January is all about renewal – many of us use it as a chance to press the reset button, to stop procrastinating and get fit or even just get a new hair cut. It’s also the time when many companies try and work out what 2012 and beyond will bring – even though really we have no idea.

I watched a fascinating session from Thinking Digital 2011 by ex-poker player Caspar Berry whose premise is ‘It is only because tomorrow is uncertain that today has any meaning at all’. Although we try desperately to predict the future and make sense of the uncertainty the future brings, if we all knew exactly what was going to happen in the next 5 years that would be unbearably boring. As a species we need to be able to rise to the challenge of the unknown. Bearing that in mind, we’ve been predicting the future of design and now we turn our crystal ball of supposition to overall Tech Trends for 2012. You can always look back and scoff at the futility of our predictions in 5 years time!

What are we excited about this month? Well, we’re heading off to Web Heroines, a mini-conference mainly for women (they do allow blokes through the door as well) with the aim of encouraging more women into design and technology (in the UK women make up only 12% of the design/tech work force). There’s a bunch of great speakers including Julie Howell, Naomi Atkinson, Rachel Andrew, Sarah Mcvittie and Sarah Parmenter and we’ll be following some of the sessions on Ubelly.

We’re also going to be exploring the New Adventures in Web Design conference in Nottingham where 8 inspirational speakers will be uncovering the latest design concepts. Plus there’s a tonne of stuff around the conference itself like Erskine Bowling, 5-a-side-fr00tball and of course the chance to party. Can’t wait!

See you in February,

Sara Allison – @SaraAllison

Using those 50+ pictures I’ve created a Deep Zoom montage using Deep Zoom Composer, including some pictures of the Microsoft BizSpark party and also a wall of tattoos since I was lucky enough to be shown some amazing examples! Thanks so much to everyone who allowed me to photograph them, I really enjoyed meeting you.

The Thinking Digital conference guide said that attending the conference gives your brain exercise equivalent to running in the Great North Run constantly for 2.5 days. That sounds pretty painful! In truth, it’s an exciting, friendly conference where great ideas are shared, speakers mingle freely with attendees (including the parties) and you’re never on your own for more than two minutes.

So where (and how?) do diamond Shreddies come in? Their inevitable rise to the ranks of ‘Meme of Thinking Digital 2010’ was borne from one of the most lauded sessions, delivered by Rory Sutherland who referenced diamond Shreddies as an example of good PR.

For those of you who weren’t able to be there in person, the sessions will be live on the Thinking Digital website. In the meantime, here’s an overview of the event from yours truly. Many thanks  to Herb at Codeworks for letting us film at the event and to Dom at Newspepper for his excellent camera and production skills.

 Yesterday was the first day of the 2010 Thinking Digital Conference (#Thinking Digital) – and I made some great connections. After registering for the conference and some networking at the Eye on the Tyne, some of us headed for the bus to take us to the ‘Video for the Web’ workshop at Gateshead College. We played ‘follow my leader’ off the bus (it’s been ages since I went on a trip bus!) and met Christian Payne who was running the session. The room was filled with about 30 Macs for us to play with and we had an enforced game of musical chairs until someone went to steal some more from an unsuspecting lecturer.

The session itself was filled with information from what equipment Christian uses to trek across the world creating guerrilla-style documentaries to camera angles, composition and how to make a compelling 12 second video.

At the end of the workshop we got into groups of 3 to create our own video, putting into practice what we’d learned. Here’s our output – filmed and edited in about 20 minutes so the editing is very rough and the sound effects are in the wrong place! We learned that less is more (the sound effects were actually distracting) and most importantly to keep it short. Thanks Christian!