti recipe. "Cook until basically all of the water is evaporated. Mix in bottle of ketchup; HEINZ ketchup."
- Ben Karlin and Paula Scher on the challenges of making America, The Book: Books are more daunting than doing TV because print allows for a much greater density of jokes. In trying to shoot the cover image, they found that bald eagles cannot be used live for marketing or advertising purposes. The solution? A golden eagle and Photoshop. And for a spread depicting all the Supreme Court Justices in the buff, they struggled -- even with the Web -- to find nude photos of older people until they found a Vermont nudist colony willing to send them photos because they were big fans of The Daily Show.
- Bill Strickland blew the doors off the conference with his account of the work he's doing in "curing cancer" -- his term for revitalizing violent and crime-ridden neighborhoods -- in Pittsburgh. I can't do justice to his talk, so two short anecdotes. Strickland said he realized that "poor people never have a nice day" so when he built his buildings in these poor black neighbohoods, he put nice fountains out front so that people coming into the building know that they're entering a space where it's possible to have a good day. Another time, a bigwig of some sort was visiting the center and asked Strickland about the flowers he saw everywhere. Flowers in the hood? How'd these get here? Strickland told him "you don't need a task force or study group to buy flowers" and that he'd just got in his car, bought some flowers, brought them back, and set them around the place. His point in all this was creating a place where people feel less dissimilar to each other...black, white, rich, poor, everybody has a right to flowers and an education and to be treated with respect and to have a nice day. You start treating people like that, and surprise!, they thrive. Strickland's inner city programs have produced Fulbright Scholars, Pulitzer Prize winners, and tons of college graduates.
- I caught 30 minutes of David Peters' presentation of Typecast: The Art of the Typographic Film Title and realized I should have gotten there in time to see the whole thing. I could sit and watch cool movie titles all day long. Among the titles he showed were Bullit, Panic Room, Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Superman. The title sequence for Napoleon Dynamite (which was discussed on Design Observer last year) was shown later in the main hall.
- At the closing party at the Museum of Science, we checked out the cool Mathematica exhibit that was designed by Charles and Ray Eames, two designers who were also pretty big science/math nerds.
- And some final thoughts from others at the conference. Peter Merholz says that "form-makers", which make up the vast majority of the AIGA audience, "are being passed by those who are attempting to use design to serve more strategic ends". (That's an interesting thought...) A pair of reviews from Speak Up: Bryony was a bit disappointed with the opening Design Gala but left, like everyone else, in love with emcee John Hockenberry while Armin noted that the preservation of digital files is a big concern for museums in building a collection of graphic design pieces...in 35 years, how are you going load that Quark file or run that Flash movie?
For more of what people are saying about the conference, check out IceRocket. There's a bunch of photos on Flickr as well.
I quite enjoyed Sagmeister's presentation on happiness...where else but a design conference would you find a talk on that topic?[1] Early in, he suggested that visualizing happiness with design is easy (photos of someone laughing or a smiley face will do it) but that creating design that provokes happiness in the viewer is something else entirely. He then shared three designs that have made him happy recently:
- Emma Gasson made a day-planner with room for 82 years, the current life expectancy of a British citizen. It looked to be about a foot thick.
- Omnivisu. Richard The and Willy Sengewald constructed a kiosk in Berlin with video cameras inside. When you look into the kiosk through the viewfinder (very much like peering into a pair of binoculars), the cameras record your eyes and beam the video to a nearby location where the images are projected onto a building which rather looks like it's got a head. When you blink into the kiosk, the building's head blinks also.
- Ji Lee pastes empty speech bubbles over advertisements on the streets of Manhattan, people often fill them in, and Lee returns to photograph the results.
Sagmeister wrapped up his talk with a list of things he has learned and how he's used that list in a recent series of projects:
- "everything i do always comes back to me"
- "trying to look good limits my life"
- "everybody thinks they are right"
- "money does not make me happy"
- "thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now"
- "complaining is silly. act or forget."
- "having guts always works out for me"
"Complaining is silly..." is my favorite, both as advice and his implementation of the design. A few of these are in this video shot by Hillman Curtis.
[1] Ok, maybe at a clown conference, but still.
At the beginning of the conference, sketchbooks were distributed to every attendee. We were urged to sketch our thoughts during the sessions & panels in our books and then tape the results onto the Sketch Wall in the Design Fair. As I was too busy typing into my virtual sketchbook (plus, I can't draw), I left the drawing to others, but I did head down to the Design Fair to see what other attendees had done. Here's a couple I found interesting:
In addition to the sketches, the wall was also being utilized more generally for graffiti, both written (with marker and paint) and created with the tape used to fasten the sketches to the wall. Here's a favorite bit of tape graffiti (tapeffiti?):
![I [heart] undo](http://www.kottke.org/plus/misc/images/aiga-sk-undo.jpg)
That would make a great tshirt.
As part of my ongoing series of thoughts about conference badge and program design (Poptech 2004, Web 2.0 2004, PopTech 2003), here's a quick review of the AIGA conference badges and programs. The badges are pretty good. Both first and last names are printed in large type for easy glancing and the schedule fits in the badge holder.
The badge lanyards are not the usual string/cloth, but a simple length of thin hollow plastic tube that's looped together with a small piece of plastic that fits inside the tube like so:
If the lanyard is too long (as they often are at these things) and your badge is hanging down to your belt buckle, just grab a scissors, cut a bit off one end of the tube, and stick it back together. The program is a small thick book which I've left in my hotel room the entire time, preferring to rely on the Web site for event descriptions and the smaller schedule that fits in the badge holder for times, room numbers, etc. The schedule is actually not a booklet, but a series of folding pieces, one for each day of the conference, so when Friday is over, you can take the Friday schedule out of your badge holder and leave it behind, which is kind of handy.
