The afternoon sessions of dConstruct also contained a lot of interesting stuff which I won’t cover in complete detail, but I’ll touch on some stuff (read Jeremy’s observations).

George Oates and Denise Wilten

The main designer of Flickr and of Moo had a conversation about community management and design and the both sites. Not much notable stuff for anybody familiar with community management methods and the history of Flickr but interesting and pleasant enough to hear from the people directly involved nevertheless.

Matt Webb — The Experience Stack

Matt Webb had a widely disparate presentation with a lot of notes small and large about experience design. It is my solid conviction that Webb can present pretty much anything and make it interesting because he is not only a really good presenter but also incredibly knowledgeable and erudite. A pleasure to watch and pretty impossible to recount.

The most important thing I take away from Matt Webb’s talks is that I —and the rest of us— should read more books instead of the short attention span stuff we are involved with online.

His slides and more material are up and he himself is not completely happy with how it worked out. Somebody told me that Webb’s talk lacked coherence and an overarching story and I tried to convince them that that was the exact point of the alphabet format.

Final thoughts

A lot of stuff discussed on dConstruct was very interesting and familiar. It is good to meet like minded people and rehear the importance of the methodologies and the rationale behind them so that you too are able to explain, advocate and implement them in your own practice.

The concept of experience design may be a bit vague. Anybody who makes anything is in a way an experience designer but we don’t call them that. What do experience designers add to this? Is it possible to say stuff about experience design without referring to the iPod?

I think the idea does have merit and it is so hard to graps because it encompasses almost everything —it is radically multidisciplinary— and involves a greater than the sum of its parts outcome. Anybody knows it immediately when they get a great experience, but it is not very clear how to create one.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 10:43 and is filed under dConstruct, dConstruct07, event, event.