twopointouch

So, last week, we organised a conference called i-design 08 and a portfolio clinic session of the same name as part of the London Design Festival.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the content, but I don’t want to talk about that in this post, However, my reports from the event will be published over the next couple of weeks and so extensively linked and republished that you will be physically ill at my gauche-itude. You will feel as though you were there, and are still there.

I wanted to talk about my feelings as the person ultimately responsible for the event budget. We’re a modest sort of organisation with modest sort of budgets, so basically, we’re talking about around £10K - the LDF paid for most of the venue hire costs.

Even though that’s a tiny amount of money in event terms, marketing terms, advertising terms, I have to say that my main feeling until the event was over was one of utter horror. There’s been a sick tightness at the bottom of my stomach for four months.

• Would people book?
• Would they turn up even if they’d booked?
• Would the speakers say anything remotely sensible, let-alone groundbreaking?
• Would people complain about the catering/seating/internet/badging arrangements?

But, of course, it all went fine. We’re professional people. We try the best we can and so it all turns out right. At the end of the day I was positively jubilant. Some people said that it was the best conference they’d been to for ages. But I don’t listen to them.

Is that feeling of horror just something you get used to after a while? And if you don’t, how do you manage those feelings? Would it be a better asset to be totally blase about events? I can see that as an asset in some of my colleagues, who just get on with it while I go off to the toilet to be sick again (not really).

Photo from the BBC’s coverage of the day.

We’re running a Portfolio Clinic as part of the i-design conference on September 17. The idea is for budding interactive designers to come along with a laptop and show their wares the the cream of London’s creative agencies. They’ll tell you where you’re going right and where you’re going wrong - or how you might make your work more saleable, at any rate. They’re giving their time for free, because they’re hoping to find new talent among the people who turn up. So far we’re expecting creative directors from:

o AIG www.aiglondon.com

o Conchango www.conchango.com

o Digit www.digitlondon.com

o Digital Outlook www.digital-outlook.com

o Glue www.gluelondon.com

o Imagination www.imagination.com

o Kin www.kin-design.com

o Lateral www.lateral.net

o Moving Brands www.movingbrands.com

o Poke www.pokelondon.com

o Precendent www.precedent.co.uk

o Smoothe www.smoothe.com

o TribalDDB www.ddblondon.com/tribalddb

o Up the Resolution www.uptheresolution.co.uk

Should be an excellent session. It’s part of the conference package (book now), but you can get into this bit for free. More details here.

I’m delighted to announce idesign 08, what we modestly like to call ‘the UK’s leading conference for interactive design.’ The conference will take place at the South Bank Centre, London on September 17 as part of the London Design Festival.

I’d be even more delighted if you were to: (a) book for the event; and (b) help us get the word out.

On getting the word out - grab this badge, stick it on your site and link to www.idesign-london.com - there is a pint in it for you*. I can do you a white version or different sizes if you like. Or - look - here’s the PSD File to *cough* mash-up your own!

The following might be loosely interpreted as marketing talk. You are free to go straight down to the blue button.

Early Bird Rates: Admission to the conference, the exhibition and portfolio clinic is currently available for just £60 (£50 for concessions). This price will rise in August, so don’t delay, book today. drinkapintamilkaday.

idesign 08 will showcase the best and most innovative work in the field and feature keynote speakers at the top of the profession. The programme is designed to be inspirational, informative and challenging. You will be a better interactive designer by the end of the day - or better able to understand the designers who work with you! You’ll also know about new opportunities and your pathway through this new digital world.

This conference is for you if:

• you want to be inspired with new ideas about web, 3D, interactive and mobile.
• you are a design professional who needs to keep abreast of the latest thinking and see best practice.
• you’re passionate about the future of the digital world.
• you want to share ideas and opportunities with like-minded creatives.

