SXSWi was immense but there were a few common themes underlying both the products demonstrated at the tradeshows and in the majority of the talks I attended. One strand which I picked up on, of particular relevance to me, was the effect that gaming has had on the design of web applications.

Web designers are looking to gaming for ways to motivate and retain users; XBOX Live style achievements are becoming a standard feature in modern web applications and while scoring mechanisms have been used before — most forums have reputation and scoring system — we can see that the design of these systems is now being given a lot more attention. There is however a danger here because not every game is a good game, in fact I can name more bad games than I can good, so there is a real need for good game designers — I like to believe I am part of this group — to play a more active role in the design of these systems. This also extends beyond web applications into real-life where gaming mechanics will begin to creep — I wonder how long it will be before I can unlock the ‘frugal shopper’ achievement on my Sainsbury’s nectar card.

Reflecting on the importance of play; in my own work I see a huge opportunity to really expand what it means to say we develop games. When asked what technology/platforms we develop for I always respond saying that we focus on the purpose of our projects not the platforms, which are decided on afterwards to best suit the purpose; I still stand by this but think my notion of platforms has been further disrupted. Some of the guys in our delegation work with what I guess you would class as non conventional mediums such as theatre, the street, or people; I took part in Duncan’s Subtle Mob and was enlightened by its ability to remove you from a space where you still were physically and particularly interesting was the use of other people playing a role but not in an obvious multi-player game sense but in a much more subtle way.

Like all good relationships, the exchange between gaming and the web is not one-way; there is a lot which gaming is also learning from the web and social media. Social games as an example have embraced many web design principles. One principle in particular is the reduction of barriers to entry and reduced friction. The social game experience starts in seconds and the user can dip in and out with relative ease, additionally the focus of the game mechanism is more about getting users to return frequently than it is about encouraging them to stay for prolonged periods of time.

A second principle social games have picked up is the release cycle, web applications are notorious for releasing products in often very incomplete Beta versions and building them with real users, this approach has been adopted by social games and makes developing one more like delivering a service than a product.

Perhaps the most interesting principle social games have adopted from social media and a key differentiator from where casual games have gone before is the distribution methods. Social games use invitations, gifts and recommendations as the user’s primary game discovery method, the Facebook App Store is not the way people find Facebook Apps, contrasted with Apple’s iPhone where the App Store plays a major part in an App’s success.

– On a slight tangent — There is some interesting overlap here into the area of social search, Google is fantastic for objective searches but as soon as the query becomes subjective it fails because the way we value a result is considerably different. With subjective queries we tend to focus more on intimacy as an evaluator than we do on authority — I will trust my brother’s game recommendations over those of a review site. What makes this interesting is how when then build people centered systems that understand and respect these relationships. Analysis of our networks as a collective can give us a great insight into trends, while our close friends are the perfect filtering system but neither are the best sources for factual information. I think these differences in our social relationships still have much scope for exploration and contribution to design.

– Back to the game — A lot of core game designers will say that the majority of social games are not games and will equally dismiss applications like foursquare, and in many ways the emphasis in these examples is not the game but rather the social interactions that the gameplay can facilitate. I believe that what we are seeing here is the death of the gamer. If we consider everything that uses gaming mechanics as a game, then who doesn’t play games? Who isn’t a gamer? I am of the opinion that moving forward gaming will be better compared to video than to film (to which it is often compared now). A video is just a medium used for a variety of purposes one of which is film and gaming is a medium used for a variety of purposes one of which is core gaming.

One speaker summed up the difference in gaming and user experience design well, saying that good UX design seeks to create a frictionless experience, whereas game mechanics are all about creating motivated experiences. These points were echoed in some of the psychology talks and the way in which neuroscience is allowing us to better understand users. So I wanted to finish up with a short list of pointers that are worth us considering when designing our next experiences. I’d like to add a caveat here; there are ethical questions we need to ask ourselves: At what point does our great design become manipulation? And as our content gains the ability to better relate with our users, how do we make sure we have their permission to get close?

