Inside the Suitcase
Each year, Creative Suitcase shuts down the studio and heads to SXSW Interactive, the most exciting conference of the year featuring emerging technologies and showcasing the best interactive from around the world. And it’s all in our own backyard!
This year, we’ve decided to share our top picks with the hope that non-attendees can learn a little something from our five days worth of education. Follow up with us after SXSW Interactive to see how our top picks ranked. Be sure to give us a few weeks, we’ll need the recovery time.
Mackenzie, Rachel and Jennifer at SXSW Interactive 2009
Rachel’s Picks
- Battledecks 2010 / Panel
Battledecks is a fast-paced, fun, laugh riot where “contestants” have to put together a presentation on the fly as slides are randomly projected for their confusion and the delight of the audience.
- Universities in the “Free” Era / Glenn Platt & Peg Faimon
MIT, Yale, Stanford, and others put lectures online. Chris Anderson argues all university lectures should be free. From Academic Earth to TED, it’s free. So what is the value-add of a university education? What models of higher education will survive? How will universities leverage the social web to reinvent themselves?
- Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To / Andy Budd, Clearleft Ltd
So you’ve designed a great product, fixed a stack of usability problems and spent a fortune on marketing. The only problem is, people aren’t using it. In this session you will learn how to get your users to do what you want them to through good design, human psychology and a touch of mind control.
- Convergence 2010: Ten Cool Things That Could Happen This Year / Dan Shust
In this fast paced, audience driven session, our panel will guide you through an unpredictable romp covering 10 digital predictions that will affect us all in 2010. What’s next for social networks, augmented reality, mobile, digital out of home advertising, gaming and more. We’ll even leave time for questions.
- Augmented Reality – Gimmicky Trend or Market-Ready Technology? / Richard Lent, AgencyNet
As of late, marked advancements in mobile phones have rapidly catapulted Augmented Reality to the forefront. AR offers the promise of a breakthrough technology. It possesses the potential to revolutionize cities, education, entertainment, and considerably more. That said, in the early stages of any technological development there’s likely to be overeager adoption of that technology, i.e. technology for technology’s sake. In this panel we’ll explore the promise of AR ‘ where it is today, where it’s going, and how the technology could add real-world value beyond entertainment and marketing.
Jennifer’s Picks
- Interactive Infographics / Casey Caplowe, GOOD
Insights and examples from the frontier of interactive infographics. The smart, interactive presentation of data is emerging as a new form of media. Still in an early stage, this format shows major promise. We’ll explore what this is all about and where it’s going.
- Designing the First Fifteen Minutes / Rob Goodlatte, Facebook
That user who just signed up is about to bail. And a thousand other people just stopped in but didn’t even bother to register. Your product is great, but your users don’t stay long enough to find that out. The first fifteen minutes of your product are the most important. Learn from the successes, mistakes, and insights of designing new user experiences for products.
- Is WordPress Killing Web Design? / Dan Oliver, .net Magazine
Is WordPress killing web design? Leading creatives from the world of web design debate whether CMS tools have made designers lazy, and created a new set of design conventions that designers feel obliged to follow.
- Web Accessibility Gone Wild / Jared Smith, WebAIM
This session presents a wide variety of mistakes, blunders, misconceptions, over-indulgences, intricacies, and generally silly aspects of modern web accessibility. Sometimes the most serious errors are made by well-meaning developers who misunderstand the concepts or take their limited accessibility knowledge to an extreme level – thus web accessibility gone wild.
Mackenzie’s Picks
- Get Stoked on Web Typography / Samantha Warren, Phase2 Technology
Typography can make or break a design, but there are big differences between what makes jaw-dropping type offline from what makes great type online. In this presentation, Samantha will evaluate interesting offline lettering and discuss how you can translate those principles and leverage CSS3, @font-face, and new font-as-service web apps to create engaging online typographic experiences.
- Mind Control: Psychology for the Web / Ben Scofield, Viget Labs
We all know web design tricks to getting people to do what you want – make buttons bigger, use accent colors, etc. There are other strategies, however, that rely on the more proven tools of psychology; this session will explore reciprocity, scarcity, and more, and see how effective they can be.
- Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon / Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering
On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.
- What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work / Panel
What happens when people can work anywhere – home offices, coffee shops, libraries, coworking spaces? With mobile computing, telecommunications, and broadband, knowledge workers are choosing new work arrangements and self-organizing in looser, more transient arrangements. We’ll discuss these broad trends and what they mean for work, using coworking as a specific example.
- Effective Dashboard Design: Why Your Baby Is Ugly / Aaron Hursman, Hitachi Consulting
Effective dashboard design delivers on the promise of targeted, accessible, and actionable information for organizations looking to maximize their profits. Through good, bad, and very ugly examples, you will learn about practical design techniques and challenges that dashboard designers face today.
If you are interested in a particular panel, let us know and we’ll see if we can squeeze it in. And of course, if you’re attending SXSW Interactive, we’d love to hear what you’re looking forward to. Off to the technology trenches we go. When we return, nobody knows… or Wednesday.
Posted by Mackenzie
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