Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Web Directions @media 2010, Southbank Centre London, June 10 10.45am.

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• Designing social interfaces – the book
• About Christian Crumlish

Presentation slides

Session description

Taking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how we can design to foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.

In game design, you create an arena for play. You establish boundaries and rules and you work to tune game dynamics that yield fun experiences rather than boring, mechanical, or pointless drudgery. Within those boundaries and rules the players create their own unique experience, collaboratively, every time. Again the marriage of strict purposeful constraints with open space and room for human variation creates the best game experiences.

Can an enterprise app, maybe one that looks like a spreadsheet and reports to HR ever actually be fun? That’s a stretch but you can absolutely introduce elements of play into the most buttoned-down context. Consider one primitive gesture from games: collecting. Many games offer some form of gather, arranging, and displaying objects. Just so, even an HR portal may offer some opportunity to incorporate a collecting “game” into the workflow.

Christian will share techniques for introducing a sense of play into the experiences we’re designing and will exhort the assembled crowd to make life more fun for our users and to thrive while doing so.

About Christian Crumlish

Christian Crumlish has been participating in, analyzing, designing, and drawing social interactive spaces online since 1994. These days he is the curator of Yahoo!’s pattern library, a design evangelist with the Yahoo! Developer Network, and a member of Yahoo!‘s Design Council. He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People, and The Power of Many, and is currently working on an upcoming book, Designing Social Interfaces, with Erin Malone. He has spoken about social patterns at BarCamp Block, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite, and Web 2.0 Expo. Christian has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Princeton. He lives in Oakland with his wife Briggs, his cat Fraidy, and his electric ukulele, Evangeline.

Follow Christian on Twitter: @mediajunkie