Rain kindly agreed to be another of my guest bloggers from MIX09 as I couldn’t get to Las Vegas this year and has done an amazing write up of the event – with photos too. Now I’m REALLY jealous that I didn’t manage to get there! Over to Rain…
I’ve been at MIX09 with my colleague Ian Forrester. It’s been a staggering four days of intense talks and workshops. I’ve met some great people here from all over the world – I’ve especially appreciated spending time with Microsoft blog queen Betsy Aoki and Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist at TechSmith, (yes, two Betsy’s in the same room!) who are both very cool geek ladies. We had some great discussion on geek, media and gender issues as well as a lot of fun – they’ve been really kind in helping me find vegan food in Las Vegas, and also loading me up with vitamin C and herbal teabags as I’ve had a horrid cold – yes that’s why I’ve been so quiet at question time!
At the glittering MIX09 party on the roof of Tao, Ian and I had an amazing, affirming chat with Molly Holzschlag, (who is quite frankly a legend) about life, confidence, work and the great stuff that we get to do, and I also got to meet the wonderful Erica O’Grady, social media consultant at Peanut Butter Media ☺
There were a huge variety of talks to attend and here’s a shortlist of some of my favourites:
• Johnny Lee – talked about some of his projects, it was great to hear how he had built his famous 3D display with head tracking and other projects with the Wiimote. He also gave us a tour of some of his favourite research projects by other people, such as mixed reality devices including haptics, tiny handheld projectors and augmented surfaces: where you leave the traditional monitor area expanding out onto tables and surfaces. Some of the prototypes that he mentioned can be attempted using easily available kit and household bits and pieces and as Johnny will be in the UK in May at Thinking Digital (Backstage are a sponsor) – it will be a great opportunity for any developers and home tinkerers to ask him how they can investigate building and forwarding open source research into some of these emerging technologies 
• 2ndfactory – these guys have created an open source toolkit for the Deep Zone image generator called Jellyfish Deep Zoom which has two main parts: the first is a client side library (.dll) that can be used for Deep Zoom development on client side, and the second is server side deep zoom slicing application that can use for dynamic generation of deep zoom images and collections • Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research – his keynote kicked off the conference making some cool observations about the future of user experience, prototyping and good design – he was also around all week mingling and talking to students and attendees • Sketchflow – a prototyping tool that uses pipes with Silverlight3 that can be used to distribute your application sketches and workflow designs to your clients – I wonder what Adobe and their users will make of this?
• Joe Fletcher – discussed touch and gesture computing, citing examples from his work on Surface and its design principles. He made the point that ‘touch’ is not good for everything, but is great for specific aspects. He took us on a historical journey of interfaces from the command line to graphical user interface, to contemporary natural user interface – describing and comparing each one in turn. He finished with a quote from the film Ghost in the Shell: ‘your effort to remain what you are is what limits you’ – very true! I enjoyed his honest style of presentation and that he took a very objective look at the functionality vs. limitations of this growing technology
• Deborah Adler, who spoke at the keynote on day two. She told us the story of her quest to investigate better design for pharmacy labeling for her master’s thesis after her grandmother took the wrong medicine and became ill. She created a system that uses colour coded bands for different family members, labeling in colours that people could read, intuitive icons, consistent labeling and more. She also made prototypes: "I’m not an industrial designer, so I had to make my prototypes out of plexi tubing and doll house materials" – a very interesting insight into the importance of UX and a humanised approach to working out problems. I think essential design and packaging problems like the ones Deborah encountered makes a very good case for open design principles!
• Objectified movie by Gary Huswit – this was the 2nd showing in the world of this movie, after last week’s SXSW. It’s a very interesting insight into the motivations and thought processes of product designers, as well as how we relate to objects and they become part of our lives and finally what happens to them when they are cast aside. The film is beautifully shot and looks great on screen, though I’d have like to seen the designer’s probed a little more on some subjects! From a corporate point of view, there were a lot of announcements and launches from Microsoft, such as Internet Explorer 8, which was backed up with workshops to explain and probe deeper into the inner workings and features such as new menus and the interesting ‘private mode‘ – hmm what’s that for? 
I will have a closer look at IE 8 back home, but I’ll be sticking with FireFox3 for now
Also, tons on Silverlight3 applications such as the Sketchflow application I mentioned earlier (interestingly, Silverlight isn’t bundled with IE8). Overall, MIX09 was a really good conference with a lot to see and hear. It was really great to see some blurring/mingling between designers and developers and even some mutual appreciation The quality of the talks and workshops was excellent, but of course, this often made it really tough to chose what to attend!
Thanks Rain. We’ll get you onto IE8 one day though
