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Joel Bradbury
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dConstruct 2010

This year 3 of the web team at View Creative were sent off to dConstruct 2010 in Brighton. The three of us (myself, Matt Wilcox and Dave Brookes) released from our den of development scurried off to find solace by the (other) sea. What follows is our account.


Posted on September 21st, 2010 , 2 years ago

Overall

The details of our journey down to Brighton deserve their own post, so they'll be saved for another day. Suffice to say - (somehow) we got there. And by there, I mean here. dConstruct 2010 itself was a spread of 9 speakers across the Friday in Brighton Dome. For those only wanting to skim, we can sum up our high and low points thusly :

The Day in Graph Form

Sorry, but this application makes use of an SVG Graphing solution that isn't supported by your browser. Try Firefox or Google Chrome.

As you can see, there was a definate double dip. As a group we seem to have had pretty similar experiences through the day. A great start, rough middle and strong ending. (note).

There were 9 speakers on the day. Of the nine (in my opinion) there were 3 that stood out head and shoulders about the rest.

The Best

  • Marty Neumeier – The Designful Company

    The first talk of the day. Not only were his slides understated, his message was clear and useful. It could be boiled down to simply :

    • You gotta design
    • Things can be good, and they can be different. Things are made in all four combination of this (Good & Different, Good & Not Different, Bad & Not Different and Bad & Different). The ones that last and change things are the Good & Different type. When making something different don’t be put off with some negative feedback – people are scared by things they don’t recognise.
    • Innovation is not a strategy – its marketing rubbish. It means nothing with out continuous work.

  • Tom Coates – Everything The Network Touches

    I wanted this talk to be bad. The title gave me the impression of a fluffy story tied back to the design industry via some weak metaphor. It wasn't. Colour me impressed with this one. Both his talk and his (incredibly well produced) slides held me mesmerised. To sum up :

    • The transformative infrastructure of today are api's. Data is connected.
    • By building the api's we can let people take things to places new
    • You can't have too many transitions in on a slide

  • Merlin Mann – Kerning, Orgasms And Those Goddamned Japanese Toothpicks

    The final talk of the day. Merlin(note) got up on stage, confident, cool with no notes, and no slides. Just from the delivery he was in a league all of his own-you can see why he gets the big money to do this. His talk was more motivational and humorous than technical, but it hit the right cord to end the day. Summing up :

    • It’s good to be nerdy. Being a nerd means you care about something
    • Most people are nerds about something. The great things happen when a group of people are nerdy about overlapping things.
    • Some people will never get the nerdyness. For some it will always be just a job.
    • Keep an eye out on what you need to be nerdy on next otherwise one day you'll be left behind when everything moves on.
    • Know when to move on, when to quit, and when to stick with it. (oh come on – that’s a hard one)

The Rest

I don't want to slag off any of the other speakers, and doubtless their individual talks had their own unique merits, however none of the others really struck a cord with me (or my colleagues). Likely due to the design focused nature of them, some we found to be just to "fluffy", forced or stretched. This tweet from the day sums it up :

“ If your talk can be summed up in a single tweet - maybe it wasn't a full talk topic #hashtagredacted. someone on twitter

Summing up the other speakers talks as short as I can :


Footnotes

  1. The fellows at Rattle Central wrote the nifty graphing app for them to mark their experiences through the day (it hooks up to twitter). They were updating the graph live through the day - much to our amusement (and sometimes disagreement). After the conference they've made the source available on github, and rather than reinvent the wheel : I've used the source code to generate this graph. (return)
  2. Not only his real name – it’s also the name of his father and grandfather. Technically we should be calling him Merlin Mann III – how good is that!? (return)
  3. Using statistically invalid methods. This really annoyed me actually. I'm all for infographics (I'm using a graph in this very post), they can be used to provide brilliant understanding of complex data, but what really grinds my gears is using statistically dubious methods to manipulate data to make prettier pictures. Scales that are invalid, inconsistent, non-congruent, or non-existing used to delineate data, that then goes on to be used to infer correlations. No sorry. There are reasons a lot of data appears dry, to remove bias and ambiguity. Freely manipulating datasets can be both dangerous and misleading - as the old saying goes : Statistics can be used to prove anything, and manipulations like those shown in this talk is why. (return)
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