While I’m writing this, there’s a big hole in the planning for day 3. The morning keynote would have been given by Andrew Crow, the former head of design at Uber. But alas, he can’t come. I know the IxD16 team is working their butts off to find a great replacement. Failing that, for now: we can sleep in on day 3! yes!
After that, the hard work starts again at 10:30. Starting off with an interesting subject – privacy and design -, in a talk ‘The Privacy Invasions: A UXers Guide to the Post Snowden Era‘. This talk about privacy is given by, wait for it, Kyle Outlaw. Can’t go wrong with that name.
The next good talk is at 11:30, by a Dutchman, Marcel Schouwenaar, who some may know from The Incredible Machine and ThingsCon. He will talk about ‘Building a Spotify for (not so) everyday products: are we ready for the post-ownership economy?‘
After Marcels’ talk, I expect to take a sprint to catch the second half of ‘Nature’s Notifications: What technology can learn from a buzzing bee and a thunderclap.‘, about how we can make notifications more natural and logical. In the other rooms, there are two talks about security (broadly) at the same time. Not my cup of tea, probably.
At 13:30, after lunch, I expect to be back in the big hall, where Rob Girling will give his talk. He will present a method to measure the ‘design maturity‘ of companies, and off course will tell us how to use these measurements to improve stuff. Having worked for companies at all ends of the design maturity spectrum, I really like to see these results – and have a good laugh, probably.
The other presentations during this slot are also great: Ricardo Aguilar is Design Lead at Mercedes Benz, and will talk about the ’connected car‘. Be warned, though: there’s a always a risk for a commercial happy story with a speaker like this. Gilles Colborne (‘Interaction Designers vs. algorithms‘) sounds interesting too – he also gave a talk during Interaction14 (yay! go team!)
In case I’m already @drunkatixda around this time, I will be sure to make a quick visit to Guillaume Berrys’ talk (14:00-14:15), which is called ‘Design Peas‘, and is sure to have the weirdest summary of the conference: Let’s go green for a few minutes and envision our design practices from the perspective of a pea. What’s your life like inside the pod?
Probably much more interesting is Alper Çuğun (another Dutchman!) at 14:00. His talk will discuss conversations as being the new interfaces. Whenever the people from Hubbub talk about experimental interfaces, I pay attention.
There does seem to be a very ‘experimental’ vibe to these last few hours. Case in point is my 15:00 appointment, the ‘The futures we want‘ talk – which asks the question whether we actively make our future, or if we’re just a part of it.
The next hour will bring us a nice concentration-improving happy hour, after which it’s time for the final keynote: Cameron Sinclair, who presents himself as ‘Chief eternal optimist’ of his company. A talk about designing for social change is sure to give me either itches or goosebumps. I have good hopes for the second.
And this ends my Interaction16 preview. There are high expectations, with a good and varied program. I hope to be able to give several updates next week, during the conference.