Bill ‘Frickin’ Buxton (as coined by Josh Clark) spoke at Future of Web Design this year on the social network of devices. In essence his talk focussed on the state of play when it comes to device interaction, and some thoughts, problems and procedures associated with interaction design in the future. In Bill’s eyes, it’s all about making technology transparent and interaction seamless in everyday life. That is, you shouldn’t have to worry about technology in different concepts, and if you can see the machine/computer/motors in what you’re doing, then the design is broken.

However, it wasn’t the talk that inspired this post, but something that Bill said in response to a question after the talk. An audience member asked about the problems that we face with technological hurdles (like processing power, memory and battery) when it comes to creating experiences across devices and contexts.

In response, Bill told a story about a watch he owns. It’s a small Casio watch with a capacitive touch screen that allows direct input onto the face of the watch to access information. For example, if he wanted to know what 1+2 was, he would draw ‘1’, ‘+’, ‘2’, ‘= and the watch would show ’3’. If he wanted to look up a phone number, he’d start to draw the name of the person he was searching for. This is an intuitive and well designed piece of technology that Bill bought in 1984. Earlier in his talk, Bill made the comment that technology takes 20 years to go from invention to commercial visibility. That is, the technology that is heralded as new and cool now is actually 20 years old, and the things that are built today won’t be seen in the mainstream till 2032. In Bill’s words, “the only processing problem we face today is up here in our brain, with our creative process.”

It’s an interesting concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot. We’re currently in an age where almost anything is possible with technology. However, the real challenge is in the ideas and the creativity attached to coming up to what can be done with the technology.

It’s an incredibly inspiring thing to think on, and is something that makes me incredibly excited, especially with all the crazy, cool, wonderful things that come out of hacks and hack days. However, I believe that as developers and designers, we need to start looking outside our own fields. This is where I see hack days focussed around non-tech areas (like Music Hack Day, Culture Hack and Culture Code) as incredibly exciting opportunities where non-tech people and tech people come together, come up with ideas together, and build things together…

Now that technology isn’t standing in the way of the possibilities, it’s time to make something awesome. Get out there and do it.

We’re down at Future of Web Design today blogging, sketchnoting and showing people Windows 8 on the Ubelly stand. Carsonified have yet again done a brilliant job at bringing in some of the best speakers in the industry to talk about app and web design, including Brendan Dawes, Bill Buxton, Remy Sharp and Jon Tan.

To celebrate FOWD, we’ve had a cool little Kinect hack built by nUbelly-er Syd Lawrence especially for the design crowd. Syd’s created an HTML Helvetica or Arial quiz, using Kinect as the pointer and running in IE10. It’s a cool little experiment in what you can do connecting Kinect and web technologies, and shows some of the possibilities of Windows 8 and IE10.

More importantly, it’s a cheeky way of testing designers on something that a lot of people are a little bit passionate about. So far we’ve had only a handful get above 8/10, and so far I’ve only seen the formidable Jon Tan get a perfect score (well, he did cofound FontDeck…).

If you’re down at FOWD, why not come down and give it a go. While you’re there, quiz Syd on how he built it, and have a chat to Martin or Andrew about the other cool stuff you can do with HTML & JS, and Windows 8 & IE10. If you aren’t down here, Syd will be doing a writeup of how he built the app, and we’ll have a slightly updated version for Reasons to be Appy later in the month!

As we announced almost a month ago, the Windows 8 consumer preview is now available to download and develop for. However, the Windows Store won’t be open for apps until Windows 8 is available for consumer release. So… we’re offering Ubelly readers the opportunity to get in early…

Last week we posted how to get started with Windows 8 development, but we’ll also be hosting a series of Windows 8 Camps, where people will learn how to build a Metro Style app using HTML and JS, as well as a primer on the Metro design language, and getting your app ready for the Windows Store. Once you have the idea for your app, you can join the Windows 8 Developer Linked In Group to get your app into the Windows Store.

We’ll be holding the Windows 8 Camps across 4 different cities, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Brighton. The camps are free to attend, and will offer a hands-on approach to learning Windows 8 app development. Keen? Register below to come along!

Any comments or questions? Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter.

See you there!

At New Adventures in Web Design, we launched the second year of The Critters and opened nominations to the community at large. At the same time we did a round robin with the guys and girls we’ve spoken to, seen on stage and generally admired over the past few years to build a brilliant judging panel to whittle down your nominations to a shortlist for everyone to vote on.

After a slightly overwhelming response with nominations, and a good month of deliberating from the judges, we’ve finally pulled together this year’s shortlist for The Critters Web Design and Development Awards.

