É o primeiro de vários eventos que o SAPO irá organizar fora de ‘casa’ e abertos a todos os que desejem participar, que é o mesmo que dizer que a entrada é gratuita.
O primeiro SAPO Unplugged é já na próxima semana em na Reitoria da Universidade de Aveiro e o tema escolhido foi Usabilidade, um tema que consideramos ser hoje um dos mais importantes para o nosso trabalho enquanto portal web.
Por isso convido todos os interessados a juntarem-se a nós, e aproveito para vos deixar algumas referências sobre os respectivos oradores:
Offffirst day was so amazingly intense the the second day gone thru lightning fast and as I start writing this notes I’m already about half of the third day, so I just decided to sum all my notes from this two last days in one post.
KarlssonWilker - this guys made me have one of the best laughable moments of OFFF, their trip to Serbia and the whole plot around them was and is movie material! Jesus, how wrong can you be when you first overlook a project. One of the things I liked about them, was the way they started and addressed the ‘bumps’ on the road, the shortness of ‘resources’ and how they creatively resolved each of them. You can see their work here, and one of you’ll probably recognize immediately is the MTV orbs:
Andy Cameron (interviewed by Régine Debatty) - Andy’s work precedes him, but his mostly known this days by being the creative director of Fabrica (the Benetton research center in Treviso, Italy). One of the things that got my attention was his idea about collaborative art works and getting people to participate in their works, his idea of augmented spaces and the overall idea of how playfulness is THE primary form of interaction really make a lot of sense and I confess he just made it to may Playful Interactions presentation that I’ve been working on. Régine blogged about her interview here, so if you’d like to know a bit more I strongly recommend it’s reading.
Although I actually enjoyed the Interaction Design Panel I honestly think they got the name of panel wrong, should have been Interactive Design Panel and not Interaction Design, since there’s a great gap between Interaction and Interactive
Some of the works presented were really interesting, Andreas Muller (Nanika) presentation, he talked and show several amazing ideas for dynamic and interactive visualizations where people can take part of the images and have some control over what they’re watching. I found particularly interesting his work’s for Nokia with the moving (ephemera) messages. One other project I liked in his presentation was his idea of teaching a computer how to draw, Andreas coded a program - Hana that allows the computer to draw flowers without any bitmap whatsoever, and the final result is something of amazing!
Rob Chiu, Chris Hewitt and Ben Boysen - WOW!!!! ok… and then again WOW.. this guys rock! They work separately from each-other and they still manage to have some amazing work, It’s hard to actually write about any of their projects I think I really enjoyed them all, but there’s one that really got me, Rob’s work about the refugees - ‘Black Day to Freedom‘:
One interesting thing I found out later going thru their blogs was they were the ones who did the amazing video for the SF FOWA that everyone was amazed by.
Fallon, responsible for the amazing Sony Bravia’s color campaign videos had a very interesting presentation (pity they didn’t cite the sources of some of their slides - Steven Johnson and his TV shows networks theory for example), nevertheless I really liked their presentation and in particular their 4 rules to get GOOD ideas:
Find the right problems to solve
Make Space
Find the skills you might not have
Keep the Faith
The all presentation seem to evolve around ideas which makes sense since their business is all about getting good ideas or they wouldn’t be a creative agency right? Some interesting aspects of this presentation was how some of the best ad campaigns they had reallllly relied on the web as a distribution channel achieving strength as never before.
MiniVegas was one of the most amazing projects I’ve seen in all OFFF, they’ve managed to create a system that allows for real time video interaction. They showcased several examples of it’s use, namely the S4C interlude messages, where the pitch of the speaker voice actually changed the video you’d see, so each message actually randomize a video scene making it different every-time! Nothing like having a look at it (click to see some demos):
Offf is off by the time I’m finishing up this post, but I’m really looking forward for next year edition, it certainly wasn’t low on expectations and it it managed to surprised me with all the amazing ideas and works that I got from it, to all the organizers a bit THANK YOU!
I’ve just got home, but my mind is still wondering on all the visual input it has been submitted today! It’s as if a part of my brain has just been upgraded to the speedy lane! It’s still wondering on fluid animations, particle simulations, typography, colors, dynamics…
Offf’s first day was impressive! And the funniest thing is that it all started the minute I parked my car! I was running late and didn’t even bothered to check the exact street of it, so I ended up arriving without a clue of the Offf’s venue place (exact) location! Once I got out from the parking lot and onto the street something remarkable happened, I noticed how some people in the plaza were moving towards a particularly tiny street, I decided to follow and this was the image that stayed with me until now of the very beginning… can quite explain but all people moving towards a same destination, impelled by a common desire (reach Offf as soon as possible got imprinted in my mind as one of those compelling moments.
