Tag : events

Last night I went along to the first Ad Hoc enquiries. It's a new approach to doing an event. Someone is invited to present on a topic within the broad sphere of innovation in the public sector, a diverse mix of people are selected to come along, have supper and frankly discuss and critique the topic of the day.

I was lucky enough to be asked to take part in this year's Metaphwoar, organised by Andy Whitlock and Poke as part of Intenet Week Europe. 

Tim Malbon at Metaphwoar! 2011 from Poke on Vimeo.

In recent months we have hosted a few events at our London HQ. We've held a couple of show and tells, plus some panel chats and presentations on different technologies and ways of working. These have been fun: bright people sharing ideas with a very engaged audience usually makes for a good time. Also, each event offers an opportunity to meet new people, which is great.

At the end of this month we're hosting a talk by the hugely inspirational Cindy Gallop, and then in early October we're welcoming a panel of highly interesting characters for Storywarp 2. Read on for more info on these events, and how to RSVP.

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about conferences. Partially because I'm looking for some good ones to add to my autumn calendar, but also because this evening my colleague Leila Johnston and I are hosting our own conference, Storywarp.

I'm a little nervous about the event – will people enjoy themselves? will I make a good moderator? will we have enough beer? – but I'm also really excited: I'm about to hear a lot of interesting ideas from bright people, and at least one of those people ISN'T a white male.  

This week Made by Many put on an event for the D&AD New Blood festival. As New Blood is designed to welcome graduates to the creative industry, we thought it best to hand over the floor to two of our most recently-graduated members of staff, Conor and Cath. 

The days are ticking down until the mother of all networking, tech-goggling, idea-exploding, tequila-swilling events, SXSWi.

Last year we headed West en masse, but this year we're taking a slightly smaller contingent (note I did not say 'keeping a lower profile' – there'll be none of that!). However, in keeping with last year, we're kicking off our Austin mission with a London tweet-up.  

We’ve held some interesting talks here at Made by Many over the last couple of years, and I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve got an exciting one coming up next week.

We’ve invited John-Henry Barac, the designer of the tremendously successful Guardian iPhoneapp, to come and share his experiences in designing a newspaper app for the iPhone. Our friends at BBH London have kindly agreed to provide a room for the talk, for which we’re very grateful.

The Guardian iPhone app has been a huge hit, and recently won the innovation award at the AOP awards, where the judges said that it “broke the mould of how content to mobile can bemonetised”.

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to attend The Guardian’sAcvtivate2010 Summit, which is dedicated to looking at how the Internet is changing the world. The focus seemed to be very much on global good. Props need to go to Robin Hough, Head of Media Events and his team for packing in some of the most fascinating and inspiring speakers into a single day. Although it was fairly exhausting, it was worth being exhausted for.

Here are a few themes that stood out for me.

London’s a great city to be working in digital/social/whateveryouliketocallit. There are lots of interesting events happening all the time, like the Clay Shirky talk we went to at the RSA a couple of days ago. 

The problem is that these events aren’t easy to keep track of. There’s always Twitter but with the real-time nature of the thing, you’re likely to miss announcements if you aren’t on the service at that particular time. I’ve also heard a few people asking around on Twitter for a calendar that lists events related to our industry, and haven’t found a suitable one yet. So I put together a list of one, which you can access here. 

I’ve enjoyed following the debate around Manuel Lima’s information visualisation manifesto, published after he spoke here at Kingly Street last month (see Justin’s post below). The manifesto was sparked by a call from a part of the audience for a critical discourse on data visualisation, so that we could stop just going “Ooohhh” and begin to answer the question ‘What makes a good diagram?’.

Manuel’s response was the succinct and simple yardstick: “form follows revelation”.

He elaborates: 

Form doesn’t follow data. Data is incongruent by nature. Form follows a purpose, and in the case of Information Visualization, Form follows Revelation…. Independently of the subject, the purpose should always be centered on explanation and unveiling, which in turn leads to discovery and insight.