Without further ado…

Meme of the Year

Nyan Cat
Casual Pepper Spraying Cop
(I was going to nominate a meme, but) I took an arrow to the knee

Win of the Year

Shelving of SOPA
Occupy Movement
Bill Gates giving away half his personal fortune to charity

Web We Would Mate With

2011.buildconf.com
Boston Globe
The Great Discontent

Web Open to All

Gov.uk
HTML5 Doctor
A List Apart

Web Personality of the Year

Aral Balkan
Simon Collison
Robert Stringer

Next Big Thing

Matt Gifford
Simon Foster
Anna Debenham

Voice of the Year

Aral Balkan
Frank Chimero
Wilson Miner

Event of the Year

New Adventures
Build 2011
Web Developers Conference

Congratulations to all those nominated! The event itself will take place on June 20 in East London, where attendees will have the chance to live vote for the winners. Keep an eye on Twitter and the site to find out how you can secure your invite to the event of the year!

Last week saw the return of the annual coding and design conference Design It. Build It. (DIBI for short) in Newcastle. The Ubelly crew were there in force, with Martin on track to do his HTML5 and Human Interaction workshop, and Nubelly-er Helen attending her first conference for ubelly (well, technically her first ever tech conference!). Unfortunately, Martin had to cancel his workshop at the last minute, but we do have some Windows 8 camps coming up in Edinburgh, London and Birmingham for anyone wanting to find out more about developing and designing for Windows 8, and Martin will be doing a talk on HTML5 and Human Interaction at Future of Web Design next month in London.

We also had a little Kinect hack that we put together of the DIBI schedule, where people could navigate the schedule using their bodies and then tweet via QR code their attendance to a particular session. We’ll be posting a more detailed view of the kinect hack in the coming weeks, but keep an eye out for some other cool integrations we’re working on…

The day of the conference itself saw two tracks, one for design and one for developers, with amazing speakers from across the industry. We sat in the design track for the majority of the day and picked up some nuggets of wisdom.

A lot of the day was dedicated to the process of creativity, with only one of the talks I sat in focussing on practical examples of web design. Out of all of these talks, there were a few key points I walked away with…

Play. Create. Share.

Seb Lee-Delisle started the day with a call to arms for developers and designers out there. He thinks that both sides of the fence are getting a little stagnant, and both need to ‘hybridify’ themselves (I think he’s called trademark on the word). That is, designers need to learn how to code, and coders need to start thinking of things in terms of design. The entire talk was boiled down to his final call to action:

Play. Create. Share.

We need to spend more time playing with code and then sharing what we do. In Seb’s words: Do you want to make other people’s stupid ideas? No? Then go out there and play!

We Don’t Try Hard Enough

In Dan Rubin’s ‘All of this has happened before’, he talked about how we’re getting stuck doing things the old way. Dan offered some insight and advice on the creative process. Dan points out that language is very important and we use the words ‘but’, ‘just’ and ‘should’ far too much. Also, we should rethink the way we label things: Fail vs Experiment, Mistake vs Try etc.

In Dan’s eyes, we need to be experimenting and doing small mini-projects to keep pushing things forward, however we also need to focus on our thought processes to make sure we’re doing things in the right way.

A new idea is new connections between old ideas

Cameron Moll closed the day on a very thought provoking talk on the burden of being creative. Most of his talk was around the importance of grit, but the interesting point I took away was around creativity and new ideas. The myth out there is that to be creative means coming up with something completely new. However, in Cameron’s eyes, creativity is organising existing matter. In the (perhaps wrongly accredited) words of Picasso, “good artists copy, great artists steal”.

Overall, DIBI was another brilliant day of learning, meeting and talking to new people and having our minds blown. Thanks to Oli and Elspeth, and the rest of the team at Codeworks for putting on yet another awesome conference.

We also put together some sketchnotes of a few of the talks, which we’ve uploaded to our flickr page and you can check out here.

We’re back at Design It. Build It. in Newcastle again for April. The Ubelly delegation will be returning sans Sad Keanu, with Ubelly’s Martin Beeby running a workshop on HTML5 and Human Interaction (which is sadly sold out already!). We’ll also have some info about some upcoming Ubelly camps for anyone interested in getting their hands dirty with what Martin’s talking about! Because we’re so excited, we asked DIBI organiser, Oli Wood (aka @coldclimate) a bit about himself and the conference conception.

How did you get into web development?