Design Pointers:

1. We are curious, we like surprises and novelty. Useful to consider when designing captivating first points of contact for a new user but these are very short-term effects so we need to consider how to retain users once they wear off.
2. We are afraid of change, we like control and reassurance. Danah Boyd made a point saying that privacy is equivalent to control and making something public does not mean wanting it to be publicised. Also seeing others do something makes us more comfortable and increases the chances that we will participate – using the number of ratings an eBay seller has to judge risk is a good example of this. We need to consider how we manage and reassure our users of their control and minimise the risk of change/disruption to their life that we might cause.
3. We don’t like to miss opportunity. Limited editions, invitation only, time restricted, there are numerous ways we can temporarily increase the perceived value of our offering but as with the first pointer these effects are temporary.
4. We like rewards and recognition. This is very obvious but worth considering is who we value this recognition from, this changes for different people, in different situations and at different points in our life.
5. We are lazy and we get bored easily. We need to design content which is easy for the user but adversely the easier it is for a user to get to the content the lower their commitment and the easier it is for them to leave it – the cost of a cinema ticket affects how often I will go to a cinema but also how likely I am to walk out of a bad film. We need to consider how we get users to make a commitment to our content and build relationships which increase in value over time.
6. Design for the brain as well as the user. Our brains don’t like edges, they try to find patterns, they dislike counting more than 3-5 items, they can only remember on average 7 items and they are better at recognising what we know than they are at recalling it from memory.

And a few pointers possibly specific to young people:

1. They live for the moment. Content and experiences are throwaway; they pick up, learn, use, get bored and move on to the next.
2. They are results driven. They want to achieve something and use only the parts of the tools they need to achieve it. They will use mentors as a means of quickly getting to the desired result and will seek honest feedback on the result.
3. They like to co-design and remix. Tying in with the points above they do not see the need to start from scratch and will use what they can to quickly get to the desired result.

All of these pointers are open to dispute they are only intended to serve as catalyst for designing good experiences.

…One more thought

There was another point from the conference which struck a chord with me but I have not yet processed it to the point of knowing what to do with it; so I wanted to mention it and maybe in a few months time I will be able to make a more informed observation.

The phrase ‘Intellectual Waste’ was used in a talk by Jeffrey kalmikoff & Scott Belsky, in relation to the crowd sourcing of ideas; design competitions where budding designers compete to design a logo or in  our case the calls for proposals which we often complete as a digital agency. At the end of these idea sourcing activities there are maybe 10s, 100s, 1000s or more ideas which will go completely unused. Flicking through the ideas folder in the office I can see numerous projects which never came to fruition and instead gathered dust in the c:\graveyard. I not sure what the remedy is to this, I am a big fan of the crowd sourcing and even though learning is in itself a result perhaps we still need to consider better ways of recycling this intellectual waste.

Content

Kicking off with the biggest frustration – the content at SXSW just isn’t pitched quite right for me. Obviously there’s a lot of tech stuff which isn’t relavant – and the more expansive, ideas based content was often just not up to scratch in my opinion.

Saying that, there were some lovely bits and pieces:

• Gary Vaynerchuk was the best session I went to bar nothing. A brilliant, interactive and impassioned manifesto for how to treat customers. Totally inspiring.
• Design fiction was fascinating – using interactive theatre to design products and services.
• The improv comedy one was also very good (although oversubscribed) and has inspired me to start this when I get home.
• The awards ceremony – lots of inspiring projects and a bunch of interesting people (although the warm up acts were really crap).

Networking

I realise now that what everyone says is that SXSW is for the networking. However – you have to be a bit more tactical than at other events. Because there are 10s of thousands of people, serendipitous “starting off a chat in the line for a sandwich” style networking really doesn’t work.  I always seem to end up talking to a CSS coder from North Dakota. Nice for a chat, but we’re probably not going to work together again.

What I think work well are smaller, more facilitated sessions. I met the most useful people in an hour at the UK Trade Mission stand than at any other point. The Great British Breakfast is also good for this.

It’d be great if the UK delegations could organise more of this stuff, where it’s likely that everyone you’ll meet will have some relevance – otherwise it can be a bit frustrating.

Saying that, I met loads of useful people and it made the trip totally worth it just on that basis.