Some miscellaneous bits I haven't had a chance to post yet about the conference:
- Congressman Barney Frank didn't talk at all about "Design and Civic Leadership", but he did say he was in favor of limiting free speech in one small way: he would ban the use of metaphors in the discussion of public policy.
- Dj Spooky on the standarization (i.e. Gapization, Starbucksification, etc.) of American retail (paraphrased): If you think about it, the US is almost more totalitarian than the Soviet Union was; we buy our own uniforms.
- Peter Merholz on the death of user experience: What people not call "user experience" used to be called "design" (by the Eames generation). The term "user experience" was necessary because "design" had become associated almost exclusively with the way something looked. The pretty, the aesthetic. Who did Peter blame? Professional organizations (including the AIGA) and designers themselves. Peter notes that design is making a comeback, particularly in the business press, something I noted in earlier in the week.
- From the Three Minds blog, a summary of a presentation by Murray Moss of 10 things that he likes right now. Well, not so much things as ideas or trends. Or commerce...all of the items he showed are on sale in his Soho store/gallery.
- More blog action from the conference: Peterme has some quick thoughts, David Panarelli has several posts from Friday (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and UnBeige tells us about Ellen Lupton, Dj Spooky, a David Carson sighting (I totally didn't know he was here...seeing his work for the first time made me want to be a designer, so I may have to accost him and gush a little), and then promptly goes off to nap. Nap!? That's allowed??
More tomorrow, already the last full day of the conference.
As part of the conference within a conference for students, Michael Bierut listed 20 courses he did not take in design school (I think I got all of them):
Semiotics
Contemporary Performance Art
Traffic Engineering
The Changing Global Financial Marketplace
Urban planning
Sex Education
Early Childhood Development
Economics of Commerical Aviation
Biography as History
Introduction to Horticulture
Sports Marketing in Modern Media
Modern Architecture
The 1960s: Culture and Conflict
20th Century American Theater
Philanthropy and Social Progress
Fashion Merchandising
Studies in Popular Culture
Building Systems Engineering
Geopolitics, Military Conflict, and the Cultural Divide
Political Science: Electoral Politics and the Crisis of Democracy
His point was that design is just one part of the job. In order to do great work, you need to know what your client does. How do you design for new moms if you don't know anything about raising children? Not very well, that's how. When I was a designer, my approach was to treat the client's knowledge of their business as my biggest asset...the more I could get them to tell me about what their product or service did and the people it served (and then talk to those people, etc.), the better it was for the finished product. Clients who didn't have time to talk, weren't genuinely engaged in their company's business, or who I couldn't get to open up usually didn't get my best work.
Bierut's other main point is, wow, look at all this cool stuff you get to learn about as a designer. If you're a curious person, you could do worse than to choose design as a profession.
I'm sitting in a huge room filled with ~2,000 people at the opening remarks of the AIGA Design Conference and there's no single other person on Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) in iChat:
I may be the only person in the entire room with his laptop open. Instead, everyone is listening to the speakers. Like Jeff, I'm torn: is this lack of a back channel a good thing or does the presence of an online component of a conference make the experience more rewarding?
One of the pre-conference events was a talk at Fenway Park followed by a tour of the ballpark. Janet Marie Smith, VP of planning and development for the Sox, kicked things off with how the team (especially the new management) works really hard to preserve the essential character of Fenway while at the same time trying to upgrade the park (and keep it from getting torn down). She talked about the advertisements added to the Green Monster, which was actually not a purely commercial move but a throwback to a time when the Monster was actually covered with ads.
Lots of talk and awareness of experience design...the Red Sox folks in particular kept referring to the "experience" of the park. One of the speakers (can't recall who, might have been Jim Dow) talked about how other ballparks are becoming places where only people who can afford $100 tickets can go to the games and what that does to the team's fan base. With Fenway, they're trying to maintain a variety of ticket prices to keep the diversity level high...greater diversity makes for a better crowd and a better fan base and is quite appropriate for Boston (and New England in general), which has always been an area with vibrant blue collar and blue blood classes.
Janet also referred to the "accidental" design of the park. Like many other urban ballparks built in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the placement of the streets constrained the design of Fenway and made it rather an odd shape....these days larger plots are selected where those types of restraints are removed. And over time, the game has changed, the needs of the fans have changed, and the fire codes have changed and the park has changed with the times. In the dead ball era, the walls of the stadium weren't for hitting home runs over; their sole function was to keep people on the street for catching the game for free, so the Fenway outfield ran over 500 feet in right field -- practically all the way to the street -- where there's now 30 rows of seats. Jim Holt observed that American butts have gotten bigger so bigger seats are called for. Fire codes helped that change along as well...wooden seats, bleachers, and overcrowding are no longer a large part of the Fenway experience (save for the wooden seats under the canopy).
The design talk continued on the tour of the park. Our guide detailed how ballparks are built around specific ballplayers. Yankee Stadium was the house that Ruth built but it was also seemingly (but not literally) built for him with a short trip for his home run balls to the right field wall. Boston added a bullpen to make the right field shorter for Ted Williams. Barry Bonds does very well at PacBell/SBC/WhateverItsCalledTheseDays Park. And more than that, the design of Fenway also dictated for a long time the type of team that they could field, which had some bearing on how they did generally. Players who played well in Fenway (i.e. could hit fly balls off of the Monster in left) often didn't do so well in other parks and the team's away record suffered accordingly.
In preparation for the AIGA design conference[1], I'm looking over the session descriptions and speaker list. The theme for this year is "Design", which seems a little broad but somehow appropriate given how much design has been taken up by the press (especially the business and tech press) recently as something Important and the design profession may be in need of a little wagon circling to figure out how to effectively explain design to someone who is all fired up about incorporating it into their business process because they read a blurb in Fast Company about Jonathan Ive and the iPod.
My knowledge of and involvement with the AIGA up to this point has been fairly minimal, which either makes me the ideal person (fresh eyes!) or a horrible choice (head up ass!) to cover their design conference. I'm particularly interested in learning how they've incorporated the fast-changing disciplines of Web and digital design into the mix. When I was working in Minneapolis as a Web designer in the late 90s, my company got me an AIGA membership, but I never used it because although they were trying to be more relevant to those of us working on the Web, my perception is that the AIGA was still largely a graphic design organization and I was finding more of what I was looking for on Web design sites like A List Apart. Now that the Web design profession has matured (and Web design practitioners along with it), it seems to fit better with where the AIGA is going (and vice versa). After all, design is design, no matter what word you stick in front of it.
So, back to the speakers list, I'm looking forward to hearing from Michael Bierut, Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Steven Heller, Matthew Carter, John Maeda, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path, Ze Frank, Stefan Sagmeister, Steff Geissbuhler, Caterina Fake, and Milton Glaser (but no Malcolm Gladwell or Errol Morris, both of whom I swear were on earlier speaker lists), some of whom you may recognize from past mentions on kottke.org. They've also added some sessions in response to Hurricane Katrina on design, safety, risk, and disaster management, which is an excellent use of the opportunity of having a bunch of designers in the same place.
If you want to follow along with the complete conference coverage here on kottke.org, here's the AIGA 2005 page. As I mentioned previously, I'll be opening up comments on most posts (incl. this one), but will be active in gardening off-topic and trolling comments.
[1] I just realized all these URLs are going to break when the next conference rolls around in two years or so, which is disappointing. Would be nice to have something like http://designconference.aiga.org/2005 that would permanently point to this year's festivities. Bloggers like permanent links (well, this one does anyway).
From September 15-18, I will be attending the AIGA Design Conference in Boston. As an experiment (for both the AIGA and me), I will be covering the event at their request[1] on kottke.org. I'll be covering the conference as a blogger, but the easiest way to think about it in terms of a conference is that I'm a speaker[2]...a sort of roving speaker with the readers of kottke.org as the audience and my topic is the conference itself.
As usual, I have no solid plan as to how this is going to work exactly, but I'm looking forward to seeing how the conference goes and adapting accordingly. I'm hoping to provide a moving snapshot of the event so that readers of kottke.org can follow along fairly well without being at the conference. I'll probably have comments open on most posts so hopefully those reading along at home and those reading along at the conference can have some dialogue, with each little world spilling over into the other a bit.
One other quick thing...if you're going to be at the conference and plan to blog it, let me know...I'll definitely be linking to other people's stuff. I'm sure Design Observer and Speak Up will be covering things pretty well. I'll also be watching Flickr and del.icio.us for links and photos...I'd suggest tagging relevent entries with aigadc2005 for easy aggregation.
More next week as the conference draws near.
[1] Disclaimer: Kottke.org's budget for covering out-of-town conferences with costly entry fees is limited, so I'm exploring other ways of gaining access to be able to bring you some interesting content that you might not get otherwise. The AIGA is a curious organization and they're looking at various ways of using weblogs, so they asked me to come and blog the conference as an experiment. To make it economically feasible for me to be there, they are paying me a small speaker's honorarium and putting me up in a hotel.
In talking with the AIGA about this, they've made it exceedingly clear that I'm to consider myself independent and write whatever I want about the conference, which is pretty much what I intend to do. If I thought the hotel room and honorarium would be a problem w/r/t my objectivity in covering the event, I would have declined them both. The bottom line is that if money were no object (if the conference were free and took place entirely within walking distance of my apartment), I'd want to go and write about it anyway.
[2] Although I will also be appearing on a related panel about blogs, journalism, and design with Steve Heller, Michael Bierut, Armin Vit, and Jen Bekman.
Update: I've changed the first paragraph slightly, from "covering the conference as a blogger/journalist" to "covering the conference as a blogger", which under the circumstances is more accurate. I am not a journalist in this instance or any other.
At Gel, Bruce Shapiro, artist in residence at the Science Museum of Minnesota, talked about his notion of "motion control" as an "emerging medium for artistic expression". As his website explains, motion control is a "term used to describe a variety of techniques for orchestrating the movement of machinery and objects".
One of the machines he brought to demonstrate its artistic expression was Ribbon Dancer. The willowy one-armed robot performed a routine for us for a couple minutes to a classical piece of music. Near the end of the piece, the ribbon got hung up on the lower part of the apparatus while the arm kept going with the routine, tugging obliviously on the caught fabric. The crowd gasped. For a second there, we thought the arm was going to pull the whole thing over -- not unlike the robot-like AT-AT that got tripped up by a Rebel harpoon on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back -- but Bruce stepped in to stop the machine and free the ribbon. Despite the mistake, the crowd's emotional reaction to the dancer's potentially hazardous misstep demonstrated the potential for the acceptance of artistic expression by machines.
(And in a somewhat more disturbing demonstration of the dancer's representation of life, when Bruce stopped it at the end of the routine and began to walk off the stage, it began to twitch awkwardly from some stray electrical signals, a death rattle of sorts. Bruce leapt back on stage and pulled the plug; the twitching abruptly stopped and the arm fell slack atop the metal shaft, like he'd killed it.)
Two people got standing ovations for their presentations at GEL. The first was Barry Schwartz for his talk on The Paradox of Choice. The second person, who gave the most fascinating presentation I've seen at a conference in a long time, was inventor/artist/mad scientist Theo Jansen. For the past fifteen years, Jansen has been creating (growing?) "beach animals" made from commonly available tools like plastic tubing, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, hose, tape, and all sorts of other stuff. Wired News did a pretty good article on Jansen earlier this year:
Jansen is evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind. Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm.
It's hard to know where to begin in talking about what's so cool about Jansen's beach animals. They're evolved for one thing; he worked out the optimal 11-piece leg using evolutionary algorithms on a computer but now prefers to race his animals on the beach and "breed" the most successful ones together, taking the best bits from each to make their offspring better. His animals have legs, muscles (pneumatic pistons within the plastic tubing), stomachs (plastic bottles for storing air), and nerves (collections of on/off values that work pretty much like logic gates).
And watching the videos that Jansen showed...his animals were so organic and lifelike as they moved under their own power across the beach. He's got a few of the videos on his site, but for some reason, the best ones he showed at GEL are not among them. To see evolution happening like this, a clumsy, imprecise process of trial and error that nonetheless produces beautiful and organic results, it was a real treat.
I spent the afternoon at the half-day session that GEL has added this year (it was formerly just a one-day conference). There were twelve different sessions described as "hands-on experiences" to choose from and I attended the gadgets session with Dan Dubno, who is a self-described lunatic when it comes to gadgets and technology products. I'm not much for gadgets, especially new ones...I'm a fairly late adopter among my tech-savvy friends. But some of the stuff I saw today...wow. Aside from the thinnest touch-screen tablet PC I've ever seen, the thing that blew me away was the Sony Librie, the first commerically available electronic ink e-book reader. Here's a photo I took:
What you can't see from the photo is how insanely crisp and clear the text on the "screen" is. It was book-text quality...it looked like a decal until you pushed the next button and the whole screen changed. It was *really* mind-boggling and you could instantly see how most books are going to be distributed in the very near future. Despite looking like a computer, when you were reading, it felt like a book because of the resolution (a very odd sensation). And it's not only for books...I was told that there's e-paper that's capable of full-color 24 fps video. Can't say enough about how blown away I was by the Librie. (Now for the bad: 10MB storage capacity, uses Sony's Memory Sticks for more storage, and the content self-destructs after 60 days. If Sony opened this up and used normal flash memory like everyone else, this thing would be huge. Enormous. It's a TV, video player, book, magazine, gaming platform, and hybrids of all of the above. Instead, they'll probably keep it closed and someone else will capitalize on it.)
Anyway, if you can handle navigating the Japanese menus, you can get one from Dynamism for $600 (which I would totally do if I still had my old job).
I'm at the Adobe Ideas conference today, so posting may be a little slow. Or non-existant because this is the first conference I've been to in, oh, 4 years that doesn't have wifi available to the attendees (I had to retreat to Bryant Park for lunch to soak up some free wireless). For all the talk about connectivity during the keynote, there isn't much evidence of it so far. :(
Anyway, Adobe announced Creative Suite 2 today, as rumored. One feature that got the crowd oohing and aahing was the Vanishing Point tool in Photoshop. It lets you map the perspective out on an image and then place text, images, etc in the proper perspective on that map. Perhaps some more later when I get to a connection again.
Update: got a better look at CS 2...looks pretty sweet. Looks like Adobe has learned quite a bit from Apple: Bridge does for design assets what iTunes has done for music files (and, with lesser success, iPhoto does for photos); namely it abstracts the file structure away (mostly) and gives the designer all kinds of views/tools with which to keep track of your work. This is something one needs to spend time with to fully gauge the impact of, but from what little I saw, Adobe has done a great job with Bridge. (And it reads RSS!!?!) I know Apple is heading in this direction with Spotlight, but I've decided that I never want to see the file system ever again...just give me views into each type of data or project that I'm doing, tools to manipulate that data, and let the OS worry about where it's storing things.
Photobloggers take note, Photoshop CS has been updated with photographers in mind. The Spot Healing Brush hides blemishes with a click or two. Three new filters deal with noise reduction (woo!), lens correction, and "smart" sharpening (superior to the current Unsharp Mask). There's new features for mainpulating RAW images and also an exposure filter for non-RAW images, with an f-stop range of -20 to +20 (how's that for overkill?).
I'm on the plane back to NYC from what was my fifth SXSW. I hadn't been for a couple of years and it was good (and a little weird) to be back. Some thoughts, in rough chronological order:
Best panels I attended: tie between Jason Fried's How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams and Malcolm Gladwell's keynote. Having read Blink and seen him speak on it twice before, there was nothing much new in Malcolm's talk, but he's a fantastic speaker...knows his shit cold, didn't utter a single "um" or "like", could make the phone book seem interesting, but doesn't have to caper about the stage to be compelling.
Everyone was nice. Well, there was that one guy who was an asshole, but I think everyone pretty much ignored him. But everyone else, so nice to get to meet you or see you again.
Overheard in the hallway: "no woman who knows that much about CSS should be that good looking", "here's how I met Marc Canter for the first time: I'm standing outside at a conference, he comes up beside me and farts", "I have no idea who you are", "surf the glue", "no one will get naked in the hot tub with me", and "Imagine Malcolm Gladwell...with breasts. That's how busy it will be."
My two panels sandwiched the keynote conversation between Bruce Sterling and Alex Steffen, so I was only able to catch about 20 minutes of it. But that was long enough to hear Bruce talking about smoking his shoes. LOL for reals.