Speakers (more to come!):

· Brendan Dawes, Creative Director - MagneticNorth

· Ann Longley, Digital Strategy Director - Media Edge: CIA

· Adrian Shaughnessy, Consultant Creative Director - This is Real Art

· Colin Jenkinson, Design Director - Cogapp

· Ximo Peris, Creative Director - Smoothe

· Simon Waterfall, Creative Director of Poke and president of D&AD - Poke

· Michael Nutley, Editor-in-Chief, NMA - http://www.nma.co.uk

· More information about the speakers and the programme at http://www.idesign-london.com

The event will also host portfolio clinics from London’s top 10 digital agencies, and the digital design day exhibition and seminars.

Booking site:

Notes:

If you wish to make a group booking (five people or more) or believe you might be eligible for a press pass, email michelle.hardiman@nmk.co.uk for more information. Or just leave a comment, and I’ll get back to you.

Concessions are available for students, unemployed, freelancers, not-for-profit companies and charities. And other riff-raff, I expect.

*or simply great karma, for non-pint-drinkers.

If this is here, then my upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress and a new theme won’t have been a complete disaster. If it isn’t here, then let’s keep it to ourselves, eh?

The newest thing is native support for tags, as well as categories. Everything is miscellaneous, of course (check this fantastic video  of a presentation by David Weinberger on this theme (57 minutes) if you haven’t caught onto this idea yet), so tags ought to supply a folksonomy for posts on the site, as well as the taxonomy it’s always had. Windows Live Writer apparently supports this natively now through the Keywords field at the bottom of the editing window. Except it isn’t quite right, since I am the only person who can add or edit those tags. I wonder if there are any plug-ins out there yet that allow this to be carried to the next level - to let users add their own tags to articles in a way that sits inside the system rather than through widgets and third parties like del.icio.us?

On the theme: it’s back to Cutline again, for the time being, since it’s one of the few that supply native support for tags. Yes, it’s easy to hack existing themes to provide that, but I really can’t be bothered.

Things to do:

Haven’t quite finished with the masthead - there’s still a couple of generic pics in there and I think the title of the site needs to be a few points bigger.

Add tags to previous posts. I used to use the very popular plug-in Ultimate Tag Warrior. It used too much CPU ultimately whenever this site became moderately popular, and I had to drop it. Nonetheless, a lot of the posts on this blog have already been tagged. Some sort of import for that would be more than welcome.

Database may or may not be screwed. Oops. (Proper IT person: "Of course you backed up your database before performing such a drastic operation?"; Me: "Uh… yeah… sure I did."). Updating old posts to add tags results in a MySQL error, though the edits are carried out nonetheless. Have to google it and see where I may have cocked things up.

This is what it looks like, for people in the know:

WordPress database error: [Table 'twopoint_wrdp1.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = 'publish' GROUP BY cat_ID

23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies. An old post (well, Nov 13th), but one well worth reading when you’re designing a site. Here’s point number one as a taster:

Text attracts attention before graphics. Contrary to what you might think, the first thing users look at on a website isn’t the images. Most casual users will be coming to your site looking for information, not images, so make sure your website is designed so that the most important parts of your text are what is most prominent.

Virtual Hosting Blog » Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

And I’m not just linking to this because the site’s authors made the mistake of including this blog in their Top 100 List of Social Media and Social Networking Blogs.

If you’re in town on Tuesday (18/09/07), then do please book to come to iDesign. It’s a one-day conference about interactive design, organised by my colleagues at dynamo-london, in association with NMK (my outfit) and AIG. Tickets are nearly all gone, but there are probably still enough left for the readership of this blog. Hi mum!

Just a quick reminder of the line-up, with some short notes on the speakers, in case our luminaries aren’t luminous enough for you already:

Tickets cost £55 (hey, that’s pretty cheap by anyone’s standards) and are available from the South Bank Centre site. Hope to see you there.

Edited heavily to add links, mostly.

