The conference is ending. Some observations:

- user exp is a big word. for the context of this conference, it meant

something like a humanized version of the term HCI with more marketing

focus.

- solving and/or improving existing problems/product (aka textbook

usability) sounded like yesterday’s as topics in a conference like

this - though it is the evidence that the real world is still being

educated about this

- seeing the practices in the order of phases of product development,

the presentations saturate more on both extreme ends, leaving the

transformatio nin the middle as a mystery

- closing plenary was inspiring as was his book. it hinted on that its

our homework to design things to increase the likelihood of incurring

positive unintended consequences

- reflecting upon tenner’s talk, our work (nokia sensor) in the past

did try to foresee unintended social consequences by user trials to

design for making such consequences more positive. since i am not a

very good writer nor public speaker, i hope to see more work from

others in the industry on this issue. personally i found it the most

difficult (and expensive) part of concept development work - if

observing/analyzing the existing world and throwing ideas are the

sweetest part of the exploration work - based on my experience. that

said, i am not saying that such work is necessary all the time. as

tenner said, sometimes intuition of a good designer is enough.

- entertainment. this conference featured a professional conference MC

who’s inbetween a standup comedia and a talkshow host. it took some

time to get used to (i never did actually) to understand why more time

is given to her than the audience of the speaker. the format made me

think never-come-back-again-to-this-conf unless you want to simply

socialize (which could have been great had i not been jetlagged so

long). there’s definitely a trend in stressing the show element in

conf presentations - who’d hate it when our attention span is getting

shorter and shorter?