BBQ! BBQ! In what could be a record for a bunch of folks who can't pay attention to any particular thing for more than 10 minutes at a time, fifteen of us waited an hour and a half for a table at Stubb's (cool menu pictured at right). I can't speak for the rest, but my beef brisket was worth the wait. As a bonus, Kathryn accidentally walked away with the primary object of our obsession during our 90 minute wait, the buzzing/blinking table-readiness notification coaster. I'm sure said coaster will be a treasured guest at many SXSWs to come.
Bruce Sterling's not-house party didn't really get crackin' until the geeks descended on the Zoob toys. The photo evidence pretty much speaks for itself here.
Ben Brown, because he asked me to. Many, many times. Ben, I expect you to comply with the terms of the restraining order from this point forward.
And finally, I'm at the airport ready to leave just after getting through security and I hear, "your attention please, Jason Kottke to security check 3 for a lost item pickup". Bag, check; rollie, check; coat, check; phone and wallet, safely stowed in the zipper pocket of my bag. What the heck could they have found and how on earth do they know it's mine? I zipped over the security check point and was waved over by a friendly/stern police officer. "You Jason?" "Yep." He holds up my wallet, which I swear on a stack of The Origin of Species was in my bag. "Holy crap," I said. "And that's not the worst part," he says with the most serious look I've ever seen on anyone's face.
Uh oh, I feel a full body cavity search coming on.
He pulls out my social security card and lectures me for two minutes on how I shouldn't be carrying it because it's all someone needs to steal my identity. Relieved that I'm not about to be hauled into a tiny windowless room for interrogation, I'm sort of chuckling at this point, which he takes to mean I don't believe him about the SS card. "Do you see me looking you right in the eye, son? That's how serious I am about this." Mr. Sir, as soon as I'm home, I'm taking my SS card out of my wallet and putting it in the safest place I can...right after I change into some clean underwear.
I'll be at SXSW this year after an absence of a couple years. My goals this year are to not get food poisoning and to be fully present at both the panels I'm participating in (I was slated to do a keynote but got bumped by Gladwell...whaddya gonna do?):
If you're at the conference, amble up and say hi...but be warned that I might ask you for money (not really, I'm just kidding [sadly, he's not just kidding, but was about the Gladwell thing -ed]).
I'll write more in-depth about a few of the speakers here, but for now, here are some soundbites (my comments in brackets):
- Andrew Zolli: All societies have an image of the future. Those that have optimistic images have better outcomes than those with pessimistic images. [The US right now seems optimistic overall, but getting a bit more pessimistic. At PopTech this year and last, about 1/2 the speakers said during their talks something to the effect of "we're screwed".]
- Malcolm Gladwell talking about a chapter from Blink:
One of the many ways in which asking someone what they think isn't necessarily the best way to find out what they want: people move away from the more sophisticated idea and they go for the simpler choice because they don't have the necessary "vocabulary" to explain their real feelings. [You may prefer The Hours to Goldeneye, but when asked to justify that choice, you may find yourself favoring the Bond flick more than you would if you didn't have to justify it.]
- Frans de Waal studies primate behavior to gain insight into human behavior. One of his findings: aggression does not disperse, it brings primates together more often than normal. [Destruction is creative. Creativity is destructive. Or something.]
- Bruce Mau: Not all countries have embraced democracy, but most have embraced traffic (individual transportation). [There are many different ways in which openness can be introduced into a culture.]
- Thomas Barnett: China is 30% Marxist Communist, 70% The Sopranos.
- Phillip Longman: Secular societies that cannot reproduce will be replaced by fundamentalist countries where children are an economic asset and a gift from God. And in Brazil, television viewing time predicts birth rate...the more TV a woman watches, the less likely she is to have children.
You can always tell (well, I can always tell) I'm enjoying a conference when I'm not writing much about it at the time. I've got the computer open for taking notes, but that's about it...not doing a lot of connecting the dots with online research or anything and not trying to write any of it up yet. In lieu of actual content, here's some random stuff from the last day or so:
- The conference badges here are fantastic. The names are huge for easy glancing and the entire conference booklet (with schedules, author bios, etc) fits in the badge holder. It's got all the info that you need and it's still small enough that it doesn't weigh you down.
- There is a 2 square foot area in the park across the street from the conference that is the only area in a 30 mile radius in which my cell phone gets reception. Hi-tech conference, hell.
- Driving to the conference this morning, I noticed a car from New Hampshire in front of me. The state motto was emblazoned on the license plate: "live free or die". But the screws affixing the plate to the car were positioned in such a way that it actually read, "olive free or dio". Hmmm.
So, the Web 2.0 conference was pretty good and I'd like to thank John and Tim for inviting me to participate. There was a fair amount of hype present, but that's to be understood (and I've been guilty of a fair amount of irrational cheerleading on this issue myself). Largely, I think that Web 2.0 as it was presented at the conference is a bit of a pipe dream** (partially because guessing about what the Web is going to be like in 3 years is bound to be fraught with difficulty), but there is a lot of neat stuff happening that feels like it's part of a new kind of Web.
Everyone at the conference had their own definition of what Web 2.0 was about, but I think Bezos got it right when he said it was about machine to machine communication versus the machine to human communication that typified the early days of the Web. And that's nothing new..it's just that it's starting to really take off as an idea that people are buying into, both literally and figuratively. Portable structured data formats (e.g. XML) have been around for several years now, but it wasn't until an ecosystem evolved around RSS (blogs producing freely available content and newsreaders to read said content) that people had tangible evidence that, yes, this structured data thing has legs.
** Bloggers, journalists, please don't quote this part out of context because if you keep reading, there's a Sir Mix-a-Lot-sized but after it.
Right now, the face of Jerry Yang, Chief Yahoo!, is up on the giant screen here in the ballroom. A few rows back, a gray-haired gentleman snoozes in his chair, occasionally snoring audibly. It's the 2004 version of George Orwell's Big Brother: The Man is up on the screen telling us what to do and we're snoozing instead of touching our toes.
