Web Directions

Berg has been developing products and inventing the future since 2005. As a design consultancy, they built videophones with Google, had work in the New York Museum of Modern Art, and created Little Printer, the cute web-connected printer for the home. As a tech startup, they built a platform for connected products, and used it to make everything from cuckoo clocks to washing machines.

Join Berg co-founder Matt Webb for a dive into design, interconnectedness, and the Internet of Things.

In this talk, Genevieve will talk about the future and what we might expect from it. This is not a talk about technology, instead this is a talk about people, and what makes us human, because ultimately we make our own futures, so our humanity shapes its nature. As a result, Genevieve will focus on that notion, on what makes us human: on the things that are changing, and the things that are relentlessly stable.

40 years of Moore’s law has meant that computing and communications power has gotten cheaper, smaller and faster. It’s not new news to say that soon everything will have an IP address. And yet. All this excitement of an internet of things is against the background of a shift in the world, a change in the way that Silicon Valley and the rest of the world is building the new products that are changing our lives, in the way established businesses are operating, and in the way that governments interact with us. Some organizations are learning the hard way, others are making decisive moves. But all of this points to an inescapable fact: in the internet of things, humans are things too. And there’s a gap in empathy between these organisations and us, as audiences, citizens, consumers and people.

Designing an internet of things that’s for humans means understanding what the empathy gap is. It’s the gap in understanding between an organization and its audience. This session is the story of how, whilst a more connected world means more things, we should remember to design those things, products and services to understand us.

As the adage goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day", nor are websites, brands, or products. It is a matter of process. From designing the president, to launching a startup, to helping Nike "Just Do It", I've applied an iterative approach not only to the work but also to the process. Challenging myself and my teams to be more empirical, more democratic, and more honest.

If we're going to talk about an Internet of Things, we should probably talk about what we mean when we say "thing"

So often, when we talk about the "internet of things" it brings to mind images of consumer white goods with an Ethernet sockets or Wifi antennas. Thermostats; weighing scales; the apocryphal Internet Fridge. But that's a narrow way of thinking that's perhaps unhelpful: whatever you may think of the term, an "Internet of Things" should embrace the diversity of Thingness.

So what happens when you think about the diversity of things that might be on the internet, and how they might behave? What about Things that people don't necessarily own, but borrow, share, or inhabit? Through projects that connected bikes, bridges, and a whole city to the network, let's think about What Things Are—and what they might be.

Designers try desperately to make work that’s impactful—to create work that will leave people breathless and hungry for more. Young designers in particular are endlessly trying to impress, their designs scream “DESIGN!”, their type choices are bold, their color palettes are disruptive. Many designers carry this momentum throughout there careers, but there are a few that begin to see differently.

Instead of focusing on the flash, they hone in on the details, noticing things that others can barely perceive. Does this make their work better? Does it make it boring? Jessica will guide you through her own work and show you what happens when the small and imperceptible becomes even more exciting than the big bright and flashy.

The world is moving a lot faster than it used to. Now, perhaps more than ever, time is of the essence. For some, our ability to find time has become more valuable than our desire to make money. While we have built efficient tools and objective systems to manage time, the ways we experience time remain highly personal. Drawing on her experiences as an artist, designer, urban dweller, and traveler, Erin will explore how the products we design can be more intentional about taking care of what is now our most valuable asset.

The web had a bit of a false start when it came to working "Offline", but now it's back with reinforcements! We'll look at ServiceWorker, the new standard in controlling caching, network requests & background synchronisation. Also, I won't make any puns about Promises, and that's a… urm… guarantee.

APIs are now everywhere and interoperability is assumed to be a standard feature of many products. However, the promise of interconnectedness cannot be fulfilled by ubiquity of connectivity alone. Nor is a great API design enough to be successful. APIs are not about exposing data, but exposing capabilities. They're not about connecting machines, but connecting people.

This session will focus on evaluating the maturity of APIs and increasing their value for yourself and others. I will share my experience researching developers' needs from their first impressions through to their successful integrations.

Every day, we make hundreds of small technical decisions: what’s the best way to implement this? Where should this function live? Is this library worth using? Occasionally, we make a larger decision: would a different framework make us more productive? Should we rewrite the whole thing in C?

No matter what scale we’re talking about, our decision making leans heavily on past experience, our community, and usually a search engine. But beyond that, the process is mostly opaque. Two programmers, given the same data, often make different decisions. We all want to be the one who’s usually right, but…how do we get there?

Let’s unpack our technical decision-making process, and see what we can learn about getting better at programming. Is mastery really something you just have to wait for? Can you accelerate it? And just what does “productivity” mean, anyway? We’ll take a tour of the science and figure out how we can apply it to the decisions we make every day.

Operations engineers sometimes use the term "operability" when they talk about the ingredients for fast, stable, maintainable applications. While operability is usually discussed in the context of back-end systems, there's no reason instrumentation and observability should stop at the app server. This talk will take a broad look at what operability can mean in the context of the browser, and it'll lay out the metrics and tools that are needed to have operable front end code. We'll also look at some production situations where good client-side instrumentation uncovered an unexpected facet of performance, security, or user behavior. Finally, we'll dig into how to employ all of these metrics and techniques in service of a faster, more responsive end user experience.

How to identify, fix, and prevent document decay.

The very mention of bit rot will strike terror into an engineer’s heart. Unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if ‘nothing has changed’. (From the hacker’s Jargon File.) Bit rot affects documentation too. Whether the cause be a changing environment, human error, or the infamous cosmic rays, we need to root out that rot.

But who has time to read and test the documentation on a regular basis? That’s the least efficient and most error-prone way of detecting doc decay.

Join me to explore the ways in which documentation can degenerate over time. We’ll look at innovative techniques for finding and fixing errors. Together we will ward off those cosmic rays!

Tracking data changes and presenting them to the user is a fundamental part of any web application. With Object.observe, JavaScript now offers us a fast, native way to track changes to standard objects without the need for custom model types or dirty state checking. As game-changing as this new functionality may be, we might just be seeing the beginning of the next great JavaScript rivalry: mutable versus immutable state.

With the evolution of client-side web applications, protecting user data is more critical than ever. Cryptography in JavaScript has always been a challenging and contentious subject with limited options available to developers. The WebCrypto API improves this situation by bringing native cryptography primitives to the web. We will cover the basic uses and security considerations for protecting data with the WebCrypto API, and examine the current state of W3C specification and browser implementations.