The first few minutes/hour didn’t go as expected, the sound was poorly distributed and at some point I could only feel that I was in class with Charlie Brown. Thankfully the day was just about to start and I certainly wasn’t ready for what would come next.
I’ll just take a few seconds to write a bit about some of my personal highlights of the day:
TYPEFACES PANEL - got a lesson about typography like I’ve hopping to get for a long, looooong time…
ERIC NATZKE - Eric’s presentation was the one who got me into the mood, I had barely arrived, got a few things from the typographic panel, and then BOOM… Eric started showing of his particles generators, than ribbons and waves and although my belly was begging for food my eyes and mind were drowning video compositions of generative art, amazing. I recorded two small videos from his presentation ending video:
Simply mind blowing!
JOSHUA DAVIS - a true case where the rumour doesn’t reach any close to the man. Joshua is an amazing and engaging speaker and even after all the nice things I had heard about him and his work, I confess I had a great time during is presentation and after an hour I was definitly begging for more! Joshua work is inspiring and some of the gold rules with which he ended his presentation are still echoing on the back of my mind.
The Mercadillo idea is amazing and I’m even surprised how I hadn’t seen it in other kind-of/alike events. Managed to spend some money and regret for not having more with me at the time. Spoted a Buddha Machine’s and a great 1976 t-shirt that I hope to get tomorrow…
The starting point “We used to call them users” set the motto for a great presentation. The title was a clear reference to the ‘OLD’ web, where people’s role weren’t anything more than mere spectators of the whole business. The web we live in today if far different, since much of it is actually based in Action, web2.0 brought in personalization and customization, users stood up and embraced the role of actors! Which for companies actually meant more work or at least they couldn’t just count on users eating all the PR jargon they meant them to take. Users got a voice!
According to Bruno, users can be more or less involved along time with a company or product, but they tend to follow a specific path of engagement:
witnessing
sharing
conversation
collaboration
action
At first, we’re all mere spectators, witnessing whatever happens around us. Nothing new here, or by that matters with the any of the following states. The only difference is that with the advent of web, the power and time by which this all process happens is amazingly fast, meaning I can progress from the point where I’ve witnessed something to the point where I decide to engage some action about it in a fraction of the time it used to happen.
For companies this brought in the need for them to engage users in all this different mind settings. And basically you have two options about it: retreat or engage the conversation. Bruno and the portuguese bloggers that joint the conversation seem to have an agreement that if you’re 100% into it, it’s probably better not to jump into blogging at all, since the side effects of poor communication (blogging in this case) can be as worst as traditional communication.
On the other side, for the companies that actually engage the blogging as a communication process, there are clear advantages. Users will always talk about a company products, so if a company does provide their customers with a place for open discussion about their products, they somehow control or at least have an active part in that discussion. Anyone barely involved in PR knows how much better that is
Plus, and this was something I haven’t heard during the general conversation, people bond with brands, it’s a natural happening, the difference this days to me is that people don’t expect to be mass-branded any more, so the closer they feel to a brand, the more personal the experience gets… and experience is everything in there days.
I personally thing that this theme is amazingly important in the Portuguese context, and I’m not complaining as usual to the fact that Portuguese companies tend to be 2/3 years far behind the rest of Europe/World! But by seeing so many companies PR’s in that room and see them taking part of the discussion and acknowledging the importance of the blogs in their communication as a way to increase their users satisfaction and have closer control how their brands are interpreted by their customers it’s already clear the importance blogs will have in the future or traditional public relations.
One last note, for the Unicer team who organized this all event, congratulations to them all, I’m truly inspired and admired with the concept.
Singularity is an amazing idea by Aral Balkan, which many of us know from his open-source project SWX and other amazing works as Flash developer.
The idea is all about active networking and knowledge sharing, but one of Aral intentions will probably really make the difference! Aral wants to engage local groups to setup little singularities happening everywhere around the world at the same time and in parallel with the online event!
I’m so sold out to the idea that I’ve joined the speakers ranks and will be giving a presentation on my Community Design Patterns project:
As a side note, just two very quick and interesting aspects of Singularity: 1) it will represent a screenshot of the Web in 2008 and 2) by saving so many flights it will be a very green conference right?
