London was my home for seven years. I can’t say I miss living there yet it never fails to entice me back.
And I’ve been beguiled by London again. This time after spending a few days at @media. I felt very privileged to be asked to speak at the event, especially as it was one of the first web conferences I ever attended back in 2004. The year Andy revealed his perineum.
My slot (ahem) fell under the ‘For Example’ category, designed to give insight in to how other people work. I chose to talk about the design of edenbee — a social network built to help individuals make positive steps towards improving their impact on the environment. I’m still pretty excited about this site and think it has enormous potential so it just seemed like a great opportunity to tell people why (and how).
Of course, I had technical issues. After taking the stage (after Tom & Claire’s fascinating and candid insight in to the BBC home page redesign), I didn’t stop to check whether the presenter display was dishing-up my accompanying notes. It wasn’t; And it was too late to stop. The adrenaline had dragged me too far.
Somehow I managed to fumble my way through the talk without any notes which, with a memory like mine, I consider at least a partial success. But I can’t help feeling frustrated that I missed some of the goodness I’d spent days preparing.
The intention was to cover some of the principles I feel are important when designing social ‘software’ (as well as give people a little insight in to the way Clearleft work with our clients). Loosely speaking, these were the merits of object-centered sociality, the limitations of reductionism within IA and also the challenges of designing for emergence. Easy really.
Well, kinda. It definitely ebbed towards the speculative as opposed to the practical but network theory just happens to be a little bit of a personal passion of mine at the moment. Hence, any opportunity to investigate it further is always going to be welcomed. I think I’ll write a separate post on the principles themselves. In fact, that’s why I started writing this. I seemed to have been side-tracked again.
Re-reading this, it all sounds a bit negative. That wasn’t the intention and actually, under the circumstances, I felt the talk was OK (I’d love to hear what other people think). Aside from the talk, I had a blast. Drunk far too much on the Thursday night and finally got to see Jeff Veen speak. Splendid stuff.
That’s it for now, save to say a big thank you to Patrick and the whole @media team for putting on another great event.