2/3 If the Eyeo Festival were the golden ratio, we’d already be past the part of ideal transition and focus. There’s only one more party and five more chances to hear folks share their work and wisdom. While today’s sessions brought more inspiration and insight, I made better picks yesterday. Maybe my brain is just getting full. Highlights: Jake Barton, who’s work I first learned of back in 2007 and who I had the pleasure of meeting briefly in Los Angeles last year at AAM, spoke about Story Corps, Change By Us and the 9/11 Memorial Museum in his talk Read/Write/Speak Memory.  Jake’s work has a relentless tenderness to it and this morning’s list of examples were no different.  There were several times in the course of his presentation where I fought back tears and rubbed my arms to erase the goosebumps. It wasn’t all sappy, though… Change By Us had me re-imagining my museum as a place where every visitor and staff member is given a post-it notepad and told to make suggestions, ask questions and share ideas about the space.  As with most of the projects people have shared here this week, Jake’s code will be open source and I hope to see how well it works with our museum’s campus. Perhaps one of the biggest things I will take away from Jake’s talk today is the notion of asking a client (or visitor or participant or colleague) to critique something instead of approve it.  I like how that approach compliments a definition of failure as not something associated with shame, but rather something that indicates progress.   Right after Jake, Zach Lieberman took the stage for his talk, Drawing, Movement, Magic.  Zach’s talk was impossible to take notes for — so many examples and concepts so new to me that it would’ve taken too long to conceptualize into meaningful doodles or sentences — face projection, eye-movement graffiti, screaming contest apps, temporary media lab space, nighttime projection involving dance, Surface tables and mobile phones.   I have the sense that Zach’s work will sit with me in the way a good movie has you thinking about the characters for days after. Later in the day, Jer Thorp spoke of his use of transitions in visualizations, sharing many examples with complete and commented Processing code.  One example closely resembles a series of sketches I’ve made of blog posts and I am eager to see if I can reuse it to create dynamic views of the data.   This brings me to a request for future Eyeo Festivals: I’d like a dedicated space for folks who are inspired by shared code to go and play with it and to get help by folks who know lots about code since we’re all in the same space.  I felt this way yesterday with the ProtoSnap, too.  There’s no way I’m going back to my hotel room to work on code when there’s so much energy and stuff happening at the conference, but I wonder how much more enthusiasm I’d be able to retain for the plane ride home, or the weekend that follows, if I got something started while I’m still here. There’s something in the air at this conference that has people realizing that they can change the world.  Part of it is surely being around folks who already have.

2/3

If the Eyeo Festival were the golden ratio, we’d already be past the part of ideal transition and focus. There’s only one more party and five more chances to hear folks share their work and wisdom. While today’s sessions brought more inspiration and insight, I made better picks yesterday. Maybe my brain is just getting full. Highlights:

Jake Barton, who’s work I first learned of back in 2007 and who I had the pleasure of meeting briefly in Los Angeles last year at AAM, spoke about Story Corps, Change By Us and the 9/11 Memorial Museum in his talk Read/Write/Speak Memory.  Jake’s work has a relentless tenderness to it and this morning’s list of examples were no different.  There were several times in the course of his presentation where I fought back tears and rubbed my arms to erase the goosebumps.

It wasn’t all sappy, though… Change By Us had me re-imagining my museum as a place where every visitor and staff member is given a post-it notepad and told to make suggestions, ask questions and share ideas about the space.  As with most of the projects people have shared here this week, Jake’s code will be open source and I hope to see how well it works with our museum’s campus.

Perhaps one of the biggest things I will take away from Jake’s talk today is the notion of asking a client (or visitor or participant or colleague) to critique something instead of approve it.  I like how that approach compliments a definition of failure as not something associated with shame, but rather something that indicates progress.  

Right after Jake, Zach Lieberman took the stage for his talk, Drawing, Movement, Magic.  Zach’s talk was impossible to take notes for — so many examples and concepts so new to me that it would’ve taken too long to conceptualize into meaningful doodles or sentences — face projection, eye-movement graffiti, screaming contest apps, temporary media lab space, nighttime projection involving dance, Surface tables and mobile phones.   I have the sense that Zach’s work will sit with me in the way a good movie has you thinking about the characters for days after.

Later in the day, Jer Thorp spoke of his use of transitions in visualizations, sharing many examples with complete and commented Processing code.  One example closely resembles a series of sketches I’ve made of blog posts and I am eager to see if I can reuse it to create dynamic views of the data.  

This brings me to a request for future Eyeo Festivals: I’d like a dedicated space for folks who are inspired by shared code to go and play with it and to get help by folks who know lots about code since we’re all in the same space.  I felt this way yesterday with the ProtoSnap, too.  There’s no way I’m going back to my hotel room to work on code when there’s so much energy and stuff happening at the conference, but I wonder how much more enthusiasm I’d be able to retain for the plane ride home, or the weekend that follows, if I got something started while I’m still here.

There’s something in the air at this conference that has people realizing that they can change the world.  Part of it is surely being around folks who already have.