The Deck That Didn’t

Traditional Design & New TechnologyHow 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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The Deck That Didn’t

Traditional Design & New TechnologyHow 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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I Am the Answer

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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Report from SXSW

South by Southwest InteractiveSo 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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