Life has been treating kindly and keeping me busy. So after a busy period, here’s a little summary of how the rest of SxSWi worked out for me.
The most juicy, for lack of a better term, panel during the remainder of SxSW had to be the Clay Shirky chat on Sunday morning. It has been a long time since I felt so inspired by someone on a Sunday morning. It was something I had much been looking forward to and the experience did not disappoint. Here’s a short clip of Mr. Shirky speaking about education,
A couple of other panels really stand out. Josh Knowles gave an excellent presentation titled, Add Some XBox to your UX. He covered the basic design elements of gaming, namely earning points, achievements and unlockables. He provided one of the more succinct explanation of a concept all conference,
Just kicking a ball around can be fun. Kicking it hard. Kicking it at things. Running after it. But by wrapping this playful activity in the rules of soccer — put players on teams, give the field boundaries, set specific goal zones, and such — you get a complex and challenging game which billions of people find meaningful.
I also felt a kinship on account of both of us being 6′5″ former English majors with a distaste for Jakob Nielsen, never underestimate the value of a distaste for Jakob Nielsen.
Oh – here’s a really cool site with some new CSS working it’s way into our browsers (as long as it’s not IE), http://sxswcss3.com/. Go ahead and check out the source code on that cool puppy.
Tuesday, the last day, featured a couple of really good presentations. There was “Effective Dashboard Design, Why Your Baby is Ugly“ by Aaron Hursman. Then, there was the highly attended session “Interactive Infographics” which featured several good speakers, including Shan Carter from the NYTimes. From the latter, I found it interesting that the NYTimes pairs a designer with a reporter and nothing is represented which is not verified to be true. If something can not be verified, it is simply omitted from the final infographic.
SxSW was inspiring, exhausting and exhilarating all at once. New friendships were formed. Old friendships were revived and plenty of libations were enjoyed. I can’t wait until next year.
