A Better Course

I came back from dConstruct yesterday, with lots to think about – bigger posts about all of the below coming soon, but in the meantime –

• Steven Johnson talked about “The eyes on the street”, which made me think about the streets with fewer eyes to see them; the almost unknown pathway through the city and – by extension of that metaphor – the almost unknown pathways though data. What does exploring look like in our own datasets, and what new ideas can we get from what we think we know?
• Informational relationships and not social ones; I heard Joshua’s talk criticised for being about copywriting rather than design, but in the case of Dopplr‘s conscious avoidance of the word ‘friend’ in its language, copy decisions can be design decisions. Incidentally, I would also agree that Joshua’s talk was more about copywriting, but predictably enough enjoyed that.
• The rich culture in niches and the rich culture in niches outside the ones we know.
• This leads into something else that felt very clear after the conference; the need to look outside of what we already know. If, as Matt Jones, posited, execution is more important than ideas, we’re going to need an understanding that is based on people who are not us, and that understanding is going to have to incorporate all the richness of what they know, how they model their worlds, and how they model their interactions with the world around them.