Diego Pulido

If you are staying at the Planters Inn (in Savannah), you know you’ve got to go to the lobby of the hotel, the mezzanine, or even sit down in the hallway of your floor to get any wifi signal for your computer or phone (like I had to at 1 a.m. on Wednesday when I arrived here)

Sadly, I’m not the only one…

So you probably know where I am right now.

In other news…

The first day of Interaction 10 (for me –and many others) was a really productive/active one. It was a day full of workshops –and these were really hands on. Brilliant.

First, I attended Dan Saffer’s “Brainstorming and Design Principles” workshop. There wasn’t a gap of more than 15-20 minutes talking before we were doing some brainstorming exercise or activity throughout the entire workshop, which was great. Personally, I never thought of brainstorming as something that could be done in so many different ways. The brainstorming and design principles I’ve learned about here can (and should) be very well applicable  in my everyday work –and beyond.

I’ll post a link to Dan’s slides whenever I find them. A resource not to be missed, no matter what you do.

The second workshop of the day was “The Right Way to Wireframe” by Russ Unger, Will Evans, Fred Beecher & Todd Zaki Warfel. Turns out, there really is not a “right” way to wireframe, but what I found most interesting about this workshop was to see how the same project (designing a particular website) was tackled from four different design perspectives. They all shared some common themes (Site maps, sketches, wireframes, prototypes), but each approach was unique and I learned quite a bit from all four. This workshop was also really hands-on. The facilitators divided the crowd into various  design”weapons of choice” (e.g. Fireworks, OmniGraffle, Balsamiq) and made us go from preliminary sketching to actually taking out our laptops (I’m glad I’ve brought mine) and actually making some wireframes that would later be presented to the group for critique.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of “Happy Hour” going on whilst we were still trying to mass-produce wireframes against the clock. Gladly, in Interaction 10, if you don’t go to the beer, the beer comes to you:

Those of you going to SXSW this year will have the chance to experience this workshop, divided as one pre and one post-lunch sessions. I highly recommend this workshop for any of you who wants to know where they stand in regards to wireframing in design and wish to discover what could change or improve (Fat Tire not included). It certainly served that purposed for me.

All right, I’m off to experience the first full day of talks & sessions. There’s loads to learn today.

Ciao from the land of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil“