Tag Archive for sxsw

Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

April 23, 2008 All, Design and Technology, Personal One comment

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

  1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
  2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
  3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
  4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

THEME 4: Embrace randomness
‘Go with the flow’ was definitely the best piece of advice I got for sxsw. It’s good to plan, but feel free to break that plan for a chance to go somewhere random with a random group of people. I’ve been very interested in the balance of structured efficiency versus embracing randomness and the effect that has on both creativity and your ability to be effective.

I was moving towards structured efficiency until I read an amazing book on creativity in the workplace called “Orbiting The Giant Hairball” which takes a very opposite approach. Like many things, I think the answer is in the middle, and I think Tim Ferriss nails it on his head in 4 Hour Workweek by showing how carefully placed structure can free you up so that you have much more time to live more randomly (if that’s what you want). Structure if used right can be complementary to randomness

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There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes

April 8, 2008 All, Design and Technology, Personal No comments

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

  1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
  2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
  3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
  4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

THEME 3: There is more to gain by giving it all away

Not exactly a theme of this year’s sxsw in particular, but of the whole blogger rooted culture that has grown sxsw to where it is now. The whole experience was almost like living inside Web 2.0. It’s a weird analogy, but the best way I can think to explain it. The culture of the people there is one where everyone has adopted the idea of broadcasting thoughts to the world. It’s a glimpse of where the internet is moving our whole society towards, where information is no longer locked up and protected, but rather everyone comes to the realization that there’s actually more to gain by giving it all away.

That realization has provided motivation for me to get back into blogging and feeling free to broadcast my thoughts to anyone who wants to listen. What good is an idea in a walled garden if no one ever sees the garden? And for me, it’s more than spreading ideas. Honestly, not that many people will be reading my ideas here on randomdestiny.com. But I gain more by the act of fully developing an idea and communicating it to the world. There’s more to gain in that act than having the biggest lockbox of ideas in the world.

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Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes

April 3, 2008 All, Design and Technology, Personal, User experience design One comment

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

  1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
  2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
  3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
  4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

THEME 2: Help people kick ass so they can reach their dreams. That’s how you create happiness. Make that your business and your life.

Happiness
The products and services we build have a wide array of goals. We think of our business as being the category that our product falls into. My company, Revolution Health, is obviously in the business of health content, tools, and community, right? Well, most businesses are reducible to the business of happiness. Jane McGonigal predicted that quality of life will become the ultimate measure of a product. “Happiness is the new capital.”

Kicking Ass
Similarly, Kathy Sierra asked “How do you help your users kick ass?” I found that to be a really powerful question. How much time do we spend at work on work that does not help an end user kick ass? If that’s the majority of the time, either the product is on the wrong track or you’re doing the wrong work.

New Measurements
We need to reframe and re-evaluate what we and our products actually accomplish in our end users. Metrics should not be around page views and sales but around how effective we’ve allowed someone to be or how many interruptions we’ve eliminated from someone’s life.
Jane provided four common elements that provide true happiness across the board. Take these as starting points for your new ‘happiness startup’.

1) Satisfying work to do
2) The experience of being good at something
3) Spending time with people you like
4) Chance to be part of something bigger

Dreams
I want to leave you with Randy Pauch’s life changing talk on making people’s dreams come true. Creating happiness is something bigger than the products and services we work on. It’s how we should live our lives.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5700431505846055184

Update: Looks like Randy Pauch has written a book based on his amazing lecture.

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Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes

March 28, 2008 All, Design and Technology, User experience design No comments

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

  1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
  2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
  3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
  4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

After transcribing my 15 pages of handwritten notes and starting to think through some of it, I’ll be posting a few big takeaways and themes I pulled from South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) this year. Here’s the first:

THEME 1: Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life
A feeling that I came away with after sxsw was that I had just experienced the super-connected world we envision the future to be. Everyone had macs and iphones, icons of great user centered design, and was completely interconnected in a wireless digital sea. But this high tech interconnectedness did not draw people away from face to face interaction (which we often blame new technology for doing). Instead, it actually enhanced it and sped it up. Twitter allowed people to move in groups and figure out what others were doing, yelp helped people sort out what places to go to, social networks like facebook instantly made long term connections for followup and learning more about the person you just met.
On a more global scale, web 2.0 tools are helping with the spreading of ideas and knowledge and helping people take cooperative action with that knowledge.

