Sessions at Big Design Conference 2011 with sketch notes on Saturday 16th July

Fingers and thumbs turn design conventions on their head. Touchscreen interfaces create ergonomic, contextual, and even emotional demands that are unfamiliar to desktop designers. Find out why our beloved desktop windows, buttons, and widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. Along the way, discover why buttons are a hack, how to develop your gesture vocabulary, and why toys and toddlers provide eye-opening lessons in this new style of design.

Also: cats in tanks, and Hasseloff with puppies.

Interfaces from SciFi films offer examples to realworld issues that are humorous, prophetic, inspiring, and practical to interaction designers.

SciFi interfaces are both fun, inspiring examples and reflections of current interface understanding. Production designers are allowed to develop “blue-sky” examples that, while lacking rigorous development with users, coalesce influential examples for practicing designers that are humorous, prophetic, inspiring, and useful. Interaction Designers can learn can learn from these examples. This presentation will describe some of the insights found by the presenter and design lessons all designers can take back to their practices.

If thinking is destiny, then checking email every 60 seconds doesn't speak well on our behalf.

Thinking with our hands, real-time problem solving with ink, paper, and our cranium, it's our biggest asset...that were too overbooked to use. And it's affecting our output. Together we'll discover the games, collaboration and design research to get back what the daily grind takes away, to make great things together.

Innovation is a word that is commonly used and seldom defined. Ideas occur all the time but do they all deserve the time and effort necessary to realize them?

There is a startlingly simple definition for innovation because innovation, by itself, is simple. It’s also a form of the creative process and can’t be obtained on demand. But when you do come upon something innovative, the real work begins: You have to examine and justify a new idea. You have to convince others that your idea is worthwhile.

Adam Polansky will give you that simple definition and show you how to gauge the merit of an idea along with a short case study about a grass-roots idea that didn’t turn out as planned – it turned out better! He’ll also show you how to frame the discussions you’ll need to have in order to get your ideas off the ground and suggest some other avenues available to move from concept to concrete.

You already use Keynote to create dazzling presentations, polished wireframes, and scrappy prototypes. But now it's time to earn your Keynote black belt. Travis Isaacs and Dustin Askins will roundhouse kick their way through advanced Keynote usage:

• Creating motion graphics and animation
• Advanced animation controls and timing
• Creating your own per-project themes
• Creating your own default shape styles
• Creating wireframes on the iPad
• Porting your prototype to be used in a browser
• Testing a prototype on the iPhone
• And many other hidden gems and uses of Keynote that you didn't know about

What's a girl to do? She created a great blog, where thousands of people come each day. Her audience spends 10 minutes or more. She has over 20 bloggers writing different articles each day. She publishes several videos each week. How do you manage all of the day-to-day activities of a content-rich site? In short, you kick some assets (content assets). Learn the secrets of managing content, handling people, determining what your audience wants, and more.

The world of web application design is expanding at a rapid rate. We’re now expected to design great experiences across a huge variety of platforms, from small screens to large displays. The flood of mobile applications and successful online businesses are showing our executives that design matters.

Why is all this happening now? Where is it all going? UIE’s own Jared Spool will show you how four driving forces—market maturity, the emergence of experience, Kano’s model, and Sturgeon’s Law—are increasing the visibility and value of design in organizations everywhere. He’ll show you what the next generation of design teams will look like and how you’ll get there.