Getting Exhausted

SXSW is just knackering. Content all day followed by drinking and networking in the evening for five days solid takes it out of you.

We all stayed together in one big house, and on reflection, I really could have done with my own room. By four days in I was really feeling a bit like I needed a bit of space! Good tip for next year -make sure you have somewhere where you can go for a bit of quiet time.

The beanbags at the back of the Games arcade did the job for me on the Monday afternoon..

What I really liked

It’s invaluable having a week away with some great people, without any work and just having time to think about ideas and talk to people. SXSW is unique in this respect, and can’t be beaten.

Also, I have a particular project I’m pushing forward at the moment.. I met some great people who I’m going to work with on it, and possibly found half the investment for the project while out there. I also met a bunch of other really good people and spent more time with some good people that I already know (just as important…)

It was great picking up the Best Game award on behalf of Six to Start, and this provided a few useful networking opportunities.

But..

I still think it’s worth making sure that year on year we don’t just keep going to SXSW because of all the hype around it. If it gets too much bigger I think it might become the victim of its own success, and there may be other events which start becoming just as important.

Action points

Ok, so what’s going to change now I’m back?

• I’m not making enough stuff. One of my SXSW take homes is just to spend more time actually getting creative things done
• Do some improv comedy courses.
• Go to smaller, more focussed events where serendipitous networking can happen more easily.

There are probably a hundred more subconcious things that’ll change now I’m back, but these make a good start.

And finally..

Thank you so much to everyone at the Arts Council and Germination for sorting this all out.

The organisation was absolutely flawless, and it’s great that you guys are supporting us UK creative folks in doing stuff like this.

http://rhizome.org/editorial/3410#more

The author of the piece, Nick Hasty writes:
“what I took away from the conference was a rejuvenation of critical, big-picture questioning, a reminder of just how drastically technology is contouring contemporary society and culture and that, ultimately, it is still in our hands to determine the overall shape of things to come.”

These are my notes from the SXSWi panel, which asked the question. The chair was Dr Doug Lenat of Austin based www.cyc.com (lenat@cyc.com):

“Cycorp was founded in 1994 to research, develop, and commercialize Artificial Intelligence. Cycorp’s vision is to create the world’s first true artificial intelligence, having both common sense and the ability to reason with it.”

Doug Lenat shows a brief history of AI in both science fiction and science fact. He says that he believes the HAL 9000 computer in the 1968 film 2001 Space Odyssey, showed us a way of changing everyday life on Earth. However, he asks, twenty years later, is the Alice chatbot as good as it gets? We continue to underestimate the problem of how much information we are using as humans when we use language.
Lenat takes a shot at predicting the future of our relationship with computers over the next ten years:
2013: crowd sourcing explosion.
2015: computers capable of question answering, semantic search and syntactic search.
2020: cradle to grave mental prothesis – we’ll delegate more and more to our mechanical servants.

The panel comprised of: Professor Peter Stone from University of Texas at Austin department of Computer Science and director of Learning Agents. His research has taken the goal that the movies have adopted ie fully autonomous agents in the real world. He believes we will try to build complete agents on a closed loop ie robots that sense, decide and act. This will drive research forward he believes. He uses the example of Robocup project where robots play football. By 2006 robots are fully autonomous individuals on soccer field and they do team work. He also cites the DARPA Grand Challenge wherein a robot drove across the desert and also examples of robots driving cars on race tracks. He shows a simulation of how robots driving cars could solve traffic flow problems through automation and detection. He concludes that AI can be part of a solution for a good future: I imagine he means compared with the dystopian vision of the Terminator franchise in which machines take control and seek to destroy all human kind.

Next up is Natasha Vita More. A strangely beautiful woman of 60 who yet looks somewhat robotic herself. I can’t say she has definitely had surgery but she was, as well as being the only woman on the panel, the one who looked and sounded most like a visitor from the future. She is currently doing her Phd at the University of Plymouth and her subject is the Transhuman or the Post Human.
Vita More asks: what is human enhancement? What are its media? In future will here be a new criteria for normal? And as for behaviour, will biosynthetic identities be familiar or fearful?
What will happen if a biologically unfixed species develops? What happens if we create multiple bio-syn personas? Will we consider ourselves disabled in the future if we’re not transformed or enhanced by AI?

