Design for Mobile, the Recap

We had a great time at Design For Mobile, our first conference. I had asked every speaker to teach me something new, and they all did. We're still integrating everything we learned, both from speakers and participants.

Most participants were especially interested in Mike Lundy's case study of how Sprint deployed the Samsung Instinct, with their "tiger team" bypassing the normal processes. It reminded me a bit of how the iPhone happened.

In addition to the many things I learned, I had a jaw-dropping moment, a brain-stopping moment, and a wonder moment.

Jaw-dropping: Jason Ward (Sprint) talked about the sheer scope of the research program at Sprint. Historical research, moving averages, and much much more. I was very impressed with the amount of data they had to work with, and then it turned out he only discussed one of the three legs of their program. It reminded me that there are advantages to having resources behind you.

Brain-stopping: Jared Benson (Punchcut) in his Presence Manifesto (all good points!) mentioned some inspiring research by folks over at Nokia, using the simplest of location tags: "home," "office," "downtown," "grocery store," "unknown." The magic here was the power of the human brain to make inference. If I see that my spouse has the tag "unknown," and I know his schedule, I can infer that he's on his way home right now. On the other hand, people who don't know his habits won't get any good information. So what can we do from a minimalist perspective to facilitate connections without impinging privacy? (Jared, I'm sorry, I missed a couple minutes of your talk as a result of this).

Wonder: Liselott Brunneberg showed us video of teens playing her game prototype system. Kids used a scanning device to "hear" what was happening in different objects of their real-world environment, in a church, a field, or anything. They needed to get clues to solve their mystery. The wonder? 18 minutes into the experience, the kids were still actively holding up the scope and panning back and forth across the car. The Wii got us up out of our sofa, this prototype gets our torso and arms moving in the car. Wow.

I was also struck by the fact that no two of our approximately five researchers shared the same discipline. How lucky we are to draw from so many sources for information and inspiration!

We'll be doing the conference again next year, and we'll be making videos available (some for sale) soon.