Jot - Bringing structured data to wikis. Actually let's not use the word wiki, because Jot isn't that. It's part Word, part Excel, part database, but deployed through a Web browser and published as Web content (as well as email and probably in other ways as time goes on). If you had asked me a year and a half ago what software I would like to build if I had the money, time, and programming chops to do it, a wiki-ish program with structured data capability where you don't have to worry about people learning the wiki-ish formatting syntax would have been near the top of the stack. (The last remaining big wiki problem is that the fundamental unit of wikis is the page. Wikis need to be less dependant on the page (think chunks instead, like weblog posts)...TiddlyWiki is a good step in this direction.)
Rojo - Sigh. This is moving toward what Kinja was supposed to be.
I stupidly left the music panel yesterday before Danger Mouse could drop some science about the music industry:
Artists are responsible, because for some reason we think we should be millionaires for making people smile. But I don't worry too much, because it will be over soon. There won't be a market for making people smile because kids will just do it for free.
Thanks to Veen for the quote (visit his post for another good DM quote.)
Mary Meeker - Don't forget about China. There is huge Web/mobile/gaming business going on in China right now. If you believe Jared Diamond's hunch (which I do), the so-called dominance of Western Civilization in the world is just a blip on the radar as far as China's actual dominant position goes.
And if you're living on Internet time, perhaps even if you have seen it. The most overused phrase at Web 2.0, aside from "at the end of the day", is some variation of "next generation" applied to software or services. Every new app being talked about here is next generation or revolutionary or __[fill in the blank]__. The sheer amount of supposed novelty being blasted at the audience is exhausting...everything is changing the world in a significant way. I imagine many of the attendees -- those who read 900 Atom/RSS files in their newsreaders daily perhaps -- find this energizing, but it saps my energy. No wonder Meg left the biz to focus on something a little less suppositious.
Jason Fried, Jeff Veen, and I did a workshop yesterday on Design for Web 2.0. In preparing for the informal chat we had among ourselves and with the audience, we prepared a list of questions to consider. There's about 15 of them, presented here unedited without context or answers:
- Right now, Web design feels like talking to the del.icio.us API and blending Flickr RSS with Upcoming iCal subscriptions. What happens when design(ers) has little to do with what's on the page?
- Blogs democratized publishing, now "tags" could be considered to democratize information architecture. What's behind this? Are powerful tools in the hands of millions really better than well-trained experts?
- How do we justify the high upfront costs of doing user research? Is there a magic bullet formula that will tell us if it's worth it?
- I love quick wins. Find something you can fix in two weeks. Measure how it works now. Fix it. See how the numbers change. Repeat until you run out of stuff. Why is this so shocking to corporate Web sites?
- It feels to me that IT departments still operate under the assumption that technology is a precious resource that should be guarded carefully and trickled out. This is like a pair of handcuffs to most Web teams. Why do so many enterprises treat their Web sites like shrink-wrapped software and not publications?
- Can usability drive innovation? What's the balance between giving the user what they need but also giving them what they do not yet know that they need?
- How do you go about designing for groups? When the "user" is a collection of people rather than a single person?
- Do brochureware sites still have a place on today's Web?
- What does user experience mean in the context of cross-media services? How do you keep it consistent when you're using T-Mobile's interface to email your photos to Flickr or updating your blog with your TiVo using your Blackberry as an input device?
- home pages -> sites -> "posts" -> ????
- Q for Veen re: your content management is a process, not a software package mantra. Is there a lesson here for software in general?
- How would you design a web-based application differently today than 3 years ago? What do we have in our design war chests today that is capable of making the experience feel 3-years more mature?
- Do you think design "talk" is too focused on technological achievement ("Look mom, no tables!") these days, or is it a step in the right direction?
- Should one design fit all? Should designers worry about their web designs working on alternate devices by default, or should each device have its own unique design?
- What is your feeling on Personas? Do they really help drive the visual design process or are they just process for process sake? What does it really mean to know your audience might be represented by a 30-something single female who likes to watch Friends, prefers paying her bills by mail, gets coffee every morning at Starbucks, and has a 56K connection at home?
- Who should we follow into the Web 2.0? What are some of the best examples of interaction design today?
I've opened the comments if you'd like to discuss any of these questions amongst yourselves.
I've got a few minutes before things get going here at Web 2.0 today, so I thought I'd wrap up what happened here yesterday.
During his interview with John Heilemann, John Doerr (who sits on Google's Board) indicated that the Web browser space is ripe for some action again, but that Google is not doing anything. No Google Browser?
Demos of the Snap and A9 search sites. Two interesting things about Snap: the data they've purchased from a "large ISP" about what people do after they search (e.g. how many pages they visited on Wal-Mart's site and if they bought anything) and the exposure of their statistics information, including how much money they're making on any given day. However, I'm not sure I want search results that looks like an Excel spreadsheet.
In general, I'm very skeptical about these search engines that offer second-level searching (Snap, Clusty, A9) or personalized search. I'm not convinced that people are going to spend that much time tinkering with their searches. Search results are not a mp3 collection or photos...I don't know how much time people are going to want to spent organizing them.
Heard a curious phrase last night...companies are doing lots of deals with other companies because they're "not Google". That is, Google would rather hire people to build stuff for them than partner with companies (which seems a bit self-centered to me). So it seems there's lots of opportunities out there for smaller companies trying to compete with Google to partner with Google's larger competitors.