I first got online back in 1992 (or 3, details lost in the history of time) thanks to a future thinking dad and CompuServe. This was pre-www and I spent a lot of time hanging out in a CompuServe forum called GraphDev, with a bunch of guys who ended up as artists on Toy Story. Graphics got me into an early ray tracer (POVray) and this lead me into coding. Between 6th form and university I picked up my first web development job in 1998, building websites for glass companies (niche market). There’s actually still some of the code I wrote back then out there live. IE5 was the new hotness, separation of content and display was in it’s early days and we were only just starting to get to grips with database backed sites. Things have moved on hugely since.

What project are you most proud of from over the years?

Lots of my work has been behind the scenes on web projects. I was really proud of the work I did for a Facebook based start-up called Wishli.st, introducing version control, deployment mechanisms and a PHP framework (CodeIgniter) which meant we developed faster, smarter and more reliably. Wedding Tales has just passed it’s 15,000th wedding photo this week too, and getting emails from happy brides is really satisfying.

What is exciting you in web development at the moment?

Lots and lots of thing On the server side of things I’ve been making a lot of use of Redis this year. It’s a super fast key-value pair store with a really low barrier to entry. I started by using it for storing sessions, then found it handled lists really well. Then I started using it to push data between our live and batch processes (there are better solutions for this by the way). It’s fast, flexible, very easy to get into with driver libraries for most languages.

One of the things that gives me great hope is the rapid adoption of version control over the last few years. When I first left university I ended up running version control and deployment for a massive government project. When I left and came back to the web world version control wasn’t widely adopted and I really struggled to get it implemented where I worked at first. Five years later and it’s more than common place, it’s being used by default everywhere you look.

Service like BitBucket and GitHub have made it far easier to get started, to share and to collaborate. This can only be a good thing.

How and why was DIBI started?

I first got involved because I’d been to the Thinking Digital conference and came away fired up with ideas, but with very little practical I could do. Whilst working with @skipchris we pondered the need for a practical technology conference, ideally bringing designers and developers together. At the time it felt like there was a much harder line between backend developers and those working on the browser side. Over the years this has really changed, especially with technologies like Javascript really blurring the lines. We went to talk to Herb who runs Thinking Digital and 6 months later DIBI came about. Three years later we’ve had thousands of delegates, some really amazing speakers (all of their videos are available) and hopefully helped a tonne of learning and networking to happen.

Tickets for DIBI are still available. It’s an amazing conference and if you’re a designer or developer in the Northern lands you should definitely head up!

What’s more, Oli and the folks from DIBI have offered Ubelly readers an exclusive 15% discount if you use the code ‘ubelly_love_dibi’. Double win.

Most of you would’ve seen the tees we’ve been rocking around the conference circuit for the last 7 months or so, but I just realised we’ve never posted the original images for the designs. Basically, around August last year we discovered a plethora of brilliant vintage B-Gizzle photos from 70s and 80s Microsoft ads. To be honest, these were gold enough as it was, but we wanted to do something a little different and have a bit of an old meets new feel to them.

We ended up getting four prints made up for the tees by awesome graphic designer Peter O’Toole, who took our ideas and converted them into his beautifully vintage style. Anyway, we thought we’d finally share the images…

Once again, it’s been a little while since we’ve had a meme-themed post, and it’s making me sad. Therefore, I’ve decided to take it upon myself to do yet another update of my favourite memes of the moment. What gives you the authority to comment on the academic field of memeology, I hear you ask? Well, dear reader, I have been around the internets for many a year, and have even attempted to create a meme myself (yes, 4 pictures classifies as a meme…).

Regardless, I’ve been trawling the boards of reddit and seas of cheesburger for the past few minutes to find some favourites from the past few months/a bit older than that.

Cooking with Skrillex

If you don’t know who Skrillex is, he is Sonny Moore, a once-upon-a-time high pitched emo singer turned dubstep producer and superstar deejay. He has made the concept of wub wub a top 40 thing, and therefore deserves to be ridiculed on the internet with no punches pulled. My personal favourite is the simple, yet brilliant, Cooking with Skrillex. Take one part Skrillex photo of Sonny ‘dropping the bass’, as the kids call it, add in a dash of photoshopping skills and three parts cooking photography et voila, you have cooking with Skrillex.

However, I just like it because it’s photoshopping with dubstep/food puns.

Notable examples:

Karate Kyle

Karate Kyle is the kid I wish I was in high school. While those who are affected by bullying may have learnt karate and adopted a Chuck Norris style attitude, I chose to resort to Broadway musicals and hang out with the girls. True story (see next meme).

