Sessions at DIBI 2012 on Tuesday 17th April

DIBI is all about combining design and technology, and if you’re too heavily weighted on one side, you’re missing out on creative possibilities. In this entertaining and down to earth presentation, Seb will show the best examples where creativity and code collide, and prove that it’s not that hard to extend your skills outside your comfort zone.

Tom has worked in the Web industry for over a decade. He has participated in a diverse range of activities including: co-authoring W3C standards, publishing cited research on web technologies, and co-authoring O’Reilly’s “Up and Running with Node.js“. Tom’s employers and clients have included: NASA, Yahoo!, Walmart, Tesco, Three Telecom and Channel 4.

Paul will give us a walkthrough of the work that’s gone into the new gov.uk including some of the designs that didn’t make the grade, and show how they’ve had to unlearn some web design home-truths in their quest to make a site that will truly work for everyone.

First, there are the various flavors of WebKit: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, webOS, and, perhaps, MeeGo.

Then there are the non vendor browsers like Firefox and Opera. Finally, we have IE on Windows Phone. Thats right, IE is still around and now its in somebodies pocket. However, despair not! Mobile web hacker Brian LeRoux will guide you through this abject landscape. Like some sort of jungle explorer with a big machete we’ll cut through the proprietary stuff and, with some luck, even find a way to build our app across all these platforms. You can expect live code, unit testing techniques, remote debugging and other forms of mobile web automation.

We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy, read, register, and take action of some kind. Designing without understanding about people is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. From her book, 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, Dr. Weinschenk has picked her top 10 “things” that you need to know in order to design intuitive and engaging websites, applications and products that match the way people think, work, and play.

The modern web developer faces a moral choice when creating sites and apps. The angel on your shoulder tells you to use standards and respect accessibility across users of AT, older browsers, mobile, etc. The devil on your other shoulder meanwhile tells you to use all the shiny, satisfy your ego, and leave user agents over two weeks old in the dust.

Chris and Bruce will walk you through the dilemma, looking at the perils of embracing the serpent and presenting solutions that will allow you to achieve a satisfactory compromise. We know the devil has all the good albums, and we want to rock out as much as you do! But not at the expense of the Web’s greatest strengths

In this talk Rob will highlight the game-related features that HTML5 and JavaScript bring to the table and show you why they are also useful to non-gamers.

As web designers we love to boast about our user centric approach to web design, but what about our clients? Most web designers resent clients, seeing them as a barrier to producing great websites. However, a website doesn’t just need to meet users needs it also must meet the needs of your clients.

Web design is not just about building websites. Its about providing a service to our clients. In this talk Paul looks at how to establish a collaborative relationship with your clients that produces websites far better than you could build in isolation.

Ted left his dream job in the R+D group at the NY Times to build and launch FancyHands.com, all whilst still providing for his family, without taking on a co-founder, and without raising any money. A programmer by nature (and at heart) there are a lot of lessons to be learn along the way, but this is something you can do.

Dan Rubin tries to do everything, and as far as many people are concerned, mostly succeeds. A designer, photographer, and barbershop harmony aficionado, he somehow finds time to speak at conferences around the world, write about myriad topics, and work with good-looking clients including MailChimp, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Geffen/Universal, and IDEO. He is Founder/Creative Director of webgraph, a design, strategy, and development studio in the U.S., and Creative Director of MOO in London.

From a simple shared resource setup to multiple slices in the cloud and back, UserVoice has been through many system iterations. In this talk Scott will take you through those systems and the issues, lessons and sometimes outright failures that drove their discovery and implementation.

While focused mainly on the technical problems present in scaling a SaaS application, he will also touch on those systems and processes that have grown out of monitoring the business itself and how technologies like NoSQL databases have helped in understanding the true state of affairs.

Cameron will be closing the day with a keynote talk on the burdon of being creative.