Spreading ideas
The Africa 2.0 session showed how Africa’s rising entertainment center, known as Nollywood, is currently relying on the internet to get content out and get Africa’s message out to the world (rather than Hollywood’s interpretation of it). Zuckerberg talked about how students from the Middle East that go to western universities are staying in better contact with friends from home and creating idea bridges between the two worlds.

Cooperation
On top of the spreading of ideas was the idea of cooperative action on those ideas. People have worked together to create an index of knowledge known as Wikipedia that is far larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Henry Jenkins spoke about how Harry Potter social networks in the UK are starting to make political actions as the members grow together. Facebook groups allow people to channel joint interests or movements together

Overlaying real life
In the last few years I think the new web 2.0 technology and jargon have been the focus. But it seems like the discussion is starting to revolve a lot more on how those technologies are creating real world changes and disruptions. A last example of this was Jane McGonigal’s talk on how games can be used to better design real life. Mashups on the internet between two technologies has become a daily occurance, but this talk sheds light on the new ultimate mashup, the mashing up of technology and the world. Online gaming and social networks have drawn users from the real world to the virtual world, but new ways and ideas are emerging to push some of that back into real life.

Second Life.png First Life.png

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Back from SXSW, favorite quotes

March 12, 2008 All, Design and Technology, Personal, User experience design 3 comments

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I’m back from SXSW Interactive today and am feeling quite delusional from the lack of sleep and 5 days of hearing great ideas and meeting amazing people. I think the best part of the conference was just being around such interesting and passionate people in similar fields. As a fairly new user experience designer, it was great to finally meet other similar people around the country and hear their stories.

I’ve got tons of notes to sift through this week but will get to that tomorrow, as well as get started on making arrangements for next year. =) For now, here’s a few of my favorite quotes from this week:

“Ebola style virality” (from battledecks)
“Fuck yea, it scales!” (also from battledecks, probably the best slide I’ve ever seen, see below)
“Steve Jobs is like the pope of design”
and
“The liver is evil, it must be punished” (indeed)

Planning your visit to SXSW

March 3, 2008 All, Design and Technology, Music, Personal, User experience design No comments

This Friday will be my first time at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW). I’ve been to a couple other conferences but this is by far the largest. It looks like it’s going to be a blast in Austin. Insane amounts of great music, warm weather, parties, bbq, and getting to meet some of the top designers and digital creatives. It looks like it will be a bit of a sensory overload, but I’ve found a few links that may help you plan / get psyched for this event.

Schedule your panels AND parties
Sched.org is probably the most helpful resource you’ll find for planning your SXSW. It comes set up with every panel and party for the whole week. You mouse over to read the description and select the checkmark if you want to put it on your calendar. At the end you can access your list at a custom URL or download it all to an ical folder. This is a really awesome site.

Where to eat
A great thread listing places to eat over at Chowhound. One place that keeps popping up is Casino El Camino. I’ll definitely have to stop by for a burger.

Get a map
A great easy to read map of downtown Austin can be found at downtownaustin.org (pdf download). Great for locating things, though I hear 6th street is kind of the epicenter of everything, so you might not really need a map as long as you can get there.

Listen to music
Get into the frenzy by listening to free SXSW music through the SXSW Player. The bands you hear on there will probably be walking around while you’re there.

Other Austin stuff
Time to explore the city will probably be a little scarce with all the stuff going on downtown, but a here’s a pretty good travel guide for Austin.

And of course, don’t forget to set up a Twitter account and hook it up to your phone.

SXSW Interactive Logo
Austin Logo