Joshua Porter has published slides from a presentation reminding us that there is over a hundred years of research into behavioural psychology waiting to inform the way in which social web applications are designed. Through the links, I found Peter Kollock’s 1996 essay, Design Principles for Online Communities, which collects together some key points from work done over the previous twelve years. The first two of the studies it covers predate the web, and at the time the latest appeared, 1994, there wasn’t a lot of the web as we’d recognise it today - no Google, for one thing.

Nonetheless, it’s quite astonishing the degree to which these principles might help with what sometimes seem like very modern issues: wikipedia vandalism and blog bullying come to mind easily. That’s quite a trite point, of course, but the simple idea that co-operation requires sustained interaction with stable, visible identities (1984) sometimes seems to be beyond the architects of some of the biggest products in Web 2.0. The sort of scandals revealed by the launch of the recent Wikiscanner utility, for example, wouldn’t have been a possibility if these ideas were built into the design of the system.

Here are the key points. It might be fun to measure your favourite rising star in the Web 2.0 world against these criteria:

• Axelrod’s (1984) requirements for the possibility of cooperation:
  • Arrange that individuals will meet each other again
  • They must be able to recognize each other
  • They must have information about how the other has behaved until now

• Ostrom’s (1990) design principles of successful communities:
  • Group boundaries are clearly defined
  • Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions
  • Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules
  • The right of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities
  • A system for monitoring members’ behavior exists; this monitoring is undertaken by the community members themselves
  • A graduated system of sanctions is used
  • Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms

• Godwin’s (1994) principles for making virtual communities work:
  • Use software that promotes good discussion
  • Don’t impose a length limitation on postings
  • Front-load your system with talkative, diverse people
  • Let the users resolve their own disputes
  • Provide institutional memory
  • Promote continuity
  • Be host to a particular interest group
  • Provide places for children
  • Confront the users with a crisis

Subscribe to the Sense Worldwide newsletter for genuinely interesting internet news that you haven’t already read a million times on blogs that think reading Techmeme is the same thing as finding inspiration. I used to think, in this age of RSS and at-your-convenience distribution, that the email newsletter was dead. It isn’t. There are a couple of other really good e-bulletins that I’ll provide pointers to once I’ve … ermm… unearthed them from my heaving inbox.

From this week’s bulletin, the Pulse Laser blog, and more specifically, this post about the enjoyment of packaging. Admittedly, it was first posted back in November, but I missed it then and was grateful for the pointer.

The fetishism of packaging is really interesting. I’m a Marlboro Lights smoker, and the introduction of their new silver pack, with its side-opening mechanism is fascinating. It opens as though it was a Zippo lighter. Now cigarette manufacturers can’t advertise in the UK, I’m guessing that their options for marketing are looking rather limited. The idea of getting a new brand on to the market must seem pretty daunting. Gimmicky packaging like Marlboro’s and the Benson and Hedges ’silver slide’ mechanism seem like a clever way to generate word of mouth about their products. I know it works - the first time everyone saw me opening the new Marlboro packet, they said, “ooh - that’s fancy.”*

You may be looking at your screen thinking, “Ian, it’s a packet, and you are a sad case,” and that may be true. However, as the marketing gurus continually point out, we’re not buying things any more, we’re buying experiences. Compare the experience of opening a Dell laptop box and the experience of opening up an iBook. Why do Apple spend all that extra money? Because they aren’t selling a computer, they’re selling a supposedly superior way of ‘living a digital life’. If they can make taking possession of your new machine feel like Christmas, then kudos to them. They are spending extra money on making me, their new user feel better, even though I’ve already bought their product. Apple want a partnership with me; Dell just wanted to flog me a laptop.

The newsletter also points to this wonderful blog - unboxing.com - which is entirely about the pleasures of packaging.**

*Yes, I know cigarettes are dirty and horrible and dangerous and expensive.

**And yes, I know fancy packaging is environmentally unfriendly and ultimately pointless and that I used to talk about commodity fetishism as a cardinal sin when I was younger and more principled.