I haven’t been to a great conference in a couple of years, since DIS2000 in NYC. And because of poor planning on my part, I won’t be attending these great conferences either.
O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference—February 9-12, 2004
I wish I was going to San Diego. Emerging technologies, great speakers, interesting tutorials and topics. This conference just gives me goosebumps. Be sure to check out Matt Jones’ UI for Alien Cowboys and William H. Janeway’s Alternative Models of the Venture Investing Process. Not to be missed.
IA Summit—February 27-29, 2004
Brenda Laurel is delivering the keynote. And it’s in Austin, now why wasn’t it there when I lived in Austin. It is the leading conference on Information Architecture. And with Jared Spool, Janice Fraser, Jesse James Garrett, George Olsen, Don Turnbull and Ann Rockley
SXSW—March 12-16, 2004
Music, Interactive and Film. It is an experience. Howard Rheingold, author of SmartMobs, is scheduled to keynote. It is no surprise that Brenda Laurel is giving the opening keynote. Go for the IA Summit and stay for the SXSW. Douglas Bowman, Tantek Celik, Cory Doctorow, Joi Ito, Philip Kaplan, Dave Shea and other Net luminaries, designers, technologists are scheduled to be there.
CHI 2004—April 24-29, 2004
It’s in Vienna, it’s academic, it’s the leading HCI conference. I wish that I had a reason, i.e., the money, to go every year.
DIS 2004—August 1-4, 2004
Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) was one of the innovative conferences I have attended. The blend of art, design and technology, I had not seen before. It is less academic than CHI, but in my opinion it is infinitely more interesting and practical.
Not everyone has the time or the money to attend these great conferences. A group of professionals (me included) is continuing to try to start a conference for Information Architecture, User Experience Design, Usability, etc here in Toronto. The 2003 conference had almost 100 attendees. We learned a lot about running a conference, and hopefully this will show this year.
TUXS 2004 is a forum for professionals to discover, learn and refine the techniques and methodologies for creating compelling, effective user experiences. The theme for TUXS 2004 is "Work Play Live: Integrating the User Experience". TUXS 2004 will include a Design Interactionary. The Design Interactionary is an experiment in participatory design, and design education. The idea is to explore the design process by asking a project team to work together in front of a live audience under extreme time constraints. This environment forces discussion of the design process, team work, organization and asks important questions about how designers do what we do. Teams are presented with a design problem and give ten minutes to propose a solution while the audience observes both their process and the solution.
TUXS is not alone. Toronto is home to a number of other great conferences including: