Social websites are funny places. What stories do you tell over drinks with friends? About the time when someone accidentally uploaded the *wrong* folder of pictures to your site? Or the time you had to manage a full-scale user revolt? Several creators and users of such sites will share five-minute stories of funny bugs, features with unintended consequences, and crazy customer emails. This panel will help you understand about first, second & third order effects when designing such social sites. How nothing goes exactly as planned. You learn about the importance of being agile and responsive to users when things go wrong. This panel is a chance to learn from others’ mistakes and avoid making the same ones!

Are you tired of entering your information every time you sign up for a new service? Are you fed up with adding the same contacts from scratch on every social networking site? The building blocks for portable social networks already exist. OpenID, microformats and OAuth let us build open, user-controlled networks. We talk about why this is good for users and how to actually put these building blocks in place.

Who are you? Who cares? With proper self-branding, not only will you find out who you are, you will make the RIGHT people care, opening up a slew of the RIGHT opportunities specifically tailored for you. This session defines branding (it’s not just the logo), talks about the top five things to focus on your brand, and shows examples of brands that work – and some that don’t, plus what they could do to improve. Most importantly, this session helps translate that information to your own personal brand. While this session focuses on a freelance or studio perspective, the ideas presented should be portable to any type of professional setting. Maximize marketing potential and get the type of work and respect you deserve.

Stage Managers wrangle directors, designers, writers, and actors every day, under strict union guidelines. Editors cajole writers into producing on time(ish) for each week’s publication. Conductors balance the needs of dozens of musicians while staying true to the needs of the music. These disciplines can teach us how to set up and support creative environments that are conducive to excellent design and development. Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path introduce you to 10 techniques used by creative management professionals to get great work from a wide range of employees.

The advent of Web 2.0 has exposed a demand for richer, more nuanced forms of interaction, posing new challenges for today’s information architect. We will examine how wireframing - one of our most readily used tools - is evolving to meet these demands. The creation of modern web applications involves designing intricate patterns, such as state-change and ajax-like behaviour. These designs need to be documented and tested quickly and efficiently. Using real-world examples, we will show how wireframes in the form of non-functional HTML prototypes can be the ideal solution to both documentation and design. We’ll demonstrate how frameworks such as JQuery can be your friends in prototype creation, and how best to put together your own library of design patterns. We’ll explain how interactive prototypes are ideal for use in agile, iterative approaches to web development, as well as with more traditional workflows, and ultimately ensure prototypes give maximum return to both you and your client. Wireframing and prototyping have long been the lynchpin of user experience design. This talk demonstrates why, with a little evolution, this is still the case.

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 explores 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.

We’ve seen the media reports about China’s red hot Web and mobile industries, but it’s time to discover the truth. This session will dive behind what you see in the media today to give you a better understanding of how the Chinese Web and digital media industries work. What key social, economic and technology drivers exist? What differences can we expect as China’s mobile and Web companies grow? How does consumer behavior adjust as the Web becomes more prevalent for more people? How does one adequately engage this market? This session will explore these questions and more, highlighted by case studies and best practices from some of the most regarded consumer brands. With the more 244 million people expected online by the end of 2008, now is the time to get a clear picture of this dynamic, evolving industry.

If “the future doesn’t need us,” (Bill Joy), then tomorrow’s design will certainly not need designers. Already, the designer’s responsibility has shifted from creating objects and experiences to creating the conditions for innovation - developing human links between bits, atoms, neurons, and genes. “Design thinking” is nice, but it becomes meaningless if and when artificial intelligence starts doing the thinking, and the design, for us. This panel discusses whether the designer’s role in the 21st century is to serve as devil’s advocate, providing a (false) sense of personal safety in times of genetic engineering, personalized machines, and a new singularity. In other words: Is it time to start designing for a time after design?

Now that social networks are pervasive and quickly becoming a regular feature set, designers need to understand the dynamics of creating experiences that encourage social behavior and public expression, while giving individuals a sense of privacy, personal gain, and ownership. This session will take an in-depth look at the principles and practices of social design. How do you create a symbiotic relationship between people and data that maximizes discovery, game-play, connections, and communication? We’ll examine a breadth of examples and explore their pros and cons. Then, we’ll take a look into the future of what’s possible. You’ll hear firsthand from a group of designers who do this every day.

Are you a web design superhero? Then you’d better know your villains – Scope Creep, Needy Client, The Write-Off, and the rest of the sinister crew – and the secrets of how to defeat them! This session will go in-depth on the most significant business and creative issues facing web designers today, and will provide specific, hands-on procedures for minimizing, overcoming, or eliminating them altogether. Find out how to transform your mild-mannered web shop into a genuinely heroic business machine.

The gaming and virtual worlds industries are threatened by real-money trading for virtual objects and debating if the Asian item model for online games will work in North America. Wake up call: Digital goods are here to stay and will shape the future of online experiences both monetarily while pushing the limits of property rights individuals may have. This session addresses the real question of what form do online property rights take? And beyond property, what is the shape and form of online human rights in virtual worlds and how do we get there from here?

