Some of us here at Cogapp were lucky enough to get tickets to Friday’s sold out dConstruct conference, just down the road from us in Brighton. It was an extremely inspiring day…

Adam Greenfield kick-started the morning with a detailed and compelling study of the role that ubiquitous computing is/can/will play(ing) in large cities (there’s no avoiding a capricious use of tenses when discussing the near-future). His talk was fuelled by the fact that, as of last year, most human beings on planet Earth live in cities. This comes at a time when we’re in the process of shifting from a state of having hundreds of people per computer to hundreds of computers per person, so it stands to reason that the laws and trends that have governed cities of the analogue past will not be relevant for modern/future times.

Information, argues Greenfield, is becoming ‘persistent’ - offered to us at every waking moment, whether it is desired or not. When surrounded by statistics on every object and person in our vicinity, people begin to cluster into groups of common identity, avoiding encounters that do not seem desirable in advance. Ubiquitous computing is likely to usher in mind-boggling efficiency and agency over our environment, but we are at risk of losing a textural, unplanned, helpless quality that has previously made cities such ‘centres for human vitality and creativity’.

Greenfield’s thorough account of possible urban conditions of the near future felt neither pessimistic nor naively utopian, but underlined our need to be fiercely conscientious and adaptable.

A couple of chaps from Stamen Design talked us through the creative process for some of their celebrated data visualisations, ranging from busy, data-rich apps like Historical Hurricane Maps and Oakland Crimespotting...

… to minimal and yet decidedly satisfying representations like Digg:

It was interesting to see how much more impressed the audience were by the simpler designs, which stylishly conveyed meaning with remarkably little text or visual complication on the screen. The user’s ‘growing literacy in complexity’, said Ben Cerveny, is allowing increasingly sophisticated cartographic solutions without needing to confuse or exclude large portions of the audience. Despite this, many of the internet’s grandest (and clearly most expensive) maps are all still variations on a very familiar theme.

We were then given a whirlwind techno-cultural tour of the life and times of Brian Fling, who contextualised the significance of mobile technologies (and specifically the iPhone) with other milestones of recent history. How does the miniature screen affect the way we design for media? Certainly it imposes constraints on the designer that forces us to be creative, but now we’re also seeing eccentric and lucrative acts of remediation in which mobiles reflect their aesthetics back onto the larger screen. The iPhone-sized interfaces of desktop Twitter feed readers are a case in point.

I’ve often wondered how significant sci-fi films and programs have been in influencing real-world technology (are there any employees of NASA for instance who didn’t grow up as Trekkies). So I was very pleased to listen to Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel provide endless evidence supporting this trend.

Very useful instances of this include that crazy pin-art-esque map in the X-Men film, which a designer for the military saw and basically re-made in the form of the Xenotran Mark II Dynamic Sand Table.

A more frustrating example can be found in Honda’s Asimo robot, a multi-million dollar gadget which at last allows mankind to... have tea served. Sci-fi has, admittedly, furthered AI technologies, but it has also clearly made a large contribution towards our hunger for style-over-substance humanoid iSlaves.

Anyway, it's hard to argue with the speaker’s key point: that by being aware of these trends, ‘sci-fi is good for your career’.

Robin Hunicke explored what makes a good computer game, extending her pervasive theory of ludological Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) to include that certain je ne sais quoi of ‘moment-to-moment joyful feelings’. Though the theory lacks a satisfactory term to describe this state, her argument for its presence was a strong one. It's similar to the appeal of totally unnecessary Easter Eggs, and having spent days skimming worms across the surface of water in Worms 2, I know exactly what she’s talking about.

August de los Reyes’ didn’t hold back on impressive anecdotes about his time at Microsoft - and who can blame him; after all, he put the Windows key on the keyboard and is head of user experience for Microsoft Surface (which all ten of my fingers were able to play with at the same time). Extending the MDA framework of computer games, August explored the user’s sense of reward and emotion, highlighting the benefits of a system with an output which is secretly greater than its input. For example, the joy of achieving an incredibly tricky headshot in a first person shooter, which was in part the sly result of some unseen snap-to targeting: the user feels more talented than he deserves, but who’s to know?

When Tristan blogged about Russell Davies’ project at This Happened earlier this year I was intrigued, but didn’t quite grasp the value of making books and newspapers out of internet content. His argument for a post-digital encounter, however, was both elaborate and persuasive – it centres around a need to get over our infatuation with all things digital for the sake of being digital, whist avoiding ‘analogue nostalgia’ and the constraints imposed by it. He points out that there are endless infrastructures and technologies in place (postal services, newspaper presses) which, in competition with digital forces, are beginning to rot, but that are begging to be repurposed. It's incredibly difficult to impress someone with something on the screen at the moment, but by ‘re-domaining’ technologies and showing someone something you can hold in your hand, it feels like an extraordinary magic trick. He invites us to get away from digital purism and do this.