Aqui no blog o silêncio tem sido rei! Enfim, muito por causa do trabalho confesso, em particular pelo facto de desde o mês passado ser o novo responsável no SAPO pela Qualidade e Usabilidade. Não é tarefa fácil e outros houve que já tiveram esta pasta e em boa verdade desbravaram muito do caminho que agora me é proposto percorrer. Sem perder muito tempo em explicações e em termos gerais passa por integrar um processo de qualidade no actual processo de desenvolvimento que já existe dentro do SAPO! Só posso dizer que é de facto uma tarefa monstruosa e não é de longe ‘pêra doce’ como se costuma dizer, mas nada como um desafio, certo?
A propósito deste tema, ontem a convite da Associação de Profissionais de Usabilidade (APPU) fiz uma apresentação no Seminário de Usabilidade 2008.
A apresentação, até por ser um projecto tão recente foi um bocadinho dar a conhecer aquilo em que estamos a trabalhar em termos de usabilidade (já que era de usabilidade que ali estávamos a tratar) e nesse sentido dei o meu testemunho sobre o processo de integração da usabilidade enquanto factor de peso na qualidade e como é que conseguimos integra-la na já complicada ‘equação’ que é o processo de desenvolvimento de software. Isto é tudo novidade, pelo que não vale a pena falar em sucessos garantidos ou regras de ouro ou sequer dizer que no SAPO somos especialistas nestas matérias, não o somos! Mas estamos a trabalhar a sério para o sermos! Por isso a apresentação acaba por ser um resumo e uma apresentação de algumas das ideias que estamos a usar e uma prova que o simples facto de termos iniciado este caminho já é um sinal de mudança no sentido certo! Digo eu, claro!
Sem mais demoras, aqui estão os slides. No final deste post encontram alguns links para os materiais que eu refiro durante a apresentação:
This blog as been more than quite and the major reason (besides the usual tons of things I get myself involved with) is the project I’m writing about in this post: since last month I’m responsible for Quality and Usability at SAPO, an Herculean task to re-think and integrate Quality on the already existing software development process. Big indeed, but then again, there’s nothing like a challenge, right?
This post is about just this, and taking the fact that yesterday following an invitation from APPU I gave a presentation during the 2008 Usability Seminar on the subject, in particular what we’re trying to achieve with the overall quality process. Being an Usability centered event I focused mainly on the usability part of the overall quality process and gave a testimony on how we’re integrating the U factor on the quality process. Much of this work is just starting so I won’t pretend I’m an expert or that we at SAPO have loads of experience is this matters… as many people would agree there’s a lot of work ahead and even more that desperately need a change. My feeling about it, is that by starting this process and posing the questions we’re already changing in the right direction
So without further due, here’s the slides. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find some links for the materials I mention on the slides:
It’s true, SHiFT is back!. We almost died on our first ’round’ in 2006 but we decided to do it again and today we just gave the first (public) step towards it: we’ve unleashed the dates - set your calendars:
A lot of work, discussion and planning will take place in the coming months, so EVERYONE is invited to help and participate in the discussion! We haven’t closed down the speakers list and there will be space for the community to vote on who gets to go up on stage later on, but if you know an exciting speaker or you’re just wishing your secret hero to be there, don’t be shy and let us know!
Pop us an email over at speakers@shift.pt.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the official Blog, or subscribe SHiFT’sTwitter / jaiku feeds.
ATENTION: This is an urgent call to all Freelancers or freelancers wannabe’s out-there!
Stephanie Booth is putting up quite a conference completely oriented towards self employed people. Going Solo will take place in the beautiful city of Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, on 16th May 2008, registration has just open, so don’t wait longer… early-early bird prices close on the 17th of Februrary.
Although the program isn’t yet closed (it’s better this way trust me!) Stephanie has already posted a long list of topics that Going Solo webpage will address:
Skills: skills that all freelancers need: GTD, marketing, networking, contracts and cash flow
Following my first day short notes and even now that I should probably be sleeping before my early flight back do Lisbon, I couldn’t resist and put up some more of my rought-notes about LIFT’s second dayt.
Disclaimer 1: I just wanted to confess that I was quite tired which implied that my attention span was, hum… somehow less than ideal. I didn’t even listened to all the day presentation’s somehow Skype back-channel seemed so cosy!
Disclaimer 2: as all personal notes, this ones also reflect my own thoughts about some of the conference presentations and as such they shouldn’t be taken literally!
Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers
I had met them the night before as we seated on the same table during fondue but it was not until they’re presentation that I actually knew they were LIFT speakers! I really enjoyed our conversation during those cheesy hours, so it came to no surprise that they’re presentation on the Hedonistic Company felt so compelling! Holm and Philipp created the socialistic-capitalist joint-venture Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur in Berlin as a way to showcase and experiment on new forms of cooperation and collaborative in work environments. They’re Hedonistic Company is grounded by 7 simple, yet powerful, principles:
Rule 1: 7 NO’s
no office
no employees
no fixed costs
no pitches
no exclusivity
no working hours
no bullshit
Radical, hein?