Designing for the web has become much more technical over the last decade, and these days being ‘just good enough’ rarely is. Alongside a strong personal design aesthetic, supporting cross-browser standards while building accessible and usable interfaces is a required skillset for online designers. Get your feet on solid ground in this session, where we explore the current best practices in designing and developing accessible, usable, and standards-compliant front end design to web sites and applications.

When a Web site or blog launched out of personal passion reaches a certain scale in terms of traffic, readership, and popularity, a Big Question arises: Can I make money with this thing? Some bloggers and publishers can. Some can’t. But you need to try to find out. Online advertising is the fastest-growing sector of advertising today. According to some estimates, online ad spending is expected to surpass magazines, network television, and radio this year. How can amateur publishers take advantage of that? This panel will bring together professional bloggers, leading Web ad networks, and progressive affiliate businesses to discuss the monetization options available to small publishers. We’ll consider strategic steps you can take to add money-making elements such as ads and affiliate sales to your site or blog. We’ll address ways to increase your visibility, traffic, and reach. And we’ll offer an inside look at what ad networks and affiliate programs look for as they consider new sites and blogs for inclusion. At the end of the conversation, you’ll not only know whether you should take a stab at monetizing your site - you’ll know how.

Removing the carrier barrier liberates your mobile services and allows you to reach all of your users. Maximizing the experience for your users and leveraging the right platform creates real opportunity for your business. Users want 24X7 access to reach your service from anywhere, for free. This panel focuses on ways to mobilize your content and services, enhance your user experience, and make money in the process.

As children, we’re told the world is a magical place. Babies are delivered by storks. The tooth fairy harvests retired teeth in exchange for currency. Bunnies deliver candies in brightly covered baskets on a spring holiday. The world’s adults use magic to explain away the complexity of life.In our work, confusing complexity is the natural result of an unchecked design and development process. Teams work hard, responding to customer requests through incremental improvement and feature enhancements, yet they often end up with a dismaying array of features that make users unhappy.

In this entertaining presentation, Jared shares some of his recent research into the craft of professional magic. He demonstrates the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design, comparing the similarities between professional illusions and some of today’s top design techniques.

In this presentation, you’ll learn how:

• Illusions performed by professional magicians follow the same design principles as your computer’s file system
• Designers can create specific mental models to eliminate perceived complexity
• Simple design tricks can make designs seem to be faster than they really are
• Whimsicality, attention, and functionality are essential elements to creating delightful experiences

You’ll see examples of illusions built into a variety of designs, including those from Microsoft, Flickr, Netflix, iTunes, and Facebook. Jared will also, possibly at his own peril, reveal the secrets from several magical illusions to show you just how the tricks were created and the effects are realized,giving you the ammunition necessary to build illusions into your own designs.

I Can Has Cheezburger? continues to eat a way your lunch hour, anthropomorphize your animals, and mock your friends. Despite a shitty design, $0 spent on market, and an impossible-to-spell URL, ICHC continues its amazing growth (thank you!). But growing quickly can kill you. Surviving DDoS, Trolls, copyright laws, server bills, and a huge serving of WTMF left us with many battle scars. We’ll provide you with a lens into our past so that you can learn from our mistakes. We’ll help you survive yours. Our internet battle scars, let us show you them.

There’s one word you should utter to the next client who asks you to design a logo: ‘No.’ Once the backbone of a brand’s identity, logos have moved to the ‘relatively unimportant’ end of the ‘important stuff’ spectrum. This panel explains how and why logos became irrelevant and will discuss how to break this news to your clients…and what the heck you do first on a design project if it isn’t the logo.

The three takeaways:

• The ways that logos limit a brand
• The fact that sometimes, no logo is better than a logo
• How to explain this to clients who can’t imagine it

We all know what kind of person a Connector is. A Supercollider goes beyond mere connections, throwing people together at high speed to generate the excitement and creative energy needed to force change. People skills are a must, but technology is becoming more important for managing relationships today. Technology also allows non-traditional Supercolliders to form relationships online with powerful offline networks. This panel looks at how these key contributors use, build and shape emerging social technologies to accelerate the particles of their lives.

Britney leaks iPhone upgrade on Facebook. w00t. The distinction between Gossip and News has never been smaller. Or perhaps it never was, and Net-era culture is just revealing that. Do we have time for facts? Where does authority come from now? What prompts us to dish? How is business is being restructured around what prompts us to communicate person to person? Geek comedian and talk show host Heather Gold, her panel of savvies and you will go deep on what seems to be the surface (but OMG, just might be driving business): Gossip.

Heather Gold  Writer/Performer,  Subvert.com

Owen Thomas  Managing Editor,  Valleywag

Alan Citron  GM,  TMZ

Shaila Dewan  Natl Correspondent,  New York Times

Evan Williams  Co-Founder,  Twitter/Obvious

Why do users form relationships with some products over others? What makes people develop feelings for software (good and bad)? We’ll show practical ways to make your application more appealing to your users avoid creating abusive relationships, and discuss what it means to practice responsible design, including:

• Recognizing your audience’s emotional attachment.
• Understanding how (and when) to think about the emotional elementsof your product/design.
• Ways to improve your process so you can avoid creating “abusive” products.