Speaking at 2008 d.Construct

In September, I’ll be speaking at the dConstruct Conference in Brighton, England. The conference is billed as the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.

Last year, dConstruct sold out in 6 hours!

Several reasons why I’m excited:

• The topic is social. For Bokardoans, you’ll know that this is right up my alley. An entire event focused on social design. Woohoo!
• Awesome lineup. This is the lineup I would want to see at a conference, so I’m very humbled to be a part of it. It includes Daniel Burka, whom I spoke with on a panel at SXSW this year as well as the folks from Satisfaction and Dopplr, two social sites that really push the social design envelope. There’s Aleks Krotoski talking about gaming, as well as Jeremy Keith, Tantek, and Steven Johnson being their usual brilliant selves.
• I haven’t been to England before: This will be my first trip. I’m going to stay a few days and see some sites…so if you have any great recommendations about things I must do or see, please leave a comment!
• I’m a huge fan of the folks at Clearleft. I even cut my web design teeth on Richard Rutter’s classic site Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi back in the 1990s. Does anybody remember Jalfrezi? I’ve also followed Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith for many years, so being invited to speak at their event is an amazing honor.

As for what I’m doing: I’ll be giving a short talk in the conference proper about leveraging cognitive bias in social design. I’m really excited about this topic…as it really brings home some clear reasons why some interface elements work and some don’t.

I’m also going to be giving a full-day workshop on September 4th. The workshop (I’m still polishing the description) will cover a lot of what’s in my book Designing for the Social Web, but I’ll also be doing exercises that involve everyone deeply in the discussion/design. Warning: if you attend the workshop, you will have to draw an interface. 🙂

And, as I mentioned, last year d.Construct sold out in 6 hours. So get your tickets early. Registration begins June 24.