Sessions at dConstruct 2009 with sketch notes

Friday 4th September 2009

• Elements of a Network Urbanism

  by Adam Greenfield

  Over the past several years, we’ve watched as a very wide variety of objects and surfaces familiar from everyday life have been reimagined as networked information-gathering, -processing, -storage and -display resources. Why should cities be any different?

  What happens to urban form and metropolitan experience under such circumstances? What are the implications for us, as designers, consumers and as citizens?

  • Urbanism

  At 10:15am to 11:00am, Friday 4th September

  Coverage sketch note sketch note sketch note

• Let's See What We Can See (Everybody Online And Looking Good)

  by Ben Cerveny and Michal Migurski

  Piece by piece, the world is moving onto the web. "Things informationalize," as Stamen advisor Ben Cerveny puts it. How can we make sense of this new torrent of information emerging wide-eyed and blinking into the internet? Stamen’s Michal Migurski will show how information visualization is making it possible to comprehend a live, vast, and deep connected web of data, with a special focus on interactive and geographic work.

  • Data Visualization

  At 11:30am to 12:15pm, Friday 4th September

  Coverage sketch note sketch note sketch note

• Make It So: Learning From SciFi Interfaces

  by Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel

  Make It So explores how science fiction and interface design relate to each other. The authors have developed a model that traces lines of influence between the two, and use this as a scaffold to investigate how the depiction of technologies evolve over time, how fictional interfaces influence those in the real world, and what lessons interface designers can learn through this process. This investigation of science fiction television shows and movies has yielded practical lessons that apply to online, social, mobile, and other media interfaces.

  • Interaction Design
  • Science Fiction

  At 2:30pm to 3:15pm, Friday 4th September

  Coverage sketch note

• Loving Your Player with Juicy Feedback

  by Robin Hunicke

  The games we love also love us back - mostly, by reflecting our successes and failures in delicious ways. This talk will explore the concept of feedback in game design, using examples drawn from both personal & professional experience. We’ll examine a variety of feedback mechanisms (good and bad), and discuss how lessons drawn from these examples can be applied to any user experience.

  • Game Design
  • User Experience

  At 3:15pm to 4:00pm, Friday 4th September

  Coverage sketch note

• Experience and the Emotion Commotion

  by August de los Reyes

  The competitive environment for technology is changing, and its impact on experience design is deep: capabilities, features, and functions are no longer enough. Emotional engagement will distinguish successful consumer experiences of the future. Designing in this world requires we change the way we think about people and products. This presentation provides a brief overview of a counter-intuitive emotional design approach and its application to one of the hallmarks of the next phase in interaction design: Natural User Interface.

  • Interaction Design

  At 4:30pm to 5:15pm, Friday 4th September

  Coverage sketch note

• Materialising and Dematerialising A Web of Data. (Or What We’ve Learned From Printing The Internet Out)

  by Russell Davies

  A couple of years back Tom Coates talked at dConstruct about ’Designing For A Web of Data’, about the idea that your data, the bits that represent you and are useful or interesting to you on the web, are escaping the confines of particular websites and are getting smeared around the web through services and APIs and widgets and myriad other things. (I hope I’m paraphrasing him fairly.) And then, last year, Matts Jones and Biddulph took that on more and talked about ’Designing For The Coral Reef’ and about how they were spreading Dopplr via that web of data, and onto devices, and asynchronous infrastructures and distributed interwoven systems, and slippy maps and geography, and there was a rubber duck in there somewhere as well.

  I loved all that. I wanted to make a contribution to that conversation. But my technical abilities are such that all I can really do to manipulate the web is print it out, and that didn't seem enough.

  And then I got involved with making Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet and I realised that printing it out is the next step. What's happening now is that the web of data wants to escape the screen, it wants to materialise into the real world, it wants to get physical, become objects. And that the next exciting stuff is going to be about designing data that can live on the screen, in devices, on paper, as things, wherever.

  So that's what I’m hoping to talk about. About getting a little post-digital, about analogue friction, about printing to large industrial infrastructures, about unproducts and letter-boxes and rabbits. And there’ll be jokes and silly videos too.

  • Printing
  • Web of Data

  At 5:15pm to 6:00pm, Friday 4th September

  Coverage sketch note audio clip