FOWD Tour Glasgow - My experience graph Notes
15th September 2009 at 5am 12 Comments Tweet a link to this on Twitter ↩
September 14th was the third leg of the FOWD Tour in Glasgow Scotland, the tour events are a great way to meet up with other local webbies in your area and include some brilliant speakers alongside some local talent. Another well coordinated event by @loulou200.
The day as a whole was generally very good, the morning tutorial sessions laboured on a bit but @drewm did a fantastic job of simplifying why and how to use Microformats something I’ve been keen to start using properly while the Silverlight and Adobe Air presentations simply didn’t interest me.
Lunch at FOWD Tour Glasgow – Photo by Ashley Baxter
The afternoon talks were a real treat though, Patrick Lauke from Opera did a great job of defending keyboard navigation and implored us to consider people who aren’t using a mouse; Drew McLellan’s presentation on Cost Effective Web Development was top notch and followed up by the very inspiring local speaker Colin Hewitt who spoke about Design, Release, Iterate: The Importance of Acting on Feedback – something I took a lot away from. Last up was Bruce Lawson from Opera who albeit tight on time had a good overview of HTML5 where it’s going and how we can use it now.
Photo by Rick Nunn
The only real disappointment of the day was the lack of discussions on proper design related topics – hopefully when the FOWD Tour returns that can be rectified.
As usual I met a bunch of super people including @ricknunn, @rockers_delight, @roanlavery, @rougebert, @sneeu, @colinhewitt, @jackosborne, @fusedreality, @synapticmishap – and like Russell Davies at dConstruct, Matt Gifford realised the true way to a geeks heart audience participation is Kinder Eggs!
Comments
Brilliant graph! I’m surprised the adobe air stuff wasn’t that good… I’m quite keen to get into that technology, but I guess it depends how it was presented. Did you manage to get yourself a kinder egg this time?
@Kat – It wasn’t that the Adobe Air presentation wasn’t good, Matt Gifford did a great job at presenting it and knocking people out with Kinder Eggs (of which I got none again) – it’s more that I (a) am not interested in Adobe Air and (b) failed to see how it related to the Future of Web Design.
Looks like it was a great day! Good job on the graph, really gives the non-goers a great impression of it. Can’t someone make a webapp for this?
Wow, a FOWD with no design specific sessions?
Anyway, that experience graph thing is going to take off. You should make a micro site for them :)
Nice round up, I had a good day over all, but some more designerish talks would have been good. I think Colin's talk was the highlight for me, that & the steak burger with flat out the BIGGEST chips I have ever seen!
None of the talks were bad, but most of them weren’t particularly design related (like you said). For that reason I found the conference itself a little disappointing – I’m glad my work paid for it, not out my own pocket. The after party was indeed the best part, but I also enjoyed the talk by Colin.
I’d agree with that graph. I was a bit disappointed by how ‘developery’ the day was in general. The importance of acting on customer feedback and the html 5 presentations were definite highlights.
I pretty much agree with the graph too. I didn’t mind it being too much guided towards web development, but I wish it wasn’t.
I loved the after party as well—I just wish I didn’t have to leave it so early!
Agreed, when you think that it was a “design” conference, then yes your graph is spot on.
Nice one Sam. I’m just gutted i didn’t get a kinder egg. It was nice to meet a few new folks like Rick and Ashley too. I also learned that I need to spend more time on my slides next time!