Karate Kyle is my new hero, much in the vein as my other hero, PTSD Clarinet Kid.

Notable examples:

True Story

So, this one time I was walking down the street, when all of a sudden a bear jumped out from in between two houses. This bear just started running towards me, roaring like a bear does. Not knowing what to do, and being totally immersed in the music pumping through my headphones, I pulled my headphones off, and placed them on the charging bear as the bass dropped. The bear turned into a cat. True story.

Yes, this is dog

Yes, this is dog is by far my favourite meme of the moment. Is it because it reveals the fragile state of our current economic climate and how that affects the home lives of millions upon millions of ordinary people? Is it because it’s a harsh but fair commentary on the role that technology plays in our lives, and how society would crumble if we were ripped violently away from our computer overlords?

No.

It’s because it’s a dog pretending to be peoples.

It’s even better when it’s paired with Sloths trying to be peoples.

I know we’ve missed a million and one memes. We were going to cover them all, but then we took an arrow to the knee.

What are the ones we’ve missed that you love?

Let me start by saying that I am not a developer. I’ve been designing and building websites for a good ten years, but html and css are about as indepth I go , aside from the occasional foray into php (WordPress is my demon of choice) or hitting up the interwebs for some js snippets and appropriating where need requires. With this in mind, I recently threw myself into a site build where the concept required some nice, simple jQuery to work correctly…

Cue everything going wrong.

After pulling my hair out for a few hours when a simple piece of code wasn’t working correctly (for no reason at all), I decided to turn to the twittersphere for help. However, the best way I could find for people to help out was to either email all the files to potential helpers (who I like to think look like elves) or give them access to the server. The problem didn’t require something as robust as Github, but needed something that could offer a simple, collaborative solution that I could email the link around to.

Enter tinker.io

Highlighted by the lovely Syd, tinker.io is a simple little open source solution that allows you to input a chunk of html, css and js and display it in an inframed window. Think a blocked up, sharable version of the developer tools that exists in most modern browsers. You can throw some code in and straight away see how it outputs. Even more brilliantly, you can then share the link with people. Each iteration (divvied off when you click the ‘run’ button) creates it’s own version under the unique url…

It’s not the most robust tool out there, and seems to have been mocked up pretty quickly using mootools, but provides a simple answer to a fairly common problem.

Sure, it’s not the social coding revolution of Github, and is a little less feature-laden than something like Cloud9 IDE, but it’s open source, and more importantly, free.

What do you use for collaborative coding? Are there any other tools out there that could help with these kind of problems?

Now that the nominations for the Critters have closed, we’re ferretting away behind the scenes collating the shortlist with our panel of esteemed judges. One of the categories that we’re ultra fond of is the Next Big Thing awards, as it gives recognition to those people who aren’t the household names (yet), but are swiftly moving up the ranks. Looking at the longlist, there’s already an amazing lineup of NBT-ers, and it’s going to be a hard job to whittle it down to just three.

While we found a few moments last week, we caught up with last year’s Next Big Thing winner, Naomi Atkinson…

What have you been up to since winning Next Big Thing at the Critters last year?

Well, things have certainly been going well — I was nominated for the .Net  ‘Designer of the Year 2011′ and was invited to speak at Beyond Tellerand in Dusseldorf and New Adventures in Nottingham, both of which were fantastically inspirational conferences which I really enjoyed being a part of.

The studio’s worked with some great clients and been involved in a number of promising products, and I’ve personally been able to flex my creative muscles with more brand and illustration work alongside my more common UI design, which I’ve absolutely loved. Keep an eye on the studio site as there will be many portfolio updates on their way!

Where abouts do you keep your Critter award?

Where else would it be than right next to me as I work? Haha, it is very much in view on my shelves next to my desk — pink, spiky, and proud

What do you think is the biggest thing designers need to look out for in 2012?

We need to stop thinking in pixels — and more in percentages and fluid responsive layouts. By avoiding designing for a fixed resolution we’ll in turn challenge ourselves to think more about our own processes. I’m still working at how to improve my current process when designing for responsive layouts, I believe this will be an ongoing thing throughout this year at least.

If the rumours are true about the retina display being brought to laptops, this too will challenge our processes, along with our output of course! 

Designing for the web is ever-moving, but that’s exactly as it should be.

Is there anyone you think deserves to be seen as this year’s Next Big Thing?

Everyone.

That’s not a cop-out answer (honest), it’s what I truly believe. Anyone and everyone could be ‘The next big thing’ — they just have to want it, and be constantly pushing themselves to do, think, create, and design bigger and better.