Monologue

dConstructive Criticism

Photo by Jiri Mocicka

On Friday, along with around 1,500 fellow designers and developers, I traveled down to Brighton’s Dome to go to the dConstruct conference, a web design event curated by the web agency, Clearleft. As with previous years, it was a very interesting day filled with talks from heavyweight industry names such as Don Norman, Frank Chimero and Craig Mod.

Don Norman, the godfather of user-centred design, kicked off the talks with a slideless talk about emotional design and designing for systems. He talked about the divergence between the computer and handheld devices, and how user interfaces are now changing to fit with this new model with less feedback, discoverability and consistency in devices, applications and websites. There is a great sense of lifelong devotion and experience that came through when Don spoke which raised common sense advice to essential guidance and made it a brilliant keynote. It set a very high bar for the following talks.

Kelly Goto followed Don’s talk on a similar theme by talking about connected experiences and Kansei Engineering, a method for translating words, emotions and behaviour into methods for designing products. There was a definite practical element to Kelly’s talk, for example, where she spoke about her contextual interviews (or “deep hanging out” as she called it) and the qualitative data that she works with on a daily basis. These first talks worked very together as a pair and shared common ground from different working perspectives.

The tag-team and the right turn

Following a short coffee break, there were the next two talks that didn’t feel to have the same resonance as the earlier talks. Bryan and Stephanie Rieger did a husband-and-wife tag-team talk about the responsibility of designers, generational gaps and the quickening of technological penetration. For me, the talk covered too much ground without much depth and the format of swapping presenters every ten minutes didn’t work at all and if anything, it disrupted the flow. If only they’d applied their “flexible and simple” advice to their talk.

Don Norman by Petra Gregorová

Next was Craig Mod to talk about the future of books. What started off as an exciting premise about his role in taming unfiltered data, producing quiet data and corralling data took a quick right turn into an unending made-up story about how the first book was discovered. Whilst the story was well written, it offered no useful information and the sudden change in narrative in the talk felt like an experimental talk going badly wrong. The reception on Twitter seemed overwhelmingly negative at the time, my initial response included the phrase “self indulgent shit”, which looking back seems hyperbolic as I’d rather see someone take a massive risk like that and fail than some slightly rewritten talk peddled out conference after conference. So, Craig, while I think the talk failed, I do think you have massive balls for doing what you did. Kudos.

Curation and digitisation

After a bite of scampi and chips at the local pub, designer and blogger Frank Chimero opened the afternoons talks with a talk about curation as authorship and new ways of organising data by serendipity. I seem to recall Frank saying that he was going to write about this as a blog post initially but decided to turn it into the talk. Signs of that came across as the material felt a little stretched to fill the time, and there wasn’t a huge amount of depth, but he was saved by coming across as a charming, self-deprecating speaker.

Dan Hon spoke about “storytelling, play and code” by talking about “platforms where it’s okay to mess around on”. Dan gave a lot of examples, including some of his own work, to show examples of playfulness on the web. I would have personally preferred a lesser amount of examples and a more in-depth case study approach, especially on the Old Spice guy campaign by Wieden+Kennedy, his employers. The last third of talk was an interesting diversion into the lost nature of media due to digitisation, which I would have liked to have heard more about.

Riots, romanticism and reality

Next up was Kars Alfrink who did a great talk on the societal divides, last months UK riots and gaming. It was very refreshing to hear a talk that wasn’t navel-gazing and did reference events outside the creative industry. Although I didn’t agree with everything that Kars talked about, and whether gaming can really make any kind of impact on society’s divides is another matter, but it’s picking these kind of talks that has made dConstruct so well regarded and a must-visit.

Kars Alfrink by Petra Gregorová

I felt a bit sorry for Matthew Sheret after the talk by Kars. Matthew is a very competent and pleasant speaker, but after a talk about rioting and social issues, one about pocket watches, children’s TV shows and the legacy of objects just looks hopelessly romantic and twee. While it’s lovely that he carries around a pocket watch that’s been handed down through the family, most people want less things in their trousers, not more. Nice screwdriver though.

Kevin Slavin rounded the day off with a strong, in-depth rant about augmented reality. While I thought the talk was very entertaining and his examples were thoughtful, and on occasion brilliant, I couldn’t help but feel that no-one would actually be too upset with his arguments, as augmented reality isn’t a widely adopted tool and if anything still a novelty that a lot of people don’t care one bit about. He did mention the uncanny valley which is a huge conference cliché (along with Apple and Henry T Ford quotes, which a couple of other presenters fell into) which means he gets a point knocked off.

Overall, I thought the day was very entertaining but I could get the nagging feeling that I wasn’t as excited or inspired as I had been in some of the previous years of dConstruct, and while I felt 10% more intelligent on the train back from London, I didn’t feel like rushing back to explore new areas of knowledge learnt. It felt like it missed like a big inspirational talk like Merlin Mann’s in the previous year or Jeremy Keith’s closing talk in 2008. That said, one of the great things that I’d admire about dConstruct is that the focus is not on working techniques but more broad patterns in the industry, and I will always congratulate the organisers for being willing to take it towards a higher level of conversation, both abstractly and quality-wise, than similar conferences. It’s still a delight to visit each year, and I’d recommend anyone to go. I’m already ready to buy next year’s tickets.

Any comments? @-me on Twitter.