Speaking at The Digital Pond

Last week was a busy one. Amongst some work with the ODI that we’re doing for the BBC, I also spoke at an event called The Digital Pond one evening.

The Digital Pond is a free meetup, and this one was titled ‘Responding To The Responsive Web: Insights On Reshaping User Experience‘. I had the pleasure of catching up with fellow Pond speaker Jeremy Keith, and was glad that unlike our first meeting back in June, this time around I was less of a nervous wreck about speaking and could actually process enough words to have a better chat. I look forward to continuing my run of events with him (but more importantly absorbing his local food knowledge) in Bologna for From the Front next month.

My talk was an extended version of the one I gave at Jeremy’s Responsive Day Out 2, and covered pretty much the same themes but in a different order and amount of depth. It’s basically about how I think technology is an important part of experiences, and how it can be used to make sites more responsive… but with a cautioner! It was great to be able to expand on some areas that I’d had to fly through in the previous version, but I’m still not entirely happy with it and will be throwing it all back through the mincer before its final outing in September. I hadn’t had much time to learn the new parts, so I’d also like to work on being more comfortable with fewer notes too.

After both talks, we fielded an assortment of questions from the audience. I would like to apologise to anyone from the 228 attendees who had to leave as it was getting late, or who were desperately lusting after a beer, because we rambled on. A lot. And I loved it. It’s always interesting to talk to people about their opinions and the challenges they face, and the Q&A, at least for me, was the best bit of the night. Jeremy’s talk was brilliant, but hearing him speak off the cuff on subjects that he’s clearly very passionate and knowledgeable about (and getting to throw in my two pennies’ worth) was even better. More ranting opportunities at future events, meetup/conference organisers!

What may appear to be a romantic duet in the midst of the crowd was actually the first question – how do we judge what is ‘ethical’?

My slides are up on Slideshare, and I believe that there will be videos released at some point, so watch out for those. I’ll add them to this post if I’m made aware of them.

I’d encourage you all to head to a Digital Pond in the future if you can. Thanks once again to the organisers, and to everyone who came. I had a really fun night.

Photos stolen from The Digital Pond meetup group.