Splendid at dconstruct

• Monday 15 September 2008
• posted by Michael Dingle
• 0 Comments

Photo credit Matt Harris

Last Friday, a few of us from splendid were lucky enough to go down to Brighton to attend dconstruct 08, a user experience conference that attracts experts in the field from all corners fo the globe. The pouring rain was not enough to put a dampener on the day, the impressive line-up didn't disappoint!
I had been looking forward to listening to Matt Biddulf and Matt Jones speak, the hugely amusing Jeremy Keith was a welcome surprise and took home my award for most entertaining! Other speakers included Danial Burka, creative director at digg and Tantek Celik. All of the speakers were very good, some interesting areas were addressed, all that will be very informative to the way we work at Splendid.

A few of our highlights...

Aleks Krotoski, our second speaker for the conference was a gamer. You may reasonably conclude from the name and preoccupation that we were about to hear a lecture given by a male speaker. However she turned out to be an astute female academic who's plight was to unite the world of gaming with the wider network of web designers and developers. She challenged the audience to consider the seemingly endless possibilities if the two somewhat self-serving disciplines combined powers to form an uber Voltron-esque, unstoppable force of interactivity and information. So does the elusive secret to alchemy lay before us? Maybe not, but we could make some freakin cool games such as Guitar Heropedia and World of Warcraftr.

Stephen Johnson talked about the use of information design and social networking that John Snow was able to use to pinpoint the outbreak of the cholera epidemic of London in the 1870's, drawing on this example Stephen was able to demonstrate to us the shear power of the social web and data.... Though we are long time rid of cholera it was the similarity of how such tools used in the physical world ran in such a close parrallel to how we use the social web today... The rise of Geo tagging in todays culture has opened up an entire new variable in which to interact with our environment, a true merging of the physical and online worlds. This information can be used to not only unite the world globally but refine our information into the community, thus help strengthining the networks that make up the world at it's most granular state.

Jeremy Keith was the final speaker at dconstruct.
He choose to tackle the rather large topic of 'The System Of The World' Beginning with a reference to Isaac Asimov's fictional science 'Psychohistory', I was skeptical that Jeremy was going to make a speech relevant to a room full of designers of the Social Web. But I quickly regained my confidence when he explained the science of Network Theory, whether man made or naturally occurring had a pattern of Nodes and Hubs. Hubs being a major connection and nodes being the weak ties in the network. This pattern has been proven through the Six degrees of separation experiment and can be seen alive in Social networking sites such as, Twitter or linkedin. Jeremy summed up giving us the secret formula for creating successfully social networking sites, there are known knowns

All in all it was a very productive and inspiring day, and Stacca got to hug a gorilla.

Look forward to seeing you all out there in the social web

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