27 posts
Lately there has been a lot of discussion around conferences in the tech world and the amount of female representation on the panels. Whilst this has been an issue for years (check out this post by Sara Williams on our site from 2011 and make some time to read the great comments as well ).
The issue really came into the public domain recently when Rebecca Rosen wrote this piece on the Panel Pledge in The Atlantic.
I went along to SCAMP 2012 yesterday and what a fantastic event it was. Friendly, inspiring, smart - there were some great speakers and just as interesting attendees. I particularly liked the format. The curators of SCAMP deliberately selected speakers who wouldn't just stand up and talk to some slides. Clare Reddington brought a lucky dip of props - the audience members picked one and then she spoke about it in relation to her work. Nange Magro presented a prototype of a dress which can be controlled with brainwaves. Salena Godden floored us with her fiery poetry performance. Mixing up talks with performances, conversations and audience participation gave the day a really nice rhythm and flow. One other conferences could learn from.
BUT. This is not what I want to talk about right now. There was one thing yesterday which irked me. Where were all the men in the audience? There must have been about 5 men there, 4 of whom were speaking. What's with this? No need to come because it's just for the ladies?
Last week, I was on the panel for the ‘Digital Marketing Agencies Pitch’ session at the Marketing Movies Online conference. Adam Rubins and Alice from digital PR agency Way to Blue and Nik Roope, founder of Poke, were on the panel with me. It was a fun session – how it worked was we each got a film beforehand that we had to pitch a 5-minute digital marketing campaign for, as if we were re-releasing it today.
I picked Bambi – the 1942 Disney classic, much loved (indeed it often makes the top 10 list of all time in the ‘animated film’ category in surveys), with the universal themes of love and loss.
On Tuesday, I spoke at Ignite London 3 on transmedia film experiences. It’s a topic that really interests me. I decided to restrict it to film, though there are brilliant examples in TV – Lost and Dexter to name just two – because of the format of the evening: 20 slides that auto-forward every 15 seconds, with 15 seconds per slide. There’s only so much you can cover in that time (15 seconds is almost the equivalent of a long breath, if you think about it). A lot like Pecha-Kucha, actually.
I started with a clip that everyone is familiar with from watching Warner Brothers’ movies. The experience of sitting in a darkened theatre is amazing for any true movie-lover, but it’s not just about box-office receipts anymore. With the advent of transmedia storytelling, the story now often starts way before the movie releases, and continues long after. For transmedia newbies, I explained that the phrase was made popular (not invented, mind!) by Henry Jenkins, and refers to the telling of a story through multiple platforms, allowing the viewer to enter the story ‘through dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and co-ordinated experience’, as Jenkins says.
A few of us were at Playful on Friday.
There were a number of great talks, but one of the themes that stood out for me was gamification, as elaborated on by Sebastien Deterding in his talk. It’s almost a recurring theme of sorts nowadays, with Dan Hon having touched upon it in his PSFK conference talk too. Sebastien spoke about how, with the advent of Foursquare, plenty of services seem to have taken it upon themselves togamify their sites in some way or the other. We now get badges and/or points not just for checking in to a place on Foursquare or Gowalla, but for reading blogs and even for eating food (Foodspotting, if you’re wondering). And that’s where people start losing the plot. He mentioned an excellent quote by James Carse:
It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever *must* play, *cannot* play.
On Monday, I went to TEDxLondon, the London sibling of TEDxChange New York, an independently organised TED event convened by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim of the event was to mark the 10th anniversary of the 8 Millennium Development Goals. Entitled ‘the future we make’, the tone was firmly celebratory and optimistic…perhaps a little too optimistic for those of us for whom a question mark hangs over the common interpretation of aid and development.
ideas are cheap. always be passionate about your ideas and communicate those ideas in the things you make - charles eames #psfk
Fri Sep 10 14:17:24 +0000 2010
Made by Many
One of the more interesting quotes I picked up from last week’s PSFK Conference London 2010, mentioned by Matt Jones from BERG during his talk, is the one pictured above.
I was invited to talk at a SheSays event yesterday on presentation skills. My talk wasn’t so much about presentation skills as it was about Made by Many’s approach to presenting our work. In fact I was pleasantly surprised when I was told that they were interested in hearing me speak about Made by Many’s work because we ‘visualise a lot’ and also present our work ‘in interesting ways, including showcasing work in progress, sketching etc – the presentation is designed & considered as much as the work’. Kind words from Mel, one of the organisers. Here’s how the presentation flowed, it’s on Slideshare at the end of this post or see it on Slideshare here.
Made by Many has an opportunity — actually, three — to host panel discussions at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2011, but we need your votes to make it happen.
We attended SXSWi 2010 en masse and absolutely loved it — the people, the networking, the keynotes, the panels and the tequila. By bringing together a huge number of creative, freakishly intelligent people SXSWi acts as a sort of ideas incubator for our industry.
The sessions delegates attend set the tone of the year to come: they raise the issues we talk about and tease out the problems we try to solve. The best sessions kick off conversations that lead to technical innovations, new ways of working, unexpected collaborations and all kinds of general awesomeness. Hosting a panel discussion is an opportunity to start some of those conversations.
I’ve been to loads of conferences over the years. Most of them have left me feeling ‘whelmed’ at best and at most other times frustrated.
I blogged last year about one conference I attended in London last May. There was a general feeling that the speakers offered nothing new, virtually no excitement or insight and most of the talks boiled down to a personal retrospective. That’s fair enough you may say, but the conference was billed as being about the future of the industry.
It felt as if the speakers had just been asked to turn up and speak about anything they wanted. No vetting by the organiser and seemingly very little brief to the speakers.
