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Can you bottle event magic?
We’ve recently been talking about hard problems for interactive. Last time was about the challenge of making a group's culture felt in online work. Another hard problem theme that has come up a lot has been around events.
By events, we’re thinking mostly of conferences, but this could apply to other types. We've been thinking of this for a while, in producing a few smaller-scale events (Forum, Digital Storytelling Unconference, Demo Nite), working on Vancouver Design Week, attending great local gatherings like Polyglot, and travelling for NodeConf, SxSW, and others.
If you’ve gone to any good conference, you probably know the feeling like the one in the picture above. There’s often a special energy that happens in the new connections and shared affinities. It seems even more intense when we travel, but near or far that great energy starts to fade soon after things wind down.
What we’ve wondered, and been asked when talking to other event organizers, is whether something can happen through the internet that keeps that energy going?
For us, the answer is: sort of. We don’t think any particular tool can meet the quality of embodied presence. Nor should we expect it to. Technology serves us best when we use it to augment rather than replace. You only need to take a look at what happened when colleges tried to create campuses in Second Life to see how wrong this can go.
Instead, we should look for ways that technology can make ongoing connections easier after an in-person meeting. We’d love to see event apps that remember who we spent the most time with, and event profiles that are selectively shared rather than public for all. Things that make it easier to reconnect with the in-person experience and act on it, we think, will take that in-person energy further.
There was a time when it seemed the increasing fidelity of internet communication would make most travel unnecessary. But it seems to have only increased our thirst for in-person experiences. The more we look to embrace that being there is being there, the more we can make of what comes after.
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Apple’s newly-social screen
We were accepted into (aka lottery luck) the tvOS early developer program this week, which means some spiffy new AppleTV hardware will soon be here to play with.
What’s happening with AppleTV is really intriguing. It breaks away from the one-person/one-screen interactions that dominate Apple’s products. But a TV screen is most often a shared screen, and tvOS apps will have to be designed around that reality.
The keynote demos emphasized apps related to typically social activities: Gilt for shopping, Airbnb for travel. We normally do/plan these with others, but online it's usually a solo experience. When you think of it, there are a lot of things we do together that get awkward because we do them across separate screens. With a multi-person screen, apps can serve those activities quite differently, and a lot of scenarios suddenly seem to have a natural home.
Parents and their university-bound children can browse and compare campuses. Housemates can plan meals. Newlyweds can get instructions for putting Ikea furniture together. They can do all that together, without anyone feeling like they're treading on someone else's device.
We have no big ideas for AppleTV apps, and no clients have asked about it. Yet. But with the AppleTV, more so than the Watch, the table stakes and opportunities feel different, and more exciting.
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Medium’s new logo
Medium updated its logo. Should we we savage it? No, of course not.
It's quite a change from their original, a confident beast stubbornly rooted in a pre-digital age, yet virtuoso in creating an online publishing space. It commanded and earned respect.
Like any brand mark, it needs a bit of time to be seen in use, and while the change is a big one, this does seem to grow in pretty quickly.
There's a good post about the reasons behind the change and the exploration that led to the new mark. It's not a long read, and would you know it, it's on Medium.
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🎉 Four years! 🎉
Denim & Steel celebrates its 4th year this month. We have no special plans, but need to express gratitude to clients and colleagues for our busiest year yet. The people we work for inspire us; the ideas we work on excite us; the problems we're asked to solve on get more challenging.
Year 5 is going to be great, and we’re glad to know all of you in some way. And if we don't know you yet, don't be shy.
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