Taking Stock

It’s been a few days since DUX 2007 ended and I have spent some time thinking about the event, reviewing my notes, letting the deep thoughts marinate. Overall it was a terrific conference, easily the best one I have attended. It was not without flaw, but taken on the whole I have no doubt that it was time and (corporate) money well spent.

Frankly, a major appeal of this year’s DUX was the location: Chicago. This is one of those self-fulfilling prophecy sorts of things, I imagine. By holding the event in such a central and desirable location, the organizers attracted more and better speakers. This pays dividends to the attendees, but on the other hand Chicago is an expensive city.

DUX Presentations: A mixed bag.

I was fortunate to attend the Monday tutorial by Kevin Brooks: Storytelling in business presentation and design. (I will share some of what I learned in a later post). For me it was a terrific way to start the event. It was a storytelling workshop, in effect, and though the focus on applicability to business presentations was minor, Brooks’ teaching style, the smallish class size, and the half-day format all contributed to a terrific start to DUX.

With the Tutorials portion occupying most of Monday, the main event started at 4:15pm with a semi-random series of talks that were a good preview of the mix of style and substance that we’d witness during the following two days. Some talks were overly academic, pie-in-the-sky experiments, others were visionary and conceptual. Some straddled the boundary between academia and practice.

Simplicity & The Information Firehose

There were two standout presentations from the first group. First, BJ Fogg’s video-delivered examination of Simplicity. He is working to develop definable measurements of simplicity, and with a few clear statements, helped the audience grasp his work. It was a fun, engaging, effective and enlightening presentation, and the only one delivered solely via video.

David Pescovitz‘ presentation on Sipping from the Information Firehose was an entertaining and exuberant look at how technology can help us sift through the age of zillionics and access relevant and meaningful information. One example: Picture yourself walking through downtown, while a digital readout projected inside the lens of your glasses, shows information such as your current location, instant access to customer reviews of a restaurant you are looking at, or real-time information on physical presence of people in your social network.

On the other hand, some of the talks were all but indecipherable. I foumd it difficult to cull the meaning behind or application of the SpiderCrab, Bi-Polar Laddering (?) and AnyPhone studies. These talks, however, offered a taste of the more eccentric* elements of the conference that we would be fed over the following two days. They were academic and experiemental in nature, like many others at the conference. And I was lost.

Overall

The conference was dense with fascinating peeks into emerging concepts, novel studies of human behavior impacted by technology, and glimpses into technologies that lay just around the proverbial corner.

The high concentration of dissertations and presentations of findings lent the event an overly-academic focus, but on the bright side this kept it from being a collection of predictions and product previews of private-beta social apps.

Regardless of particular subject matter, I was disappointed by the some of the speakers, many of whom appeared to be delivering oral versions of their findings papers. The accompanying PowerPoint prezos, collections of bullet points projected and then read to the audience, were often sleep inducing.

Meanwhile, many in the audience were busy multitasking. I took notes in my new Moleskine, thoughtfully provided in the conference welcome pack. But anyone with a BlackBerry, iPhone or laptop was reading, posting, texting, and emailing, or generally busy doing anything but listening attentively.

A major disappointment was the lack of actual social media interaction for the event. There was no official blog, no DUX twitter, no live online question submission tool, no speaker ratings or feedback mechanism. I have no doubt that any - or preferably all - of these types of tools would have kept the audience more engaged.

Wait, there’s more!

The conference was so full of new ideas and great speakers. Over the next week or so, I will post additional entries on DUX, focusing on particular talks and themes that emerged from the conference.