And finally, the design of the paper program here at Web 2.0 is, shall we say, less than optimal. There's no single listing of events in the program that contains the 3 vital bits of information attendees need: event description, time, and place. The description and time are listed on one page and then you need to flip to another page to figure out where it's being held. Annoying, especially since it seems like the program is designed for maximum ad space rather than for usability.
I'll be doing a workshop on Design for Web 2.0 at the Web 2.0 conference next week with Jeff Veen and Jason Fried:
Web design and development has come a long way in the past ten years. Early assumptions have been replaced by mature decisions based on tested principles and clear best practices. We're taking what we've learned in those ten years and presenting the workshop attendee -- be you a designer, technologist, or businessperson -- with a collection of practical tips and techniques for designing Web sites, Web applications, APIs, feeds, and everything else that makes up the next-gen Web. So join us for a lively discussion of Web design as it continues to move beyond the browser.
Given the freewheeling nature of the workshop format, that description may not be entirely accurate, but it's close enough and if you show up, you won't be disappointed. (For a chuckle, if you look at the rest of the workshop roster, there's me and my one-man band stuck in amongst a bunch of CEOs, Partners, Directors, and VPs. Good times.)
The Pop!Tech conference is coming up in October (read about my adventures there last year and conference-goers' adventures with the nTag badges). This year's conference will feature Burt Rutan, Richard Florida, Malcolm Gladwell, Ze Frank, Bruce Mau, and Doug Rushkoff, although, as with last year's conference, I'm sure some of the most interesting speakers will be the ones you've never heard of before.
I'm not sure how many of you are conference goers, but if you're interested in attending Pop!Tech, the organizers are giving kottke.org readers $300 off the regular registration price. To register, follow this link to the Pop!Tech site and click on "Registration" in the upper left-hand corner. If 5 people register via that link, I get a free ticket. So if you want to go, I'd appreciate the referral.
Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path will be in NYC on July 22 to teach a one-day course on The Elements of User Experience. The course will be based on his excellent book of the same name and his essay on The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams:
This presentation provides a framework for user-centered Web design with clear explanations and vivid illustrations that you can put to immediate use. During this full-day seminar, Jesse will show you how to apply his concepts to simplify the complex challenges of creating products that meet business goals while satisfying user needs. Along the way, he'll share his insights on the next wave of user experience innovation.
If you're interested in attending, kottke.org readers can register with promotional code AFT38 to get 15% off the cost of the course.
Gel (Good Experience Live) is a one-day conference being held at the NY Historical Society in Manhattan at the end of April. The focus is on "experience", which is a bit nebulous in comparison to a conference on technology or design, but that's what makes it fun and interesting. Highlights from last year's event were Ken Jackson's talk on New York City, Jim Kunstler's skewering of contemporary urban design, and a live performance by The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.
Scheduled to appear at this year's Gel are Christo, Scott Heiferman from Meetup, and Andre Haddad, VP of User Experience and Design at eBay. If you register for Gel, tell 'em Jason sent you (they have a referral program).
Some random notes from my three days at the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine:
- The substrate of complexity is irrelevant, whether it's carbon or silicon. That is, a computer is a computer is a computer, be it a Powerbook or a human being. The level of complexity is the important part.
- Patent clerks spend an average of 4-6 hours per patent on a prior art search. Yikes.
- Lessig imagines an 18th century DMCA: the (D)aguerre (M)achine (C)ontrol (A)ct. I've seen Larry speak three times now; it's interesting to see how he's refined his argument.
- URLs cribbed from Golan's presentation: Danny Rozin's Wooden Mirror and Kelly Heaton's Furby wall.
- Audience member on the Jewish perspective on stem cell research: "A fetus is a fetus is a fetus until it becomes a lawyer."
- Cloning + embryonic stem cells is a powerful combination. Cloning takes "old cells" back in time, creating identical young cells. Embryonic stem cells can then be harvested from the cloned embryo and used to create new cells and organs for the original organism. Wild stuff.
- The Methuselah Mouse Prize is encouraging work on anti-aging, giving out prizes for the longest-lived lab mouse.
- Q from the audience about humans possessing indefinite life spans: "But doesn't this mean there won't be any children?" Answer from Aubrey de Grey in a most straight-forward tone: "Yes, it would mean a world without children." At that point, a chill went up my spine.
- A population pyramid for the US from the US Census Bureau's IDB Population Pyramid page.
- The shortest summary of the past 100 years I've ever heard: "the 20th century had its ups and downs." - Clay Shirky
- James Kunstler: "We are creating places we don't care about [living in]"
- Overheard about Virginia Postrel's talk on the Age of Aesthetics: "for someone who thinks aesthetics is so important, you'd think she would have used something better for her slides than Comic Sans on light purple." That and her increasing shrillness toward the end of her talk turned much of the audience off her argument I think.
- David Martin raised a question I've been preoccupied with for a couple of years now: "How much of the global economy is just an hallucination?"
- Geoffrey Ballard on the future: 12% of the population is currently ruining the planet. What happens when the other 88% get involved?
- Here are the goals that the 191 United Nations Member States have committed to meet in the next 12 years.
- An audience member asked space architect Constance Adams about sex is space (within the context of designing habitats for procreation), and she indicated that erections in space are difficult to achieve because in zero gravity, blood tends to collect in the head and feet.
- Robert Wright, author of the excellent Nonzero, is tall, handsome, witty, so very smart, and possesses impeccable timing. I think I am in love.
The badges at Pop!Tech were wee interactive computers called nTags. When engaged in conversation with someone, you could choose to send your contact information to that person, see what that person is interested in (based on your interests), get recommendations on people that they have met that you should meet, and generally augment (or hamper) networking.