Rule 2: Work-Work balance
This is a particular interesting rule, since according to this guys we MUST engage client work and self-induced projects with equal energy and effort, knowing that some of the client’s work isn’t always as dear as we wish you shouldn’t really let them take over our energy and attention, meaning that you should somehow balance your client work your other personal projects in an attempt to not let any of them fall short or be corrupted by the other
Rule 3: Instant Gratification - ¥€$
Money is an incentive, but they suggest a less traditional approach to it’s ‘use’, reuse the money of each project immediately, use it as a direct incentive to your collaborators right after the project finishes, pay all the bills there’s to be paid and reserve 10% for the ’cause’. They’ve actually made a very clever suggestion regarding those pesky yearly bonus: no bonus at the very end of the year! The end of the year might fall short if you consider employee motivation, when the bonus arrives he might had just left
Rule 4: Pluralism of Methods
engage your company in trying different approaches to everyday work, experiment, tweak and perfect each ‘modo operandus’. Use collaborative platforms, online and offline and find technical solutions for social barriers/problems within the ‘company’. Real Life Meetings are so last century, take your teams to the next level online meetings!
Rule 5: live up to your intellectual obsessions
I sort of lost my self at this point… but in the end I suspect what they meant was allow and support everyone’s intellectual obsessions. We all have them! They’re a BIG part of our inner self and assure our inner balance. By supporting your teams intellectual needs, you’re in reality helping raising the integration and acceptance levels of people within and towards the ‘company’. More Motivation => More Results
Rule 6: Responsibilities without Hierarchies
There’s no eternally assigned boss, each project needs to have someone in charge, just make sure that everyone gets a seat every so often. Foster off-site team reunions!
Rule 7: The Power of Procrastination
Don’t exhaust yourself in trying to be too efficient for it sometimes has the downside effecting of reduce productivity for all the effort that goes into CONTROL! As all things in nature, so will good ideas adapt and catch on even if you neglect them for a while.
Your best advertising is NO advertising. Good products, services and ideas market themselves. No PR! Let you and your team be the best possible PR’s
Henriette Weber
Henriette is a long time friend and still my favorite Danish girl we sort of share a peculiar set of special Brainwaves (more on this on a next post) as I joked about, so I’m pretty aware of her ideas on chaos… anyway I’m drifting… Henriette managed to be selected to present a short open-stage at LIFT and as expected I thought her message was not only compelling but also impossible not to overlook again and again at this current times.
Enjoy the Chaos was the motto for the conversation, according to her we’re all part of a silent revolution, the fact is that in a consumer world, much of us (including myself) don’t fully grasp the dimension that consume has in our lives… even if it clearly isn’t making us more happy! So in the end we’re witnesses of a new reality pop here an there about where people opt-out for less as a way of becoming not only more free, but essentially more happy.
According to Henriette the same is happing in business and in particular in marketing these days and it’s of vital importance to them. The normal business approach, of business is business doesn’t seem to apply all the time anymore. But why are the companies so afraid of introducing more chaos on their processes? Aren’t they leaving out the creative revolutionaries at door?
People want relationships, a one on one relationship, whether it’s with a brand, a product or a service, so new forms of dialog are needed, the internet has surrounded us all and we simply cannot afford to leave that proximity goes by untouched.
Robin Hunicke
Robin Hunicke is both an academic and practitioner and works for Electonic Arts, it’s hard not to listen when a girl talks passionate about gaming, right? But besides being currently working on BOOM BLOX for the Nintendo Wii and having worked on My Sims, Robin pretty much took us on a journey about the Playfulness of Games and Apps.
When designing a game, a program, a Webapp, some sort of social networking platform or pretty much anything this days, it’s impossible (or should be) not looking at the importance of the Real vs Non-Real. How many games/apps have made us feel like we’re loved, important or helped us show our love with someone? Well in fact, not many according to Robin Hunicke, but at least some, being the top example of one that does: Facebook!
