Journal tags: ixd19

While the Interaction 19 event was a bit of a mixed bag overall, there were some standout speakers.

Marty Neumeier was unsurprisingly excellent. I’d seen him speak before, at UX London a few years back, so I knew he’d be good. He has a very reassuring, avuncular manner when he’s speaking. You know the way that there are some people you could just listen to all day? He’s one of those.

Marty’s talk at Interaction 19 was particularly interesting because it was about his new book. Now, why would that be of particular interest? Well, this new book—Scramble—is a business book, but it’s written in the style of a thriller. He wanted it to be like one of those airport books that people read as a guilty pleasure.

One rainy night in December, young CEO David Stone is inexplicably called back to the office. The company’s chairman tells him that the board members have reached the end of their patience. If David can’t produce a viable turnaround plan in five weeks, he’s out of a job. His only hope is to try something new. But what?

I love this idea!

I’ve talked before about borrowing narrative structures from literature and film and applying them to blog posts and conference talks—techniques like flashback, in media res, etc.—so I really like the idea of taking an entire genre and applying it to a technical topic.

The closest I’ve seen is the comic that Scott McCloud wrote for the release of Google Chrome back in 2008. But how about a romantic comedy about service workers? Or a detective novel about CSS grid?

I have a feeling I’ll be thinking about Marty Neumeier’s book next time I’m struggling to put a conference talk together.

In the meantime, if you want to learn from the master storyteller himself, Clearleft are running a two-day Brand Master Workshop with Marty on March 14th and 15th at The Barbican in London. Early bird tickets are on sale until this Thursday, so don’t dilly-dally if you were thinking about nabbing your spot.

Right before heading to Geneva to spend the week hacking at CERN, I was in Seattle with a sizable Clearleft contingent to attend Interaction 19, the annual conference put on by the Interaction Design Association.

Ben has rounded up the highlights from my fellow Clearlefties. There are some good talks listed there: John Maeda, Nelly Ben Hayoun, and Jon Bell were thoroughly enjoyable. Some other talks were just okay, and there was one talk, by IXDA president Alok Nandi, that was almost impressive in how rambling and incoherent it was. It was like being in a scene from Silicon Valley. I remember clapping at the end; not out of appreciation, but out of relief.

If truth be told, Interaction 19 had about a day’s worth of really great content …spread out over three days. To be fair, that’s par for the course. When we went to Interaction 17 in New York, the hit/miss ratio was about the same:

There were some really good talks at the event, but alas, the muti-track format made it difficult to see all of them. Continuous partial FOMO was the order of the day.

And as I said at the time:

To be honest, the conference was only part of the motivation for the trip. Spending a week in New York with a gaggle of Clearlefties was its own reward.

So I’m willing to cut Interaction 19 a lot of slack. Even if quite a few of the talks were just so-so, getting to hang with Clearlefties in Seattle during snowmageddon was a lot of fun (and you’ll be pleased to hear that we didn’t even resort to cannibalism to survive).

But while the content of the conference was fair to middling, the organisation of it was a shambles:

Imagine the Fyre Festival but in downtown Seattle in winter. Welcome to @ixdconf. #ixd19

They sold more tickets than there were seats. I ended up watching the first morning’s keynotes being streamed to a screen in a conference room in a different building.

Now, I’ve been at events with keynotes that have overflow rooms—South by Southwest does this. But that’s at a different scale. This is a conference with a known number of attendees, each one of them spending over a thousand dollars to attend. I’m pretty sure that a first-come, first-served policy isn’t the best way of treating those attendees.

Anyway, here’s what I submitted for that round-up of the best talks, but which, for reasons of prudence, was omitted from the final post:

I really enjoyed the keynote by Liz Jackson on inclusive design. I would’ve enjoyed it even more if I could’ve seen it in person. Instead I watched it live-streamed to a meeting room two buildings over because the conference sold more tickets than they had seats for. This was after queueing in the cold for registration. So I feel like I learned a lot from Interaction 19 …about how not to organise a conference.

Still, as Ben notes:

We all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, despite best efforts by the West Coast snow to disrupt the entire city.

I’m going to be back in Seattle in just under two weeks for An Event Apart. Now that’s a conference! It runs like a well-oiled machine, and every talk in its single track has been curated for excellence …with one exception.