Many attendees liked them and used them happily, but others revolted. Some people started trading their badges with others. Early on during the conference, Whit Diffie hacked his nTag badge to send a sleep command to any nTag badge in range, effectively deactivating them. As word spread of the hack, people sought him out to sleep their hated badges. Others were pissed that he was turning off their badges without permission; someone asked at the end of the conference if sending a sleep command constituted an attack (When Sleep Attacks!). Following Diffie's lead, a woman hacked her badge to send the sleep command and a disgrunted Pop!Tech goer tried to rip her badge from around her neck (When Liberal Nerds Attack!).
I didn't particularly like my nTag badge (it was too heavy for one), but I can't argue that it didn't result in some interesting social behavior, though perhaps not the behavior that the nTag folks promised in facilitating networking.
Holy cow!! They just had the guy from the Kollaboration 2000 talent contest perform in between talks. Fucking amazing.
This is the second time I've listened to a talk about nanotech from someone representing the Foresight Institute (the first was Robert Drexler), and both times the talks were full of politics and not that interesting at all. They seem to have so much baggage attached their efforts that it's impossible for them to take a fresh look at it. Disappointing.
I'm at the Pop!Tech conference for the weekend in Camden, Maine. Maine is the 47th US state I've visited...hopefully I'll get to see a bit of it while I'm here. More to come if I feel like posting.
The highly regarded Pop!Tech conference is coming up in a few months, October 16-19 to be exact. I've never been, but from hearing about from various sources (a list below), it sounds like an ambitious conference that tries to identify and discuss broad trends across politics, technology, culture, science, and economics...and largely succeeds in doing so. This year's roster of speakers includes Golan Levin, Tom DeMarco, James Howard Kunstler, the L Train, Bob Metcalfe, and Kevin Sites.
The organizers of Pop!Tech have been nice enough to extend a special offer to kottke.org readers. Register for Pop!Tech 2003 using this link and you'll save $200 off the early bird rate and $500 off the regular price. Who says kottke.org never saved anyone any money?
Oh and here's the promised links to coverage of past Pop!Tech conferences:
PopTech, The Blog (J.D. Lasica and Buzz Bruggeman)
PopTech 2002 coverage (David Weinberger)
PopTech 2002 (Ernest Svenson)
Conferenza Pop!Tech 2002 Report #1 (Shel Israel)
Conferenza Pop!Tech 2002 Report #2 (Shel Israel)
Conferenza Pop!Tech 2002 Report #3 (Shel Israel)
So, when I fix it so I can control my TiVo via the web and buy an Apple iSight camera & point it at the television, I can watch Junkyard Wars and Family Guy at work via iChat AV, right?
Also, at next year's O'Reilly Etech conference, someone** will do something with iSight/iChat AV that will allow people attending one panel to tune into the other two concurrent panels (much like Hydra let people textally eavesdrop on concurrent panels last year). The really cool thing? The organizers of the conference won't have to do anything to make this happen, aside from providing the wireless network. No setting up a streaming, teleconferencing, blah-de-blah server, no renting of video cameras or microphones, no A/V people. Just give people a medium for communication & collaboration and they'll figure it out for themselves.
** Here's a suggestion: a presenter could mic him/herself, make the audio available over iChat AV, and make the presentation available on the web so that anyone who has iChat can follow along from anywhere in the conference area. Add in real-time stenography with Hydra and you can enjoy the conference entirely from the bar or one of the sofas in the lobby.
I'm at Reboot in Copenhagen, Denmark today. Don't know how much I'll be writing about it, but I could go off at any moment. Highlight of the day so far is one of the organizers calling Microsoft, a Reboot sponsor, evil.
Building on one of last year's conference darlings, Danny O'Brien's Panopticion, Ludicorp is demoing Confab. Taking advantage of the formation of the transient geographic group interacting in both real and virtual spaces here at Etech,
Confab is an ad-hoc conversation space mapped to the conference facility's floorplan which allows you to discuss and debate sessions live with other attendees, make contacts, send instant messages and create conversations to plan group meetings and activities.
A crude Matrix, if you will, for finding friends, not enslaving humanity to harvest their energy**.
** Although if you're an introvert like myself, that's what extroverts do...suck all the energy out of us for their own evil purposes.
There's a panel about warblogging at Etech...featuring exactly zero actual warbloggers. Weblog pundits talking about warblog pundits talking about media pundits talking about the war? I'm getting dizzy...
Scott Berkun says that conferences are what you make of them:
I've seen many folks take conferences way too seriously. I find that I learn much better if I'm having fun, and enjoying the people I'm with. I can't do that if I'm fixated on getting to every session on time, or not staying out too late, or trying to achieve any specific objective. If I'm relaxed and enjoying my time away from the office, I'm more open to new ideas and approaches for what to do when I get back. I believe strongly that this is the primary reason my employer is sending me: to learn. Therefore, it's my job to figure out what kind of environment and state of mind I need to be in to best facilitate that objective.
I'm off to SF for O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference on Tuesday. I'm going against the grain this year by taking my iBook along, "blogging" in "realtime", and taking digital photos of people. If there's a box, I am out of it. If you're attending as well, stop by and say hello...I'll be the guy with the iBook and digital camera.
The Etech conference put on by O'Reilly is coming up near the end of April and I'm already getting excited for it. Last year's was the best conference I've ever been to. In contrast to many conferences I've attended, the panels and presentations were just as valuable as the hallway conversations between panels.
This year looks very promising, with tracks on Internet applications, social software, nanotech and hardware, and the nebulous "untethered". And it's a bargain at ~$690 for all the panels when you use O'Reilly's Friends and Family discount code (et03ff) to get 30% off. See you there?
Put on by the Good Experience folks (aka Mark Hurst), Good Experience Live looks like a fun one-day conference in NYC, featuring a host of good speakers like
