I’ve just come back from holiday, and the Clearleft office is a-buzz with early preparations for this year’s dConstruct conference. Actually that’s a lie. Preparations have in fact been underway for some months now, as the conference is going to even bigger and better than before (I’m mean that in as unbiased a way as I can).
This year’s conference is all about designing the user experience. We’ve lined up some pretty fantastic speakers including Jared Spool and Peter Merholtz. We’ve got George Oates & Denise Wilton talking about human traffic, Leisa Reichelt on waterfalls and washing machines, Cameron Moll on great design; with Tom Coates and Matt Webb giving us their respective views on webs of data and experience stacks.
I know there’s some concern about the availability of tickets for dConstruct, and they are likely sell out quickly. However we’ve moved into the magnificent Brighton Dome Concert Hall this year – mostly in response to the overwhelming complaint of cramped seats in the Corn Exchange – so there will be some additional tickets available.
Tickets will come on sale in July and we’ll announce the date with plenty of advance warning – the best thing to do for speedy notification is subscribe to the Clearleft Events RSS feed. Two years ago dConstruct famously sold out in 45 minutes, however there won’t be any need to panic this year. As long as you’re there within about 24 hours of tickets coming on sale you should be fine, although obviously I can’t guarantee that. There is however a guaranteed way to get a ticket for dConstruct, and that’s to attend a workshop.
We can only squeeze so many great speakers into one day, so we’re putting on some intimate one-day workshops in the run up to the conference itself. We’re really pleased to have Peter Merholtz expanding on the Principles & Practices for Successful Experience Design. We’ve persuaded Thomas Vander Wal to come back again this year for a day of Building the Social Web with Tagging, and Tantek Çelik will be joining forces with our own Jeremy Keith for a day of Microformats. Tickets for the workshops will come on sale next week and will be limited to about 15 people per workshop. Each workshop attendee will get a free pass for the conference.
Finally I should point out that the dConstruct website has now reached its second iteration – that of “sketched ideas”. M’learned colleague Paul has more details of its design. And listen out for the inaugural d.Construct 2007 podcast (link to follow) – I hear Jeremy’s dulcet tones whispering into a microphone as I type.
Brighton · Clearleft · Conferences
Jack Origami wrote:
Looking forward to see you on the conference
Justin Thorp wrote:
How come there isn’t a speaker talking about Web accessibility? Isn’t that an important part of “designing the user experience”? Wouldn’t it also be very timely with the recent release of a WCAG 2.0 draft?
Rich wrote:
Justin – accessibility is an important part of the user experience, however we only have a limited number of slots available and we decided to concentrate on overall experience design than implementation.