dConstruct 2010

So on Wednesday I get asked if I would like to attend dConstruct at the Brighton Dome. My normal reaction to anything not predetermined within the last month gets an automatic ‘no’ response. However, I thought this would be good for me and would (if nothing else) mean 2 days out of the office.

Before I break down the event itself, I want to reiterate a few things. I’m a developer NOT a designer. As much as I would love to be both, it just ain’t gonna happen. You are talking about someone whose art teacher laughed at one of his projects to his face. Someone who by stage 5 of every single Photoshop tutorial gives up as the piece of shit on his screen looks nothing like the example. I really enjoy my job as a Software Engineer for a private investment company. We deal with the company’s portal which is only ever seen by a small number of clients. I develop in my spare time and am a keen learner of any new technologies. I don’t idolise other proficient developers/designers/gurus or wish to discuss developing down the pub with my mates.

Day 1 – Designing a Flexible Process with Simon Collison

My expectations
I am a man of logic and reason. I have never been involved with a project that has run perfectly. This should be ideal as it will show me an approach that I can adopt in the future and everything will be plain sailing.

What happened
Simon was a nice and approachable chap with bags of enthusiasm and experience. We followed the processes which he has adopted in the past with varying degrees of success. This doesn’t sound good ‘varying’. We were constantly reminded that every client is different and requires an agile approach. It doesn’t look like I’m not going to get the ‘perfect project process’ formula I was after. The team exercises were really good fun and reminded me of the initial excitement you get when starting any new project. Overall it was aimed predominantly at design agency-esq businesses. Which was probably right looking at the rest of the audience.

Relevance To Me – 3/10

Relevance To Designers – 8/10

Stuff Learnt

1. I need a new Macbook Pro (Everyone in there had a more recent model)
2. To start any project you need to consider all platforms (iPhone, iPad, Televisions)
3. I need to change my new site scripts to create media specific CSS
4. I need to use the Javascript moderniser script to upgrade all browsers to be HTML5 and CSS3 compatible

Day 2 – The Conference

Marty Neumeier

A good start. A really interesting talk regarding the history of businesses and how they’ve adapted. Also what role innovation plays in success and how it can go wrong.

Stuff Learnt

1. Your product needs to be good and different
2. Innovation is the key to success
3. Businesses need to be constantly designing and taking risks

Score – 8/10

Brendan Dawes

A humorous talk with some visually amazing slides. It was all about gathering as much inspiration as possible, considering what you have, and then reducing it to perfection. Unfortunately not relevant to anything I’m involved in but I’m sure this will be a useful approach for the designers.

Stuff Learnt

1. Sometimes you shouldn’t need to explain design decisions, they should just happen
2. Don’t go to the Piccadilly area of Manchester

Score – 7/10

David McCandless

This talk was about how information is beautiful. I did feel that this would be more for me. I wasn’t disappointed. He had some excellent examples of misleading information. And how that putting information in another context can create some compelling results.

Stuff Learnt

1. Despite having quite a dry data set, it can be made more interesting
2. You can establish patterns more clearly once the information has been organised in a more visual manner
3. The media clearly have an Outlook reminder for scaremongering

Score – 10/10

Samantha Warren

This discussion was about Typography. A subject I have little knowledge of. She was very enthusiastic and clearly loves what she does. It was a mainly male audience so I wasn’t sure about the shoe analogy really worked for the audience. Give a girl a microphone and it won’t be long before they start banging on about shoes (sorry I couldn’t resist). To be fair the analogy did work quite well.

Stuff Learnt

1. Legibility is vital in a font type
2. The character of the font should emote the context it sits in

Score – 7/10

John Gruber

He opened by showing a tweet from one of the audience which was a picture of the guy outside the Brighton Dome stating ‘Only 16 hours until the Gruber!’. He asked the guy to raise his hand, and these really excited hands came up waving frantically. I turned to my colleague ‘what a douche’. He discussed that any project is only going to be good as the controlling force behind it. The analogy he used was that of film directors, particularly Stanley Kubrick. Who took control of every single aspect of the filmmaking process.

Stuff Learnt

1. If you are in charge ensure you listen to the people with more talent than you (a key lesson I wish some previous project managers I’ve worked under would have listened to)

Score – 7/10

Hannah Donovan

Hannah started with some improv live music which was awesome. That was until the dick whose phone rang mid-way through. Hannah discussed the importance of improvisation in design teams. She mentioned the developer fort where a team of techies go to a castle and have to build something from scratch with no Internet. Sounds like a great team-building and inspirational exercise.

Stuff Learnt

1. To improv you need to be able to be awesome at the tools you use (basically I need to step up my Photoshop learning)

Score – 6/10

James Bridle

An interesting (if not depressing) look at how historically we have managed to lose so much interesting data. That we are at a frontier of information and should therefore ensure that we keep everything. A really great example was used regarding the Iraq war Wiki page. I won’t spoil it though in case he does another similar talk.

Stuff Learnt

1. erm…..always back up your data?

Score – 5/10

Tom Coates

Probably the most visually stunning presentation. Some great videos and animations. The talk did get me excited about the prospect of household items all being plugged into the Internet. I found the boundaries on ownership particularly interesting. Basically, because our stuff would be wired into the network we would know where it was via geolocation. So no matter where it was or who had it we would still know it belonged to us.

Stuff Learnt

1. The future is bright
2. Eventually, everything will be networked

Score – 8/10

Merlin Mann

A good one to end on, as definitely the most amusing of the speakers. He started by calling everyone ‘nerds’ and then went into the difference between ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’. A ‘geek’ will come around and fix your PC for you, and a ‘nerd’ will want to talk about the PC for an hour before fixing it. A ‘nerd’ is really obsessed with something.

Stuff Learnt

1. I’m a geek and not a nerd
2. Don’t stay obsessed with just one thing (he gave an example of a Photoshop expert whose clients dried up)

Score – 7/10

Conclusion

Overall, it was a great experience and I’m glad I went. I’m too logical in my approach to things to get enough out of the 2 days. I was getting fed up with the analogies by the end of it all. I’m sure for the designers this would have been perfect. I did actually speak to a couple of people who had attended previous events and they all suggested that it wasn’t as good as previous years.