About a month ago I wrote about the progress we’re making planning the conference UX Week 2008. I feel a little sheepish plugging Adaptive Path events on my blog (you’re not here to be sold at!) but it really is a big part of what I’m doing and thinking… And if that’s not what this blog is for, I don’t know what is!
What I’m trying to do here is help put together the premiere user experience conference bar none. One of the first things we realized is that in order to do that, we need a mix of inspiration and information. So the mornings are single-track main stage talks that should appeal to all, and in the afternoons of days 1 and 2, we offer 3 hour skills-building workshops. We’ve recently added workshop on sketching for interaction design, and Indi’s mental models.
We also have a responsibility to point the way forward for the user experience discipline. One piece of feedback we’ve consistently gotten at AP is that folks look to us to know where things are headed. That’s why the last day is devoted to the Future of User Experience, and is coming together as a day on what I (half-jokingly) call Our Glorious Ubiquitous Future. We’ve got everything from designing for mobile, robots, gesture, and large-scale multi-touch. We’ll talk about the future of the browser, and explore the realm of alternate reality games. Much of this might seem far out now, but it’s clear that in 3-5 years, we will need to be ready to design for these contexts. Will we be ready?
And, of course, a conference on experience design can’t be *all* work (but don’t tell your boss!). Day 3 begins with a series of sessions on immersive experience design, which is then followed by our Exploratorium field trip. This isn’t meant to be down time so much as an opportunity to shift gears, to consider experience design from multiple perspectives.
Lastly, I’m really excited about how Day 2 is shaping up. Starting with a keynote by the CEO of Zipcar, we then move into a day devoted to media and service design. We take on media and politics with sessions from Audrey Chen, senior information architect of TheDailyShow.com (she’ll share what it took to put their complete archives online), and Dave Wolf from Cynergy, a company that developed a brilliant conceptual prototype of designing for democracy in the 21st century called Ben (after Ben Franklin). We then follow that up with explorations on service design, and wrap up the day with a discussion of how Milkshake Media developed the LIVESTRONG brand experience.
I’m honestly giddy about what we’re getting together for this event. It’s going to be inspiring, informative, fun, and doubtless exhausting. I hope to see you there!
Register with promotional code FOPM and receive 15% off the registration price. That price goes up after April 30, so register now and save!
Looking forward to it!
rgds,
Dan & Jo