Recently in events Category

I'll be going to a few interesting events in the next two months:

April 26 GoRuCo (Gotham Ruby Conference)

from the site: "A technical conference aimed at highly motivated programmers interested in all things Ruby."

April 30 Visualization Day at CUNY

This looks really interesting, with presentations by Ben Schneiderman and other HCI & Visualization notables. The conference is free, which is always a plus.

May 12 - 14 Where2.0 in Burlingame, CA

I've been wanting to go to this conference for a couple years. Always a great line-up of speakers and lots of interesting people and projects. This year's Where2.0 should be excellent - with all the LBS apps and platforms that are launching.

May 17 Smart/Models (AIGA/NY Biz Conf)

AIGA/NY has put together a great looking conf featuring a diverse group of designers and producers discussing... the biz. I'm especially looking forward to Jason Fried's talk on 37signals' approach. There has been a lot of talk about new business models in the creative space, and this looks to be a great round-up of some super intelligent people with highly innovative ideas and methods.

IxDA put on a great panel event last night on Sustainable Interactions. ITP's Tom Igoe and Core77's Allan Chochinov stole the show, pushing some difficult concepts and posing difficult questions to the rest of the panel, and the community.

Highlights in bulleted form:

• Sustainable design is stupid.
• Design is political.
• Interventions.
• Sick Building Syndrome.
• "Global warming is not trying to kill us... and that's a shame."
• Keeping track. (a la Bruce Sterling's spime
• Artifacts vs. Programmes.

Sustainability is (if not recognized directly) an issue within the field of interaction design - from physical to digital to behavioral.

I've got tons of thinking to do, and some potential projects to work out. All in all a good night.

I spent yesterday at the Javits Center for Carson's Future of Web Design conference. The space was packed with all flavors of web-people: designers, developers, managers, marketers... The color-coded conference passes were a nice touch (green for developer) - it was cool to get a feel for the practical distribution of attendees.

The conference was held in the glass-enclosed, cavernous West-side wing of Javits, a poor choice of venue. The PA system was awful, the room was incredibly noisy (what is this, a boxing match?), and sunlight coming in from the ceiling washed out the projector through-out most of the day.

But environmental complaints aside, the con was great. Josh Davis opened up with an irreverent talk about his path and process, showing some of his more recent work with algorithmic design. Ryan Singer (of 37 Signals) gave a great presentation on web application usability. One of his past FoWD presentations (on web app form design) is available here. Ryan gave a deserved shout-out to E. Tufte, which got me super excited.

UPDATE: Seems that Carson puts conference materials (audio and pdf of presentation) up under the past events section... sweet!