[SXSW2008]: Day 3

At the end of Day 2, we adjourned from the Convention center and then headed over to the park across from the facility where the drink company FUZE was offering FUZE-cocktails. The FUZE was moderately tasty, but the FUZE+Tito’s vodka was absolutely nasty.

Accordingly we headed out to the Avenue A | Razorfish party at SIX on 4th and Colorado AKA, the bar built into the Spaghetti Warehouse ( quelle bizarre ). The music was good and Lauren discovered that she likes whiskey sours ( with a Steven-added garnishing cherry ).

Our posse then travelled over to Iron Cactus on 6th where Lauren advised all present to enjoy their Acapulco plate which, true to her recommendation, is delicious. Afterwards the posse seemed interested in going out and hitting more parties, in particuar the 16-bit. For a second year in a row, Lauren and I bailed early on Saturday night, went home and rested while the out-of-town set were free to drink and wait in line as long as they cared to.

We also held reckoning with the fact that we would lose an hour. Good thing to remember.

After the jump find:

Notes from “Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World”
Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative
Conference Room Fun
Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs

Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World

James Box and Richard Rutter from ClearLeft

“…But it’s not in the functional specification”

Using wireframing at Clearleft is a far more effectiveway of describing the functionailty
Experience is very badly understood by observation: the designer has to take part. Nothing is easier than believing we understand experiences.
When desiginng a web page, we are, when we use wireframing, producing a possibility space
We should encourage exploration of this space.
We should not limit, as designers, for this is the way to madness.
After this we can move on to interactive and behavioral deseign
When we went to Ajax, we lost the feedback from the submit form, the reload: we must expplain, drag, drop, click, etc.
Wireframing will give you the framework for interactive prototyping.

How

A brand new social networking site called “elf cartel”. Wireframing to increasing levels of complexity.
They’e big on jQuery

Helpful tools

elfcartel.clearleft.com
PolyPage from new bamboo: a great tool for building multi-page page flow sites.

Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative

Panelists: Melissa Hagemann (Program Mgr, Open Society Institute), Richard Baraniuk (Professor, Rice University), Erik Moller (Deputy Dir, Wikimedia Foundation), SJ Klein

This was a great example of what a panel should be, clear questions guided and moderated by a talented and aware moderator, audiences that took their time to explore ideas, but who never doddered off into inanity, etc. Excellent, thank you all for such fine work.

Book implementation ruins the natural learning behavior of humans

Baraniuk: Frustruated by standard textbooks in signal processing for engineering
Disconnecting ideas to create linear stream
Disconnects people, very hard to pull together a community of people to bring different ideas and viewpoints on what it means to do engineering
Processes by which materials are developed is absolutely glacial
As such, they went to knowledge sharing model, wiki based.

Multi-Lingual translation is difficult

Book delivery mechanism

Documentation along the 37Signals idea af “good enough”: does the curious kid in the village need authoritative, extensive documentation? No, give them the basis and let them request more: book/truck-mobile model
This has great ways to change communities: economics, husbandry, farm engineering

Steven thinks that we need to find a tool that allows more easy translation, high applicability of Caudel’s 3 phase of creativity

MathML is key to being able to express complex expressions, it’s still just text on both ways

We skipped Zuckerberg’s Keynote. I heard it was boring. We had lunch at the Spaghetti Warehouse

And here’s my think about facebook. I’m not on it, but people invite me, and Facebook knows my email address and n-many people have invited me. I don’t like this. What’s up with that?
Instead we met and had a lengthy discussion with Stephanie form San Jose about everything from JavaScript to life in the South Bay

##Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs

Peter Kirn cdm: Create Digital Media
Joy Mountford VP Design Innovation, joymountford.com

New tools are making the data in our digital world more accessible and more expressive – even if number crunching isn’t usually your thing. With open APIs and open tools that let even non-programmers learn to code, there are new opportunities to make our Web-powered lives more meaningful. S. Joy Mountford, a pioneer in interface design and a veteran of the original QuickTime team, will show a series of visualizations that her team at Yahoo has produced. These show flight segments turned into dynamic parabolic trails of light, Yahoo Answers feeds showing key words as animated word clouds, the extent of mail traffic reach and topical search query bursts around the world. These displays are the start of an interactive, truly personal Web 3.0 environment. Some people described these applications as ‘useful’ art, but Joy thinks they may be a start towards a different type of interface. Ready to try making these kinds of tools yourself? Peter Kirn, an educator, composer, and media artist, will give a hands-on overview of how you can begin to manipulate this data, even if you’re not a programmer. Using the free, open source tool Processing, you can translate Web data into three-dimensional animations or even real-time music.

Beautiful animations made by Yahoo for modeling Air traffic
Kirn shows off a MIDI listener of spam, basically sonically you can track the amount and density of spam arrival. They tried this at Yahoo! but due to Yahoo being pissy and the layoffs, they no longer have that data

Tools

processing.org

[code lang=“c”] size(800,600) background(0) smooth(); ellipse(width/2, height/2, 100, 100) [/code]

Explanations are built into the tool

Sxsw2008