Wherein I finally write about my IDEA Conference experience

The conference that I spent around 8 months planning, IDEA, transpired over the course of last Monday and Tuesday. In short, it went really well. Attendees seemed genuinely enthused — many went out of their way thank me. The speakers had a good time with one another and the audience. And, after I was able [...]

For your listening pleasure…

We’re working to get all the presentations and audio up from IDEA. But, in the meantime, I just want to point you all to the audio of Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote [12MB MP3]. It was amazing — he summarized the event brilliantly, and then exhorted the audience to do better. He also drew a diagram.

A Day in San Francisco

Days like yesterday remind me how much I do miss living in San Francisco. I had a day all to myself, with no plans, so I headed to SF, and biked around. I’ve drawn out the bike route on Community Walk, and am embedding it here: CommunityWalk Map – October 14, 2006 Bike Ride It [...]

What does Jakob Nielsen have to do with the current state of the web?

Jakob proudly points to an article in The New York Times on Google’s acquisition of YouTube, where he is quoted, “What does a video storage service have to do with search?” Suggesting he doesn’t appreciate the reasoning behind the takeover. This sentence reveals two drastic oversimplifications. Taking the second, first, Google is as much an [...]

Embrace the chaos – designers and systems with emergent behavior

Last night’s BayCHI panel on the role of design and designers in systems with emergent behavior proved lively, fun, and informative. Tim, Larry, and Joy were great contributors. We touched on a lot in the 90 minutes we had, but even so, I realized we could have spoken for an entire day and not exhausted [...]

Two weeks until IDEA!

Suffice to say, I’m excited and anxious about the impending IDEA Conference! We’ve got a stellar line-up, people attending from all over the world (including a group from Thailand!), and a bunch of details to attend to before the big show. The website now has abstracts for pretty much every presentation, and I’m confident in [...]

I’m speaking at BayCHI tomorrow

Tomorrow evening, I’m joining Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, and Larry Cornett, design manager at Yahoo, for a panel at BayCHI on the role of design, and designers, in developing systems with emergent behaviors. I have no idea quite what to expect, apart from it being lively and fun!

Putting you in your place

Last night I took part in a large conversation on the meaning and importance of place and space, and tools that we use to define our relationship to space. There’s been a lot of activity and interest in place — from obvious things like people’s love of Google Maps, to the passion around geotagging photos [...]

Six Days in Lisboa

Thanks to the extremely generous efforts of the organizers of the Shift conference (Bruno! Pedro! Hugo!), I have just spent the last six days in Lisbon, Portugal. It was my first time on that side of the Iberian Peninsula. I’m going to save my thoughts about the conference itself for the Adaptive Path blog. Here, [...]

peterme.com

Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz