As a self-effacing Brit, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer optimism and enthusiasm of 5,000 Americans who all seem to have a web app to promote.  Dig a little deeper with some of these guys though, and you find there’s a lot of optimism, and not a lot more.  Their commitment to their idea appears total, but after a while you get the sense that there’s only a single dimension to their vision, a single level of depth to their thinking. 

Not that I’m knocking Americans.  They’re great at this stuff, and they’re great optimistic people who get things done.  But it sets me thinking, what are we Brits good and bad at.

We’re great at ideas: we’ve invented many many things: in the digital world and far beyond.  Our creativity and technical innovation is a genuine strength.  We’re also great at what I’d call ‘commercials: finance, project management, running businesses rigorously at any level, including globally. 

Where we’re not so hot is evangelism of two sorts: the first is the belief and commitment that gets an idea from pub-talk to something viable, something that’s gone beyond ‘I might do that one day’.  That demands self belief and an ability to animate and motivate peers and collaborators.  The second kind of evangelism is promoting the concept to the wider world: investors, end users, the press. 

It’s not that we Brits lack balls, but we’re culturally reticent to shout about how great we are or might be.  Americans have us beaten hands down there; maybe we should import some to Bristol.

Bootstrapping through collaboration

With so many small businesses starting up without funding, this panel set out to explore how collaboration can help. Interesting and appropriate stuff? You would hope so, sadly the obvious anecdotes from the panel focussed on the tiny and the banal. They do have funny accents tho and we got cool stickers.

and the winner is

The UK did well last night at the web awards, with Preloaded winning Best of Show for Launchball. The winners were:

Activism – World without oil
Amusement – Elf yourself
Art – Viscosity
Blog – Passive Aggressive Notes
Business – Wikinvest
CSS – Ficlets
Classic – Wired
Community – Flock
Educational – The Story of Stuff
Experimental  - MetaNotes
Film/TV - Animoto Productions
Games – Launchball
Mobile – Mosio
Motion Graphics – HL2
Music – Minuit
Personal profile – Jlern Design
Student - Paper Critters
Technical achievement – Twiddla!

Goodbye Tiny Screen?

A panel on how mobile interaction can be more useful and intuitive in future and how outside the US there are some interesting developments in this area. The main  thrust of mobile devlopment is to get us away from peering into the tiny screen and getting stuff which is actually useful and relevant.

The panel agreed that the lack of uniformity of the mobile platform causes great barriers between easier use of mobile. Mobile internet behaves differently on different devices and there isn’t really a mobile equivalent of Microsoft. different payment schemes in different countries also causes problems for MMS and SMS messaging.

Contest is everything for mobile and different cultures use mobile differently. This is a mixture  of the technical and service variations and the context in which users spend time on their mobiles. For instance, the Japanese spend more time on the train and the ‘keep your phone on silent’ policy for Japanese public transport means that Japanese users take up non-speaking activities like reading digital books and watching TV. 

In some countries SMS is used for social services ie using texts to relay useful information to users eg reminders to vote in Italy, health information in Kenya .

 A man with some interesting things to say on this is British mobile designer  asdn panel member Matt Jones. He talks about the ‘overlap between physical and digital things’, ‘sociality and consumption… things that bring the digital out into the real world’.

Matt talks about the “context of consumption/interaction’ in his devlopment of mobile applications and devices… ‘so we’re not wandering around looking into the phone… we should be designing devices which are ‘in the world’ using accelerometors etc so we don’t have to look ‘into’ the phone, so we don’t have to think about the interface.”

He talks about a “holistic view of how users interact with mobile devices

Find out more about Matt Jones’ ideas here:

http://www.blackbeltjones.com

http://www.servicedesign.org.uk

Also recommended, an immersive portable device known as ‘a book’:

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield.

ARG wins award

Hurray! The Alternate Reality Game ‘World Without Oil’ last night won the award for Activism here at SXSW Interactive. Made by a team headed by ARG supremo Jane McGonigal, World Without Oil invited a couple of thousand people to become citizen journalists in this imagined senario. The website holds the archive of all the user generated content created for the project and is a great example of how rich an experience ARGs can be. The award also shows an understanding that massive traffic numbers are not the only measure of success for online projects.

Keep Austin weird

Strange things happen in Austin. On the way to the web awards last night, hundreds and hundreds of American starlings started to gather in the sky above us.

“We-ird” said a nasal american woman, stopping us on the street. “They look totally like birds”. Er yes. 

Keep Austin weird started on car bumper stickers and is now the city’s unofficial slogan. It is everywhere and seems to have been wholeheartedly adopted by creatives and festival go-ers. British cities take note.

Mondays schedule

10am: The Art of Self Branding

11.30am: Designing for “Oh No!” 

3.30pm: Ten Tips for Managing a Creative Environment 

4.30pm: SXSW Clicks: Interactive Designers (networking event) 

A Big future for Alternate Reality Games

I’ve been making Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) for 2 years and finally this week I am able to say with confidence that this is what I do. The interest in ARGs as a new artform was reflected here at SXSW Interactive with a dedicated panel discussion. The panel members included Dan Hon, ex-Perplex City now of 6toStart and Dee Cook, an ARG writer/designer who I believe worked on World Without Oil. WWO has been nominated for the SXSW Interactive award for innovation and I am expecting it to win at tonight’s ceremony.

 As is the usual form for discussions on ARGs, this was on one level a basic introduction for novices to the form but some pertinentt questions from the audience gave rise to some interesting ideas about where ARGs might be going in the future. The question of a business model for ARGs is what’s on every ARG producers mind. The panel agreed that subscription is not a route which is expected to take off. While it works for MMPRPG like World of War Craft, the panel thought that subscription doesn’t look likely to appeal to ARG players for finite narratives. The best business model looks likely to be brand sponsored or publically funded.

For those wanting to use this egalitarian form for social change or ‘serious games’, sponsors or funders of future ARGs need to reflect this. Charities such as Cancer Research, who have commissioned an ARG from the Hon brothers, would gain a great deal from commissioning ARGs, allowing their audience to learn as they play. Public funding made my first ARG ‘MeiGeist’ possible and both the BBC and Channel 4’s education departments are making moves in the ARG direction in order to exploit the great learning potential for school kids. As they become immersed in an ARG narrative kids will be learning life skills, collaboration, role playing and how to behave socially as well as research and detective work. Couple this with their inherent grass-roots nature, ARGs are indeed the best way for both broadcasters and socially responsible bodies to engage with young audiences, which means that this ever evolving form has a very bright future. Seems to be a form which allows women directors to flourish too…..cheers to that!!