The South by User Experience
An Interactive view from a first-time visitor.
South by Southwest (abbreviated as SXSW) is a Music, Film and Interactive festival held each year in Austin, Texas. The festival spans over 10 days, welcoming more than 130,000 people across a plethora of events.
History
What started off as a music festival in the late 80's has since grown to magnitudes of unimaginable scale (and I'm not exaggerating). Looking at it from a local context, it’s like combining all of the Europe’s largest music, film, interaction design, media art, content creation, internet activism, startup culture, business, health and comedy festivals into a single event — and all this in less than 10 days.
Interactive
The Interactive track, which brought me to Austin, consists of sessions, keynotes, workshops, panels, book readings, book signings, awards, meetups and mentor sessions, to name a few.
Keep in mind this is by no means a comprehensive list of SXSW’s best, but rather a subjective take on the people, projects and products that stuck in my head. (I wasn't able to see everything I wanted, obviously, and am not accustomed to the festival’s religion — The Queuing).
Fuck No #design
The session that opened SXSW for me, was actually one of the best ones. “How to Say ‘Fuck No’ & Still Have Them Love You” presented by Ocupop Creative Director Michael Nieling walked us through some of their projects, including the most famous one — the HTML5 logo design for W3C. He comes from the skating culture and has an extremely laid back personality and presentation style. He focused a lot on giving the clients what they need, not what they want — emphasising the designer’s ability to communicate *why* design works.
Smart Landscapes #design #art
Called by the NYT a hippie with a business plan, Daan Roosegaarde spoke about his Smart Landscapes of the Future going through some of his projects, including: Dune, Intimacy 2.0, Lotus Dome (now on display at Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, NL), Sustainable Dance Floor and the Smart Highway (his most known project, interactive and sustainable roads).
Be Awesome #reddit #netculture
Having been on the road for the last few months (speaking at more than 77 universities), Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian preaches innovation in the age of Internet. His talk, “Be Awesome Without Their Permission” focuses on his experiences with companies, startups and students building great projects facilitated by the existence of the www. He has a great deal of positive showmanship in his talk but ends the session quite emotionally. “Lives left: 0”. We give our best in video games when there are 0 lives left. He reminds us that in life there are also no extra lives. We only have one chance of doing what we love, with the people we love.
A dash of East London #interactive
Hackney house is East London’s creativity hub including global leaders, start-up enterprises and everything in between, looking to show, share and discuss ideas.
They showcased a lot of stuff I use, so just to mention a few — #technologywillsaveus #sugru #bergcloud and #bareconductive. Loved it!
Next UX #prototyping
Jason Cranford Teague promoted prototyping with HTML, CSS and JS. He also mentioned a few tools he thinks are doing a great job — Proty (which he helped to build), Jetstrap (built on Bootstrap), Protoshare (a great collaborative tool with a complex UI) and Adobe Edge (Reflow). He also mentions a new player in the prototype game — Macaw. Originally a Kickstarter project, the software will be out by the end of the month.
Misspelling #advertising
You’re not you when you’re hungry.
A great little campaign for Snickers that builds on hungry people misspelling words when performing a search. They ran an ad campaign on the misspellings of the most commonly searched terms, and greeted users with “Grab yourself a Snikkers”.
Learning to lead #teamwork #ux
Things I’ve Learned from Leading (UX Designers) covered some interesting techniques on how to manage and motivate your UX team. Russ Unger, the former UX Director of Happy Cog, started of with a great resource Discussing Design but focused on a system he invented called Critique Buddies. It connects team members and enables them to discuss projects and give constructive feedback. There are critique leaders and the team leader has weekly one-on-one meetings with them.
UX beyond screen #ux #products
Cliff Kuang, the articles editor at WIRED, presented some examples of interaction in the post screen world. He focused on a few products: The Cone speaker by Aether, which aggregates all of your streaming services and plays music based on your listening history patterns; Automatic, which allows you to improve your driving skills; Tinder, a mobile application helping singles connect.
The real revelation for me, was a piece of software called Kimono. When I saw it I thought to myself — ‘this is something I’ve thought about for ages’. The software allows you to intelligently scrape data from any website, create an API which then fetches the data according to a preset schedule and even enables you to create a quick mobile application featuring the newly structured data.
Pattern Libraries #ux #design
Designing pattern libraries was a popular session. Although the speakers didn't get much into the gritty details (as I wished they would), they did provide the attendees with some good examples and resources. They worked on the (now outdated) eBay’s UI patterns, but also showed some great resources, mainly the Mailchimp Library, Patternry, pea.rs and Herokuapp.
The Art of Learning #life-hack #learning
Tim Ferriss, the popular lifehacker and best selling author of the 4 hour book series spoke about his latest endeavour — the TV show “The Tim Ferriss Experiment”. In each show, he tries to acquire a skill in less than a week, learning from the world’s best. He gave a few book recommendations — “The Art of Learning”, “Not fade away”, “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman” and “The pleasure of finding things out”. The talk was obviously about learning throughout life, what the EU would call — the Lifelong Learning Programme.
From writing to building #sf #rant
Having watched Bruce Sterling speak a few times already, at #shareconference in Belgrade, Serbia and #republika in Rijeka, Croatia, it was interesting to see him in a slightly different context. He focused on people who didn't, but should have attended SXSW. First he spoke about Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the Paris mayoral candidate who is going to lose. He then mentioned his Italian twin Gianroberto Casaleggio, the web figure turned politician.
Bruce concluded his rant by telling the audience about his foreseeable future — shifting the focus from writing to prototyping. Prototyping the future, the technologies, the possibilities. Spending the next year creating and materialising his convictions. Next year, at SXSW, he hopes to present his process. Science fiction turned reality.
Conclusion
Although there was much talk about the processes and tools we use, I would like to end this report on the lines of Alexis, Bruce and Tim. We only have one life and one chance to learn and create, regardless of other people’s opinions or permissions.
Work hard and never stop creating.
As is the case with planning and life hacking SXSW, one only gets better with practice. See you next year.
I also saw Neil deGrasse Tyson speak about space and exploration, missed Elon Musk, failed to queue in time for Tilda Swinton, danced to the amazing St. Vincent, spent some time with local friends from Croatia’s Shoutem and Slovenia’s VIA, met a few designers from Dropbox and Facebook, tried out some of the MIT Media Lab projects in person, attended the Dribbble meetup, ate some oversized BBQ ribs and Tarantino’s chili, learned about OK maps, drank a wasabi margarita at the German Haus, attended stand-up comedy, drove a bicycle to Josephine House and took some photos.
This entry is the 3rd part of my New Year’s resolution project.
Read all of the entries here.
