Gather 2012: Middle Session

Making infographics that don’t suck – Mike Mike Dickison

  • www.numberpix.com
  • Didn’t have a chance to take notes cause it was so full I couldn’t sit down

Gather on mass – featuring Rowan Simpson, Karl von Randow and Penny Hagen

Rowan Simpsons

  • Developers + designers + dictators
  • Poster Boy Dictator = Steve Jobs
  • change made by people: who care, have authority, take responsibility
  • Careful about words they use – Don’t use “they” , careful how you describe colleges, other teams, “the business”
  • Domestics – members of cycling team supporting head rider
  • Focus – we all know it is good but it is uncommon.
  • Opposite of focus – Don’t get bored, don’t flail
  • You don’t have to invent you just have to leverage these and execute
  • Innovation just one action, execution requires you to keep going though many steps
  • MVP – whatever you can sell
  • Sales – How will overcome your obscurity?
  • Be a polymath – what else are you good at? where is the intersection?

Karl van Randow

  • Focus on design – how it looks and how it works
  • “NASCAR fans” – generic term for customers
  • Team in NZ, USA and Europe. ichat and skype
  • Camera+
  • Changed from “shoot and share” to “post-processing app”
  • Lots of mockups, iterative design
  • Initial startup page had animated viewfinder, launched with but removed after 6 months
  • Custom typeface, skewed thumbnails, etc makes app feel unique
  • Release to correspond with WWDC keynote, competition to give away $10k of camera gear. Lots of public charts of sales ( with nice infographics) to attract attention

Penny Hagen

  • Design in the Wild.
  • Iterative, largely private within company/studio at the start
  • Few users at the start in house, but only a few testers.
  • Beat blurs private/public
  • Crowd sourcing – get ideas from public – cars, nightclubs, ACC ideas
  • Open Design – Normal process but all phases open to public and takes input from public – eg Drupal website redesign ( 1600 people participated )
  • Emergent Design – Initial design and then evolve final design from there. Patchwork prototyping ( start with existing software product and patch )
  • DIY Design – Ponoko – Build a platform and let end users design
  • Constant Design – ongoing conversations
  • Potential / Challenges = mass distributed participation – transparency – everyone becomes a design
  • Questions – who, how, why? – who owns ideas/IP? – who decides what is good/right – what tools? – what is designers roles? – why aren’t more people doing it?

 

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