The annual conference about Web technologies in Spain is called Fundamentos Web 2008 and this year, as previous ones, is hosted by the W3C at Gijón, a wonderful city in northern Spain. Topics vary from new standards like ARIA, unobtrusive AJAX or the future of Web 2.0 and I'm really excited about key presenters Jesse James Garret and Eric Fain.

Anyway, the most interesting topic to me, the one that made me attend the conference, was the Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior workshop by Eric Fain, described as:

Those in the field of cognitive research have been describing and defining mental models for a few decades. Mental models are the most effective way to align design strategy with your users' behavior, and to approach your design from the understanding of the end user. Mental models are representations of people's behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use. In this full-day workshop, Eric Fain will teach you how to better understand the user experience through the use of mental models before making design and strategic decisions. Mental models provide design teams with a very clear picture of what their users are trying to accomplish, so the product or design can be structured accordingly.

I know this is not PDC 2008 at Los Angeles, but I'm hoping to learn a lot from this conference and of course meet new people at the evening Espicha, kind of a nerds dinner :) So if you are attending also this conference and would like to have a chat, don't hesitate to drop me a note.