Hippo Dignity

It’s overcast here, which is a drag - there’s so much sky in Cape Town, and by all accounts it’s spectacular when it’s sunny. But hopefully the sky will clear tomorrow, when we have some more tourist time.

(I just went to check the weather forecast online, having forgotten that I’d already logged off the Internet, since as noted before the cost is metered. I bought four hours worth and have already gone through an hour and a half. What I’ve come to realize is that it’s not that I use that much Internet time — I got through most of my email fairly quickly — but that so much of what I do with my computer now presumes that I’m always online. I downloaded MarsEdit so I could compose blog posts about all this offline; so far so good.)

Presumption is also a good place to start thinking about the Interactions conference, and about this trip, since the former was so much about using and challenging them, and this trip just overturns them, or exists outside of them.

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I had hoped to do a Rebecca and blog the heck out of Interactions’08, but the fact is, there came a point where all I could do was sit back and let it wash over me. With eight sessions a day for two days straight, there was a lot to think about, and a lot to take notes on.

Plus, as it turns out, the whole thing is going to be available online as streaming Flash movies anyhow. The TED talks have really, I think, changed the game in terms of how a conference’s knowledge can live on as a continuing provocation/education and publicity for what the conference does. It will also, I’m sure, change the game for conference speakers — in the same way that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has admitted to being super-aware that he can no longer reuse a joke onstage without someone in the audience having already heard a bootleg of the first time he told it, streaming video will make regular conference speakers break out of their practiced shtick or risk seeming like hacks. (How you balance the need to build on earlier thought with the demand for novelty is the next problem, I guess.)

So for now I’ll just congratulate the tireless Dave Malouf, Dan Saffer, Joshua Seiden, Liz Bacon, my colleague Robert Reisman, and the rest of the IxDA board, the volunteers, and the faculty and staff at SCAD for a truly extraordinary conference experience. The quality of the dialogue, the intensity of the energy, and experience of the place were all extraordinary. I am so honored to have been a part of this first-ever conference for interaction designers, and I can’t wait for 2009.

(If you can’t wait for the movies to be online later this week, or don’t have 20 minutes to spare to see me race through my deck, Core77 did a bite-sized writeup of my talk and a few other talks as well.)