This weekend I had the pleasure of popping down to Brighton (which I realised I miss from my University days immensely) to attend d.Construct 2007 put on by the clever chaps at clear:left.
The day kicked of with a great talk by Jared Spool, who was a great speaker, full of energy (great for first thing in the morning). He covered, "The Dawning of the Age of Experience", focusing on how Apple and Netflix can succeed against people who seem to have better products or advantage in the market place. He also introduced me to Chicken Sexers, who can tell the sex of a chicken, but they can't explain why, in much the same way we can tell good design but can't tell someone exactly how to do it.
Peter Merholz ngs usable. It was great to hear so many speakers on the same page, and I also look forward to using the grayscale blur technique he used to check the importance of elements in design.
Next we had Denise Wilton, the founder of B3ta and George Oates the principal designer at Flickr chatting about design, communicating with users and their past. We even got to hear Denise say the C word on stage, something I will for ever expire to!
Matt Webb gave a talk on the Experience Stack, taking us through A to Z on experiences and how important they can be to implement in our work. He had quite a lot of strong views, but it was great to hear.
The last talk of the day was by Tom Cotes, who talked about the future of the web, not being in web sites of pages, but in data. Your product will be your data, such as flickr's actual photos and tags, twitter's tweets (90% of activity is through their APIs) and their new service code named FireEagle being all about geotags. It was one of those talks that really excited me, and made me want to do the same thing, but I guess we can't all have Sugar daddies like Yahoo! :p.
It was also great to meet and chat to some really interesting people, I had lunch with Cal Henderson, Ryan Carson, Niqui, and Tom Hughes-Croucher, as well as catching up with old friends like Aral and Andy.
The after party was at AboveAudio near the sea front, and the BBC put on a great platter, with Yahoo! supplying the booze. I also managed to get some more goodies form Yahoo! including a face ball! Can't wait to give that a shot in the office on Monday!
Thanks to everyone at clear:left! Good work guys!