Hey everyone I just wanted to invite people to participate in the TORONTO CATASTROPHE (design) SLAM "a day of dialogue over Toronto disaster scenarios".
This event is part of Digifest 2008 ( http://www.dx.org/digifest/ )
ONTARIO SCIENCE CENTRE -Sunday, March 30, 2008
THE TORONTO CATASTROPHE SLAM "a day of dialogue over Toronto disaster
scenarios".
Be part of this unique day of dialogue and challenge for academics, students, professionals, not-for-profit and the public. The purpose of this event is to exchange knowledge and ideas with others on the topic of catastrophe, disaster and emergency. This is a rare multidisciplinary engagement that will include informative keynotes and participatory challenges that will be designed to examine scenarios including a Natural Disaster scenario, a Health Epidemic and a Security Crisis. For more info on the Catastrophe Slam check out http://digifest2008.wik.is/
WHAT IS A DESIGN SLAM
A Design Slam is where we have a fictitious group of stakeholders present a problem to groups "consultants". We will form these groups randomly at the beginning of the event. These ingenious and innovative people will have a set block of time to design and pitch their idea to the stakeholders.
We have 30 slots that we are opening up for free public registration to the Catastrophe Slam but I encourage you to check out the entire 3 day Digifest event for $25.
You can register for digifest here: http://www.dx.org/digifest/register.html
While I really appreciate the desire to enhance the designer’s toolkit with controls that can be used as building blocks in the foundations of our applications I am concerned about potential to abuse. I truly believe that Microsoft is doing it’s best to embrace designers but I wonder if developers will inadvertently take this work and corrupt or commoditize the value that good design can bring to a project.
I am a little fearful of carousel controls and Deep Zoom (Sea Dragon) everywhere when the effort to do these types of interfaces becomes effectively none. They say God is in the details so while I applaud the desire to have people do less grunt work and focus on adding value to a project. Do not lose sight of the details . Developers you can’t always do it all, consult a designer, Business Owners your developers can’t always do it all, consult a designer.
Good design is not a feature it is a pillar of the success of your product.
Oh and here is a picture by Betsy of Bryce singing on the RockBand Stage, sober to boot.
I have been working on a mindMap that illustrates the kinds of activities, research and technologies that me and my co-workers do in our everyday practice. While I realize that this is somewhat specific to our company and the work that we do I thought it would be interesting to get feedback on it. I hope to refine this as we develop the practice.
Everyone should go check out the capabilities section of the idea couture site. I personally find it very inspiring but I know it would not work for us. Mind you we are a stogy software development house not a hip design shop :-)
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I’m enjoying Mix this year and the keynote was pretty cool. The conversations are there but there are still some good old fashion whiz Bang demos. Silverlight looks amazing. I really hope it takes off.
At lunch today I talked Ian Muir and he felt the same way. All the marketer are like “videos with skateboards, AW YAH” and all the developers in the room are groaning.
DISCLAIMER: This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. The information that I present will often be created by others and they would be the owners of that content, I do not presume any ownership of their content.