Doug Lenat rounds up with how a fiction writer might look at the idea of human plus machine from an artistic perspective. A question from the floor asks whether computers can ever make something ‘ beautiful’. Lenat says it is in the eye of the beholder and mentions Harold Cohen’s programme, which has made ‘beautiful artwork’. He says in a century or two people won’t understand what this problem is about, or why we’re concerned with it. A follow up question asks about the possibilities for humour as machines learn to be more like us. Lenat says it is a question of whether a computer can predict what will be seen as funny or beautiful in any context. I think that what is funny or artistic is often something which is out of context. Another layer of complexity of meaning which computers will need to understand.
Lenat concludes by saying that as well as a sense of self awareness and self purpose, we must build a sense of morality into these machines. Whose morality in what context remains to be seen.

The AAAI Presidential Panel on Long Term Futures (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) www.aaai.org

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/20/south-by-southwest-technology-interactive

It questions whether the interactive element of the festival now dominates the event:

“This year has seemed like two tribes – music fan and geek, who, while not quite at war, are engaged in something of a grapple for SXSW’s soul. With fewer members of the music media, including the British contingent, one blogger asked this week: “Has SXSW jumped the shark?”

Grulke says: “There are definitely two different mindsets. Interactive people, all they do is go to panels with smartphones and laptops and music people are like, ‘let’s get to a club, get a beer and watch a rock band’.”

One reason that it feels like the techies have taken over is that the first half of SXSW is now so dominated by digital media: MacBooks and Google Phones are hauled along to Austin and the techies vie to become virtual “mayor” of the Austin Convention Centre on the hit location-based mobile phone game Foursquare whilst simultaneously watching the likes of Williams and Ek – appearances which are furiously blogged and tweeted.

By midway through the festival the city’s hotel lobbies are abuzz with activity as the techies check out to leave and, sizing them up a little suspiciously, the music crowd arrive and check in.”

Personally, I can relate to the issue of real time blogging and tweeting, something that I am also guilty of.  It feels like no-one is living in the moment and there is a sense of ingesting information with a satellite delay.  By the time you’ve tweeted you have semi-missed the next bit of the panel.  It raised the question for me- are we society’s ADHD kids?  Looking behind me in sessions I saw people catching up on email, playing Bejewelled on their iphones, surfing the net and generally not paying full attention.  Contrast this to the film panel I went to where people *shock* used paper and pencils to write notes.  When I got out my Mac to tweet the session people visibly turned round and tutted.  There was a sense of attention and focus that was sometimes visibly lacking in the interactive audiences.

Geeks.  Put the gadgets down, step away from the gadgets…

Intelligent, pithy and extremely articulate, you got the feeling you were consuming a lifetimes work boiled down to 40 minutes – healthy, nutricious, enough to bite on and not overcooked.

The men that followed on the other hand (sorry boys, but the women really won this one) were dry, process oriented and basically dull.

I’ve never seen the kind of exodus the crowd treated Evan Williams to.  5,000 people crammed in and well over half left, leaving a dispiriting empty looking conference hall by the time they wrapped up.  http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20000486-52.html

And Daniel Elk the next day wasn’t much better.  The interviewer and the content kept people there, but as performance goes it was a damp squib.

That these men lack charisma isn’t the main problem. The problem is they’re the current poster children for our collective ambitions for the web.  Twitter is great – a happy accident with openness at it’s heart that’s had the (mostly unintended) consequence of doing social good.  And so is Spotify.  But do we really need another way of consuming music when so many exist already?  Is that the best we can aim for?  The problem is of celebrating these (agreed, technologically and business wise brilliant) achievements as the only zeitgeist.   We need to resist the kind of circle jerk group-think that just produces imitations and copies rather than really creative solutions to unsolved problems.

Thanks to Bruce Sterling for bringing us back – http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/17/bruce-sterlings-sxsw.html

Nicely handled by Ian Hogarth (CEO Songkick) all alone which made a refreshing change from the endless panel format.

