At last I have published my review of dConstruct in Brighton (been in draft for a while now)

If you are expecting insight into the talks this is purely opinion but there are some trails to follow or of course the dConstruct podcasts will be available

My Review

Sep 12, 2007 by

Shaun Hare

event

dConstruct 2007

★★★★★ Well another year another clearleft hosted dConstruct web conference.

This year centered around user experience design.
I felt this was a topic that I was really interested in but maybe something for the larger developer. How wrong I was !

The speaker line up was great and extremely though provoking (see notes below), the conference facilities were much better than last year (although the foyer/congregation area often felt a bit cramped).
The schwag was good, and the sponsers thought of some good promotional ideas.
I particularly liked the Nixon McInnes your status is… T-shirt and the Flickr books (didn’t get one thought dooh!!) .

The speakers were

Jarad Spool of UIE

who gave a good presentation very enthused, funny at times and on topic. A good start to the day, although I am a little unsure about his theory on the art of chicken sexing (having done it) and knowing how hard feather sexing is. For those interested there are a number of methods of sexing a day old chick (probability does come into it, but that is the be all and end all) but good use of external material to demonstrate the point. And he did magic and everything wow!!.

Peter Merholz of of Adaptive Path

For me this started of very similar to Jesse James Garrett’s talk at @media Europe 2007 but it did move on a bit.

Leisa Reichelt of disambiguity.com

Waterfall bad washing machine good was a really good talk. As I am trying to start implementing a methodologies based approach it gave me some ideas on what is best practice and how that can be implemented.

Cameron Moll of Authentic Boredom

Gave a great insight into turning good design into great design. Though provoking stuff like machine efficiency vs User efficiency and simple tips like stripping away the gloss to basic typography in black and white to see how the heirachy works fantastic. First time I had heard him talk.

George Oates and Denise Wilton (Flickr and Moo, B3ta etc etc..

They sat on the sofa and had a chat, somewhat scripting but refreshing, I learnt about the history of flickr and this site called B3ta which I never knew about but enjoyed ever since. They inspired some ideas I could, should put together using the flickr API . I enjoyed it.

Matt Webb of Shulze & Webb

Got to admit I was a bit confused about this and I know Matt has beat himself up about it, but the more I reflect I think the presence was justified and the blog post provides source material that more than makes up for it. Matt needs to take some tips from Other speaking experiences especially the point about live demos but using a wii remote - geekily great.

Tom Coates of Plastic Bag and of course Yahoo but I guess you know that url

FANTASTIC- Really made me think I have been thinking along the right lines. with my dallies into machine tags,bluetooth, location data, feeds, api’s, microformats etc I just see the web as a big data source ready for mining. Can’t wait to see fire eagle . I am also sure one of my clients will be happy when I unveil the results of more thoughts on their data distribution .

So all round a great day .. I am bookmarking/watching/marking next year on the calendar already

Well done Clearleft

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