Yesterday was an amazing day for me in Madrid. Last Thursday I was invited (thanks Mr. Gorriti) to participate as a micro-speaker in the fourth edition of the un-conference (desconferencia) held in Madrid and I must admit that it's been an incredibly funny and fulfilling experience.
The format of un-conferences or bar-camps is quite interesting because everybody attending the event should participate in it. Using this pattern, the Madrid Un-conference 4.0 was composed by 19 speakers with their respective 19 micro-lectures of 7 minutes each. The main purpose of this kind of conferences is to promote participation and dialogue between attendees, so after each lecture there was a small time of 5 to 10 minutes to start a conversation about the topic exposed by the speaker with all the people at the other side of the screen. It's been like 8 hours of full immersion into real-life user experience and interaction designer experiences.
We spoke and started conversations about biotechnology and bio-hacking (Agustin Jiménez), innovation on successful and monetized sites (Carlos Ubeda), evolution of standards consortiums and how to evolve standards from a micro-format perspective (Borja Delgado), an state-of-the-form of usability vs. user experience in software engineering (Miguel Jiménez), inertia and learning of users in user interfaces (Rafa Muñoz), the future of our jobs as interaction designers (Olga Revilla), ten lessons learned by an ux engineer while traveling around the world (Humberto Matas), how to monetize your content online or if it should be monetized without loosing your reputation (Juan Delgado), works of the Barcelona-based Observatory of Design (Ariel Guersenzvaig), practical cases of applied interaction design (Nau Santana), how to use common maths while designing graphic interactions (Maria Jose Aguilar), image recognition in mobile devices (Jesús Sotoca), how to adapt user interfaces to actual users and training about interaction design (Javier Cañada), using prototype document to describe the scope of projects (Eusebio Reyero), user-centered design in e-Learning systems (Olga C. Santos), perspective of a newbie learning about interaction design (Esther Moreno), inspiration and innovation in web development (Isabel Casanova), how creativity is processed through the lenses of our own experience (Mikel Gainzarain) and a final presentation with an small briefing of the topics covered through the whole event (Jesus Gorriti)
As I said before, it has been impressive the quality of people, thoughts and goals that were gathered together by the organization. Good job, I hope to keep participating in events like this because with this experience you have triggered a bunch of new ideas in my mind that I would love to express during the next days.
If you would like to follow what was happening during the un-conference you can see all the events at the Twitter site (http://www.twitter.com/desconferencia) or look for updated content, videos and pictures at www.desconferencia.com but anyway, I would post the contents as soon as they are published (or at least link to them) so keep happy the rest of the weekend :)