Digital Design Blog

Hitting the Open Road for SXSW

Like many of you, we too are packing our bags for this years’ SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The schedule, events and party list are truly Texas-sized (i.e. ridiculously big and somewhat overwhelming). Nonetheless, we are prepared to take it all in and perhaps do some light posting.

Avenue A | Razorfish design team will have quite a large contingent attending. Even better, a number of contributors to this blog will be speaking, including myself. Here are the highlights:

The Web Agency: There Will Be Blood — Social media and a transition to digital marketing combined with an economic slowdown just might be the ingredients for a perfect storm in the world of marketing, advertising and Web agencies. There will be winners and losers when this happens. Learn what it means for you and folks in the middle and on the periphery. (Garrick Schmitt, Monday, March 10 @ 5:00pm)

Life after iPhone — The iPhone may be the most disruptive technology of this decade. The countless ubiquitous computing tools available to User Experience professionals mean convenience and usability headaches. With boundaries blurring between web and mobile, how will the UX discipline change? This panel explores challenges for designing Rich Internet Applications for multiple devices. (Kyle Outlaw, Tuesday, March 11th @ 10:00am)

Going Social Now — If you think social media is all about clever corporate marketing on Facebook or quirky videos on YouTube, you’re missing an opportunity to change your company’s entire culture and operations. In fact, social media can affect how companies innovate, test ideas, recruit talent, measure performance, and interact with all their stakeholders. In his discussion “Going Social Now,” Shiv Singh, head of the Avenue A | Razorfish social media practice, will show you how the enterprise can use social media to improve your business practices. As part of his discussion, Shiv will discuss how the rise of social media has created a new form of marketing altogether, social influence marketing. Social influence marketing is about employing social media as part of the entire lifecycle of a marketing campaign, even beyond a campaign. You will walk away from this engaging discussion with ideas you can take back to the workplace based on real-world research and case studies. (Shiv Singh, Monday, March 10th @ 10am)

Hollywood and Design and Literature: Just Who is Inspiring Who? — For some time, the conventional wisdom was films were the dominant influence on interactive entertainment. Initially this was about story, but then filmmakers started imagining how the future of computing would look. Children of Men, Minority Report, and Disclosure all suggested how we would interact with the world around us. More recently, we have seen games start to reverse the trend and in the last year we have some great developments to suggest that much of the conventional wisdom is now in flux. Then the Wii and now multi-touch computing have arrived with their softer, friendlier approach to entertainment. Meanwhile, Quarterlife, the brilliant new series where its community helps shape the direction has gone from 8min web only episodes to network TV. Whether its interactive or films, with few exceptions, the past year has seen critically acclaimed entertainment about violence, wars and conspiracies learn that more accessible entertainment, in terms of story and technology, are what is selling more units or capturing more eyeballs. This panel will explore just who is influencing who, and how the different stakeholders (writers, artists, designers and producers) in the process think the next few years will play out. (Joe Crump, Sunday, March 9th @ 10am)