I had hoped to do a Rebecca and blog the heck out of Interactions'08, but the fact is, there came a point where all I could do was sit back and let it wash over me. With eight sessions a day for two days straight, there was a lot to think about, and a lot to take notes on.
Plus, as it turns out, the whole thing is going to be available online as streaming Flash movies anyhow. The TED talks have really, I think, changed the game in terms of how a conference's knowledge can live on as a continuing provocation/education and publicity for what the conference does. It will also, I'm sure, change the game for conference speakers -- in the same way that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has admitted to being super-aware that he can no longer reuse a joke onstage without someone in the audience having already heard a bootleg of the first time he told it, streaming video will make regular conference speakers break out of their practiced shtick or risk seeming like hacks. (How you balance the need to build on earlier thought with the demand for novelty is the next problem, I guess.)
So for now I'll just congratulate the tireless Dave Malouf, Dan Saffer, Joshua Seiden, Liz Bacon, my colleague Robert Reisman, and the rest of the IxDA board, the volunteers, and the faculty and staff at SCAD for a truly extraordinary conference experience. The quality of the dialogue, the intensity of the energy, and experience of the place were all extraordinary. I am so honored to have been a part of this first-ever conference for interaction designers, and I can't wait for 2009.
(If you can't wait for the movies to be online later this week, or don't have 20 minutes to spare to see me race through my deck, Core77 did a bite-sized writeup of my talk and a few other talks as well.)
Emerging behaviors
You can follow the Interaction08 backchannel on Twitter, if you're so inclined. The best comment so far came from my former coworker Keith "it depends" Instone, who joined with others in complaining on Twitter about the noise from the sponsor area bleeding into the speaker area. When it finally quieted down, he said:
i guess we just used a twisper - a way to tell someone on the other side of the room to hush upI wasn't in the morning sessions in that part of the conference, but I did notice that after lunch, things quieted down pretty quickly...
From Savannah to South Africa
I’m at Interactions08, the first annual conference of the Interaction Design Association, and it’s being held at the Savannah College of Art and Design. It’s a beautiful day in Savannah, and I’m looking forward to the conference — and, uh, to finishing the slides for my talk, which I’m giving on Sunday. Come on down, if you’re here!
I got bad advice on the geography of the South, or I would have scheduled my trip differently to see John, who is fighting the good fight with the Conservation Voters of South Carolina. As happy as I’d be to see him, it’s probably just as well it won’t work out this time, since my schedule is insane — on Wednesday morning, I’m flying to Cape Town as the frog representative on a research trip for Project Masiluleke. I’m not sure how much Internet access I’ll have, but I’m hoping to blog the hell out of the trip.
Aprés moi, le mash-up
And as long as I'm talking about online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about television, I'd be remiss to not mention this amazing video, which I was pointed to by my friend Francesca Coppa.
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2008/01/28/pressure-a-metavid-by-the-california-crew/
It's a "meta vid," a fan-made vid about the process of making fan-made vids, back in the days when people did it with two VCRs, a tape deck, and a stopwatch. The level of commitment to the task at hand makes me exhausted just thinking about it!
Along with its celebration of the ingenuity necessary to do something like this in the days before every Mac came with iMovie, it's also a useful reminder to those of us who go on and on about "user-generated content" and social media sharing on the interwebs that we're not necessarily creating the wheel here. We may have invented the radial tire, to stretch a metaphor way too far, but we're not creating the desire to interact with content -- we're just facilitating it. The new behaviors that arise when it doesn't take three people and a weekend full of diet soda to make a three-minute video -- well, those are a whole other ball of wax.
The advantages of laziness
I was too annoyed with Virginia Heffernan's recent piece on the way new online "franchising" opportunities for TV shows may or may not help make them a hit to take the time to write up a response to it. Luckily for me, Maura had more time to spare, so I point you to her.
Pull quote:
i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general....but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be(Yes, she doesn't use proper capitalization. We've mentioned it to her, yes. We love her regardless.) Read the whole thing here.