We had an opportunity to go to the DIBI (Design it Build it) Conference in Newcastle in April organised by Codeworks. DIBI 2010 was a two track conference with one track dedicated to design and the other development and it turned out to be a really enjoyable and enlightening day.
The Host
On their site Codeworks identify themselves as a centre for digital innovation, and they appear to be one of centres of excellence in the region. Since 2003 they been growing in a number of different areas, they’ve started trade associations, placement programmes and several events of which DIBI is one, although we don’t live in the Northeast. I’m quite interested in learning how an organisation like them evolves and works to deliver on goverment initiatives for industry. I remember the last time I spoke into someone from this company was Prof. gilbert cockton at a Microsoft Research event in 2005, if my memory serves me correctly he did a 3 min infoblast for his presentation and encouraged me to visit them, that was a long time ago though and since then I’ve heard Herb Kim present TED X Manchester, which was another event RITH attended. Gavin Elliot did a fantastic job of running the design side, presenting and asking questions.
The Event
The line up of speakers on the design track was very impressive, and the setting was superb, no to mention the nice staff at the Sage.
Although I’d heard of quite a few of the speakers, I was particularly interested in meeting Tim Van Damme, Sometimes it good to put a voice to the carefully crafted pixels. I had no idea I’d run into Chris Spooner as well and most of the local designers and development guys were really friendly and approachable.
Adii Pienaar Crunchbase Profile
Say what you will about the segment he’s operating in (themes) , this guy has balls presenting in a room full of designers and I think he handled the questions really well. He spoke about how every aspect of his business is designed, right down to his name. He had some gorgeous slides, and there was some delicious consistency in the way he said he hadn’t designed them himself. I had a good chuckle when he said that.
Sarah Parmenter
Seeing Sarah go through her workflow in designing iPhone apps was really nice to see. Especially her detailed app flow, which is something we do as well. With all the confidentiality terms, its sometimes hard to get a closer look at pieces of work in development and the process that led to them being made, and in this case Sarah did a really great job of offering that insight.
Tim Van Damme
I love his work and his work ethic of working your ass off and making things look incredibly good!
This guy is an absolute pixel genius who does fist pumps whenever he removes 100 pixels from a design. His talk was so incredibly passionate and full of vision, with manifesto like energy, basically calling designers to break the mould and challenge mediocrity, with a careful pause for thought on what the design tools of the future might be like by comparing what we use now to primitive tools (The bone in A Space Odyssey)
Incredibly theory rich talk, from Simon Collison. Top points for mentioning Christian Le borg’s visual grammar which we have in the office. Its nice to see a designer, designing things with such a dedicated approach and understanding of theory. Theres a lot of superficiality and naïve design babble in this industry and Simon was a clear testament against it all.
We redesign things, and the temptation is always there to start from scratch. but what do you do when something is already giving results and you want to optimise it. It was really good to see applied user testing presented as a detailed a case study and hear about the best practices in doing so. The thing that stood out was how persistent users are despite the clunkiness of ecommerce experiences. We were recently buying a present for one of our friends, and I was utterly appalled at the shopping experience that one of the sites presented, so much so that I was tempted to go elsewhere, apparently according to what Dan was saying most users persist at the task until its done, despite the clunkiness.
Let me mention two things that the man in the sharp suit said which resonated with me.
- Designing for the most capable browsers and pushing technical boundaries should be a driving force in our work
- I was reminded again that designing for the lowest common denominator is one of the worst things we could be doing.
The Sancho Plan closed the event and I’m pretty sure I want to go to DIBI again next year.
Petite url: http://rith.co.uk/fqjqw