Facebook is a GAME! Facebook is:
Chatty:
Social:
Automatic:
Selective:
Quick:
Repetitive: adding friends, chatting with them, adding friends, chatting with them, …
Rewarding: what are the rewards? more friends? gifts? hugs? stars?
for all the above reasons, Robin stated and I could only agree that Facebook is indeed one if not the biggest social online game ever! Facebook works on rewards: lets me decide how to use it, which rewards I might wanna collect, by using it I’m bringing it more and more closer to reflecting my which makes the game in a sense pretty much about ME, like a one-on-one game and not about US or the rest of the crowd. People keep jumping into the Facebook bandwidth because of personal interest not in the interest of others. Facebook makes us feel like:
“I am a person living a fun life and i am LOVED” - Robin Hunicke
One peculiarity in Facebook and on all the so called social apps, or social networks is that is about the people that use it and not about who designs or owns the platform, pretty much reminding me my own quote on the workshop whether when me, you or someone is developing an online community, we should focus on facilitating the conversation and not controlling it in any possible way! The conversation should flow within the community freely at any given stage, for not guaranteeing it would be to sentence it to a time-delayed killing.
People are intrinsically and last time I read biologically drawn to games! No one likes chores, chores like the things we do everyday, wether it’s work, hobbies, house chores or even a relationship can become a sort of chore (which is obviously bad!), what’s missing in all of this ‘chores’? REWARDS! People need the positive reward, that price when they’ve reached the end of it, they’re goals!
Robins conclusions rocked actually and kind of made me envy her passion on what’s she’s working: Put people in the center of some universe, give them space to create and smile and something extraordinaire will pop up! It’s possible to smile at work! We just need to find our rewards!
Just arrived @LIFT for its second day, as expected its first day was an intense experience, coming to LIFT always has the effect of recharding another… could be for the frenetic sharing of ideas, the conversations, I honestly don’t know! But I know others that probably agree with me.
LIFT as evolved, Laurent’steam introduced a lot of changes and managed to somehow take LIFT to the next level, I’ll be posting my notes from the different talks I’ve attended on the next coming days, but I would like to highlight some of the things that really got my attention on the first day:
Genevieve Bell
GBell is an internationally recognized ethnographer, and she actually gave one of the best presentation of day, or could just be me, who am a bit biased towards her presentation subject: Secrets, lies & digital deceptions. As a society we all basically lie and we’ve managed to introduce this behavior into our online life’s.
During my workshop here at LIFT I’ve talked a lot about the role of personalization inside online communities, the importance of identity, the need we as humans have to make some sort of ‘impressions’ management and the image we try to project trough our online avatars. I’ve talked a bit how the creation of this personas empower’s us as users to adapt to specific contexts. It has all to do with Integration.
So to some extent it was nice to hear someone like Genevieve stating precisely that, how people lie to adapt, as a self-defense mechanism that helps protect our identity. At the same time, sharing secrets seems to be the base of trust, as in real life, the sharing is what brings us together, so does the same somehow happens online, the more information you share about yourself the more people somehow trust you and your avatar.
Her passionate presentation is already available on video, so take sometime, I really think it’s worth it.
Jonathan Cabiria
Still on the same line of though, Jonathan also gave an great presentation on Permeability. Permeability in the sense of what comes out of our online lives and somehow crosses to our real life and vice-versa. According to Jonathan by being in virtual worlds, people are many times confronted with hidden parts (facets) of themselves, they get the ability of trying out things they might not feel comfortable to do in real life for oh so many reasons. Jonathan also presented a study that showed how this good feelings managed to transpose themselves to the real world and have helped people suffering from depressions to recover from it by rising their feelings of integration, loneliness, isolation, pessimism and/or low self-esteem.
What I took from Jonathan’s message is that the online and real worlds are merging, we’re seeing people moving a big part of their ’social’ lives online. One interesting thought he mentioned was how many times, developers like myself don’t really grasp the entire implications of a social platform that we’ve built. The social applications of a social platform is many times bigger than expected and reaches people and highs that could have never been predicted.
Second day is just starting so for now I just leave this two very short comments on yesterday’s presentations but I promise to write a bit more as soon as I managed to digest all the input I got from yesterday.
One final note for the amazing work that Cristiana and her team from Bread and Butter produced for this year, there are a total of 10 different art projects!
I personally thing that this theme is amazingly important in the Portuguese context, and I’m not complaining as usual to the fact that Portuguese companies tend to be 2/3 years far behind the rest of Europe/World! But by seeing so many companies PR’s in that room and see them taking part of the discussion and acknowledging the importance of the blogs in their communication as a way to increase their users satisfaction and have closer control how their brands are interpreted by their customers it’s already clear the importance blogs will have in the future or traditional public relations. 
I had met them the night before as we seated on the same table during fondue but it was not until they’re presentation that I actually knew they were LIFT speakers! I really enjoyed our conversation during those cheesy hours, so it came to no surprise that they’re presentation on the Hedonistic Company felt so compelling! 
Still on the same line of though,