dConstruct 2007: raise your hopes

Quickly then, two eves and a day of experience, quickly compressed into an undifferentiated slab. In a bar on Brighton's stag night strip: an outdoor terrace packed with familiar and new faces, and a queue on the fire escape to access it. Queues will be cited the next morning. We are in town for dConstruct, a conference on user experience or experience design. Some of what I heard and thought follows and there are poor drawings. Apple and Flickr are good at design, and Microsoft and Nokia and nearly everyone else are not so good. That is law. Being an expert is good, but some things are inexplicable juju - unless you do them a lot, in which case you might become an expert. Queues are a floating signifier: either the hallmark of excellent design or the symptom of ballsed supply chain management. The history of consumer electronics starts with an experiential promise - Eastman (Kodak): "you press the button, we do the rest". This same history has technology giving way to features, and features to experience and simplicity. The history of aerial warfare starts with vision (reconnaissance) and develops towards projected force (machine guns) via a bias for problem-solving instead of solutions-provision (I have no problem with the design takeaway, but wonder if Sven Lindqvist might tell a different history that starts with projected force (bombs from balloons) and ends with panoptic reconnaissance and un-manned strikes). Steve Jobs 1984, 2007: time is even crueller to humans than it is products. Jeff Hawkins: the block of wood story which begat the Palm Pilot = good experience design. But the more interesting question: if the same man and approach was also responsible for the recent Foleo car-crash, then how to make it more likely you'll consistently have product hits? That Flickr started as a feature in a now defunct game is well-known; how does this open-ness to unintended consequences and adaptation tally against the much-cited iPod, whose claimed excellent design derives from an iron-grip on the product and service experience? The father of Waterfall secretly coveted next door's younger baby, Agile. Waterfall as haircut can look good, but as process is bad for designers and humans (well, always?). Reassuringly, user-centred design and agile development can (be made to) live together in perfect harmony. A sofa invites intimacy and anecdote - an unstated Gricean maxim of conversation? Swear-filters invite language reuse; people that write paragraphs like this are clearly utter cranberries. We don't like to offend our computers. Nor our conversations: implicature is what we do in bringing expectations about intentionality and meaning to a conversation, transaction or experience, via a mental model. Your website is not (the limit of) your product: your product reaches out into the network, and this is to be encouraged. Design for always-already reused. Nit-picking: experience/web/internetty design conferences tend to privilege performative and presentational competence, with corresponding risks. That a design proposal can legitimately be called a prototype. That dogma abounds: Apple/experience design good, Microsoft/non-experiental design bad. And that simplicity veneers a necessary complexity. But that's the nature of talks. There wasn't much new content, but the speakers performed really well. I must stop whining from the sides, raise my game and raise my hopes (that courtesy Arthur Davies, via his proud dad). The Market Diner is still a good place to go when the Meat Reaper comes calling in the middle of the night; Bill's is the lunchtime restorative. The event was really well organised by Clearleft and Brighton was in good form. At its social, playful best dConstruct felt like Reboot, and the return to Londra was an ascent back to the surface after a stag night's beer and talk. Good fun thx.

Comments

[Tom Coates]

I have absolutely no idea what you thought of the event or any of the speakers.

[rodcorp]

Well, partly I was trying to exemplify the point about performativity obscuring the complexity of design situations, but clearly I have demonstrated Matt's rather harsh self-criticism and been a bit more opaque than intended.

Ok. Mostly the content was really good, though I didn't think I learned much that was new, probably because I'm quite immersed in this stuff already and have had the pleasure of talking to you and others at the pub about this kind of stuff for ages. I hope you'll be posting your talk/slides. The content was engaging though: I wanted to branch the talks off into more info on WW2 planes (Cameron), and why do adverts not work without sound? (Matt), and when is the first button ever? (Peter), and... etc.

The speaker performances were excellent. The freewheeling, nervy Coates style works very well on stage. My top three were you, Matt and Denise/George (but I am always slightly biased towards people I already know and like).

I enjoyed it more as a social event than a learning event, and that's not a problem for me - it was very good to spend time with friends and meet new ones, and I thought Brighton was on good, welcoming form.