The recent ‘In Progress’ conference curated by ‘It’s Nice That’ held at the Barbican centre in London, was a great one-day event full of inspirational talks.

The topic for the conference was 'what defined 2011' and what could be potential highlights for 2012. Throughout the day, a variety of speakers shared their thoughts and ideas across various disciplines and below are some of my favourite talks from the day.
 
Tom Uglow

Tom Uglow, Europe’s Creative Director for Google and YouTube, spoke brilliantly about his thoughts on users and creativity. He presented his beliefs about the future of the creative industries and explained how he felt that all creative disciplines follow a set of common principles. To highlight these, he referred to relevant videos and images. Here are some that I noted down:

Google Analytics In Real Life - Online Checkout

Ridley Scotts - Life in a day

Haiti Map

Mills

Mills, Director and Head of Publishing for ustwo spoke about the fear and fun of creating apps. He talked about ustwo’s own app development initiatives including last years highly rated ‘Nursery Rhymes’ and ‘PAPERCUT’ apps. He shared their lessons learnt from the projects, which included:

• Take risks and learn from them in order to understand that this is still relatively new market

• It is hard to make a substantial profit from making apps, but it is an interesting way to understand what users like and what they are prepared to pay for.

One of the main reasons ustwo created these apps was to try and get a better idea of how to sell to the public and how to best reach a large number of users. Mills mentioned, how through this process, they learnt that users desire apps that give them a beautiful experience, makes them feel good and gets their heart beating. I think it is probably true that most successful apps have had an element of this within them. With this principle in mind, Ustwo has gone on to develop the ‘Whale Trail’ app game, a game that makes you feel good as you fly through the air collecting points.

Moira Sinclair

Moira Sinclair from the Arts Council talked about engaging the public with art and how this might evolve in the next few years. She talked about some big collaborative projects for the 2012 ‘Artist taking the lead’ programme. Here are some of her examples:

Bus Tops

Nowhere Island

Big dance on Trafalgar Square

Matt Jones

Matt Jones the Principle from Berg delivered a really interesting and engaging talk, full of humor and imagination. He spoke about his attempts to find out what happens when technology acquires a (tiny) mind, motives and behaviors. He questioned how we look at technology as it becomes increasingly more personal and a bigger part of our lives. He quoted “Maybe we should look at it more as creating a body of allies - human or non human.”

In the BERG studio they use the quote ‘Be as smart as a Poppy’ as the main drive for their work. Here are some of his ideas and work:

Flickr - Hello little fella

The Uncanny Vally

Ted Chiang - The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Sticky Light

Little Printer

Tony Davidson & Kim Papworth

Tony Davidson & Kim Papworth from Wieden + Kennedy talked us through some of their successful branding campaigns and the challenge of keeping up with the ever changing media landscape, whilst remaining culturally relevant and emotionally engaging.

A recent project they talked about was their work for the band Kaiser Chiefs. They created a website that allows fans to design their own album cover and a bespoke selection of tracks, and even the ability to make money from their creations. They explained the process of working on such a project and how important it is to keep an open mind as you go along.

They described that when you work on a project, many elements change and unforeseen factors occur; you need to keep working with what is real at the time for the success of the final outcome. They also talked of the importance of staying curious and experimentation. I think these points hold true, especially in the present day where we are continually bombarded with information making it a rare treat when someone has come up with an unusual and intriguing concept.

Kate Stanners

Kate Stanners, Creative Partner at Saatchi & Saatchi talked about her passion for transforming business by applying a practical and creative approach. As an example, she spoke about the successful T-Mobile campaigns that she worked on. The concept is simple and very effective; bring some fun into peoples lives. She also talked about how important it is to think on your feet and be prepared to take risks. In many of the campaigns, she took great risks, which has almost always paid off. She explained reasons for this is that often you put something out there and leave it in the hands of people, which can often lead to it creating its own subtle powers that are far more effective in the big scale of things. She explained that a powerful tool for campaigning can be to give people what they want and let them run with it.

Katrina Dodd

Katrina Dodd who is editor of Contagious Communications, gave a run though of some of the most significant global trends, technologies and marketing campaigns that have emerged over the past year, and also what we should look out for in 2012. She believes that many of these successful ideas and concepts evolved from spotting gaps in peoples lives and providing them with functionality rather than gimmicks. She presented some very interesting examples of what is out there at the moment, some exciting and some scary in my opinion. Here are the ones I noted down:

Burberry - Runway to Reality
A marketing campaign by Burberry where every person in the audience at a fashion show is given an iPad with an app that allows them to instantly purchase what they see on the runway. She described this as a means to bring people into the brand and make them feel part of it.

Tesco - Homeplus in South Korea

A virtual supermarket on a subway train allows waiting train passengers to use their mobile to scan QR codes of Tesco products that can then be delivered to their door.

Starbucks Mobile Payment - Making your mobile phone your wallet

Starbucks recently produced an iPhone app that enables users to pay for their drinks and pastries via their mobile.

Amazon - Aunt Mildred button
Amazon plans to add a button to their site with a service that allows users to secretly exchange unwanted presents for more desirable items before they are even shipped.

I really enjoyed the whole conference and I came away from it hugely inspired, with a much better insight of what is happening right across the creative sector amongst users and technologies. My conclusions that I took away from the event, was that as agencies working with design and technology need to be prepared to take risks and be open to experimentation and exploration in order to discover new paths in a competitive industry. Essentially, users want experiences that make them feel good which brings a bit of joy and excitement into their lives.