Basically, the internet has brought fans more choice, made it easier for unsigned acts to build a fanbase and saved the music industry by stimulating the rise in sales for live events.  Interestingly (my favourite insight from the session), as ticket sales have gone steadily up in the last decade, the proportion of sales from top selling artists has markedly declined – meaning what the internet has really enabled is support for the wierd and wonderful, a much more diverse music culture which we used to feel was strangled in the old days when major labels were in the ascendency.

So we know the obvious sites – ticketmaster, eventbrite, myspace – but for new artists and unsigned acts with limited resources, there’s a crazy confusion of new tools coming out all the time.  So which ones work?  Which to choose?

On the demand side (ie bands can attract support, build their fan base and show promoters how popular they are to get gigs) there’s tools to help you find gigs – Songkick itself, but also Pollstar – sites like Eventful where fans can demand gigs and bands can build up a head of steam by building sign up (which works for all events, not just music and can applied to say, touring theatre) – and sites where artists/promoters can find and choose their optimal venue, send a request to play there, and make the case by getting their fans to lobby – eg. Gigmaven, which is only available in NY so far, but one to follow and surely London will be soon if it gets take up.

And for the really smart there’s Next Big Sound - a data tracking analytics site where you can track how your fans engage with you online, across all social media.  How many plays you’re getting, who’s mentioning you and when, numbers of plays, views, comments, which you can also compare with other bands, and use to show venue owners and festival promoters why you should be on the bill.

Then there’s selling tickets direct to your fans – either by promoting your own events (which most bands hate, but this makes it easier) or by supplementing what the venue is doing for you by flogging your own ticket allocation (sometimes the key to getting a gig in the first place). Being in control gives you better data (you know who’s bought and you have their address) and better margins.  Check out Ticketfly, Topspin (a retail channel you can embed in your own site), and Crowdsurge.

And then you’ve got to sell it.  Tools that aggregate mentions across blogs and social media and give you tips to up your twitter score like Hype Machine and Sonicliving.

The music industry is (like with many things) leading the way in the concept of social commerce - fans want to follow their bands, they want to belong. To make it nowadays, ambitious bands can do this for themselves and a plethora of tools are there – it’s more about being judicious about which to use, resisting the temptation to migrate to the next new spangly thing to come out, and putting the time in.

So the Tweeture did that favorite trick of mine: inverting network technologies- so they aren’t used so much to connect people who already know each other across geographic spaces- but connect people who don’t know each other across social space.  A neat trick if you can pull it off. And in this the Tweeture rocks, to the point of exhaustion. Any time i had the Tweeture i discovered it was impossible to walk anywhere or sit anywhere for longer than 5 mins without meeting someone new  them:”hi what is that?” me: “this is the Tweeture, he’s a social robot…”.

Now this is great and at first i thought it was down to our huge genius and considerable skill in making a social robot that communicates via twitter,  is location aware via gps, does reverse geocoding and asks you questions about your current location like”tell me again why were at 11th and congress”,  uses its haptic sensors to update its mood and flashes cool coloured LED lit antenna to communicate this to the players.

But as the swanky batteries powereing his swanky services ran down each one failed in turn. Until i was left holding a very tired Tweeture. This however did not deter  the curiosity of the crowds. and the “hey what is that?” continued long after his electronic charms had faded out.

So could we have done what my friend Catherine Herdlick from COaP said ” Dont worrie about building it just tell people your building a Deluded Twittering Monster Robot”.

Well this Design fiction approach maybe right, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun for anyone. And we would never have been able to have the adventures we had Chasing the Tweeture across town from party to party (he is a Very social robot monster).

Looking up the Tweetures GPS location was super useful in getting  a bearing but the Carers tweets  were the most useful. Especially when combined with judicious use of the Tweetures own twitter voice to ask them questions like “hey i’m feeling a little lost where are we?”.

My favorite Carer moment was on the Tweetures first night out alone. Someone tweeted “hey the @thetweeture is getting tired where are his parents?”. Care. Care for a twitter puppet. Care for a concept, and care for a strangers project. There is a lot of dormant care out there. It doesn’t take much to trigger a stream of really caring behaviour.

Sometimes people are just looking for permission to care. Its nice to offer that.