Sense and Sensibility

For the closing plenary Brendan Dawes starts by telling us that love and art don't make sense - to a machine. We make decisions that make no sense at all, and enjoy things that are completely pointless. One of the reasons we have such an emotive reaction to the i-phone is that Apple are not afraid to include fun, pointless things in their design process.

App designers are picking up on the need for technology to have a human element. Brendan highlights 'It's A Clock' which tells the time the way humans do - it's just coming up to 12.3o by the way :-) We need to continuely question accepted practices and methods which means not necessarily always designing the most efficient thing. To quote Hendrix - you've got to know what goes between the notes, not just the notes.

Brendan then takes this concept and applies it to data - the transition of the data is very important. DoodleBuzz is a great example of this. It moves away from the 'click' paradigm of using the web and encourages people to doodle across the canvas (webpage) to pull and sort information in different ways. This concept is taking further forward by the Magnetic North website which allows you to draw to pull snapshots of information about the company rather than just presenting pages with 'cv' like descriptions of the company. This is more typical human to human interaction, rather than human to machine interaction. A site I would recommend to all of you to go and look at - now!

Brendan ends by quoting Muriel Rukeyser - the Universe is made of stories not atoms.