For folks still recovering in whole or part from the exhaustion of the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, just think about those fellow attendees who went on to this year’s Dorkstock — I mean, this year’s Information Architecture Summit, wrapping up right now in Vancouver. I kid, I kid. Because if you follow the blog-borne reports coming out of the conference, you’ll see some really interesting stuff going on: tagging, tagging and more tagging, as one attendee told me, and lots of fascinating discussions on the organization, management and manipulation of information. Plus some flat out, wild and crazy fun. Look out.

Seriously, I’ve been following the events through excellent summary posts from Luke Wroblewski, among other bloggers, and feeling like I’m getting way more reporting value from the generally more analytical mindsets of the information architecture audience than I saw come out of South by Southwest. A lot of this ad hoc reporting is so good it’s almost like I’m there, but I’m not. It all sounds geekily absorbing, and it makes me think that maybe next year I’ll go.

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My first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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Among the many things I wish I knew a lot more about is how my home network works. I mean, I have a pretty decent if admittedly fundamental handle on how TCP/IP and DHCP work together, but heaven help me if I ever try to get them to behave reliably for anything other than the most basic of configurations.

I use a heck of a lot of what I think is network address translation or “port forwarding,” directing traffic from outside my LAN to a specific computer within it — a feature I find incredibly handy for SSH tunnels, light HTTP serving and AFP access. All of which frequently amount to exercises in frustration. I can never get my computers to reliably acquire the same IP address on repeated reboots and re-connections to the network. I’ve tried fiddling with a countless combination of settings, including manually acquiring IP addresses and address reservation, with little luck.

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How many more weblog posts can I squeeze out of my trip to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival? This is the last one, I think: it wraps up the panel discussion in which I took part on the first day of the conference, “Traditional Design & New Technology.” As promised, I’m making the slides available for download. However, be forewarned that this deck is unlikely to be of much good to anyone. It was prepared as just a skeletal framework for the discussion, so there’s not a lot of content in the slides themselves.

In preparing for the session, Mark Boulton, Toni Greaves, Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria and I all labored through several rounds of a much more detailed and extensive deck of slides that we used to help us get our bearings with the subject matter. After several rounds, we ultimately decided that first framework was too constricting, that it would too forcefully guide the discussion and suppress the spontaneity of the group. So we took a deep breath and threw it all out, keeping only a choice few slides as touch-points for the conversation.

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Almost forgot about this until I was cleaning out my travel bag this morning: on my way to throwing out the mostly superfluous contents of my 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival goodies bag, I ran into Jeff Croft and Wilson Miner in the lobby of the Hampton Inn. They pointed out that I might want to hang on to the “SXSW Activity Book,” a “cheeky” collection of nerd-friendly, rainy day-style games included amongst the ad flyers and industry magazines stuffed inside the bag. The back of the four-page booklet featured a trivia question, the answer to which is actually my name. I got a kick out of that.

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So I really blew it with the live blogging from the epicenter of the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival thing, meaning I barely did it at all. I blame it on preparatory frenzy, post-panel appearance exhaustion, and general laziness — I couldn’t bring myself to pick up a pen almost the entire time I was there. In practice, I’ve never really understood those who show up at conferences and find within them the fortitude to record nearly every single point made by speakers and lecturers on paper; I much prefer to just absorb the onslaught of knowledge. In that spirit, I mostly just kept my ass in my seat, listened, and hung out, and had a great time. But, for the record, here is a spotty list of the conference as it went for me.

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Liz Danzico, Mark Boulton, Toni Greaves, Jason Santa Maria and I have just finished our panel, “Traditional Design and New Technology” here at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Frankly, I’m relieved; we spent a lot of time preparing for it, including an endless stream of email exchanges, many outline drafts, international conference calls, and a big, team-building breakfast here in Austin at 7:30a this morning, so there was a lot of build-up. In the end, I think the panel went pretty well — basically, anything that went well is owing to Liz Danzico’s masterful job of moderating the discussion. We had a pretty lively debate and several challenging questions from the audience; the festival management has recorded it, apparently, and will be posting a podcast sometime soon, which I’ll link to when I find it. Anyway, I enjoyed the whole experience quite a lot. If you were in the audience today, first, thanks for attending, and second, I’d be keen to know what you thought. Don’t be shy, I can take it.

Wow, I’m a little stunned by the general lack of reaction to Monday’s post about the long decline in the quality of design style manuals. Maybe I was under some hallucination that this is an issue that many (if not most) designers will encounter many times in their careers, and that those designers would generally find the tortured motivations of style manuals to be a worrying state of affairs. Even so, it was one of my favorite pieces so far; I took out more time to write it than I do most pieces, and I think it represents a novel perspective on what it is exactly that designers deliver to clients.

At any rate, I’m undeterred in my pursuit of this subject. Never let it be said that I’m guided solely by comment count! As it happens, the second part of my rant on this subject is considerably less ambitious — it works off of the premise that the climate of client-designer expectations is one that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. For the time being, designers are stuck with these particular circumstances when it comes to style manuals: a high bar for comprehensiveness and a low threshold for time and for fees devoted to documentation — resulting in a lot of labor producing little value.

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I don’t often write ‘round up-style’ write weblog posts, but I’ve got a crazy week this week, so I’m going to make an exception. Most of the craziness is the fault of my coming trip to Austin, TX to attend this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival; I’m just running around trying to take care of everything before I go. For those of you attending, please see me come talk out of my butt on Saturday morning at 10:00a, when I’ll be participating in a panel called “Traditional Design & New Technology.” It’s in an early time slot, but I promise you, I’ll be glad you made it there. And you might learn something!

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It strikes me that there are lots of problems with style manuals, those definitive pieces of documentation that accompany a completed design solution: Clients want them to be a comprehensive set of full-contigency bylaws governing the usage of the designs they’ve paid for, but they frequently balk at the necessary time and expense that’s necessary to produce anything so complete. Designers want to deliver a sound set of pliable guidelines that will continue to do justice to their work, but even with a capacious budget, they can’t possibly provide enough all-encompassing logic to stand in for design talent absent from a client’s payroll.

These conflicting circumstances usually result in style manuals full of what I like to call ‘rote specifications’; thick booklets packed with granular details on sizes, measurements, colors and rudimentary “do’s and don’ts” for the usage of a design solution. Unfortunately, these are usually constructed to appearimpressive above all else, relying on the sheer quantity of detail to justify to clients both the full expense of the design process and to evince the apparent sustainability of the completed design.

At best, they’re superficial documents with limited usefulness; like blueprints for television homes, they’re interesting in their intricacy, but of limited practical value in real life. I’ve seen many style manuals that, while voluminous, were useful for only a handful of factual attributes: PANTONE colors, typeface specifications, and grid measurements, for instance, but little else. One could have easily been reduced these manuals to a handful of pages and they would have proven just as useful.

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