SIGCHI.nl 2006 conference

Today, my colleagues Annelies, Gert, Pascal and I attended the annual conference of SIGCHI.nl, who seized the opportunity to announce its new name: Chi Nederland.

The conference was held in the beautiful Tuschinski theater in Amsterdam. This year’s theme: “The Web and Beyond” (or in short: Web 2.0*). An impressive 650 (roughly) people were present, a record for this conference.

The first keynote was held by Jared Spool, who beforehand apologized that he is more an historian than a foreseer. His message was that Web 2.0 isn’t about technology or features, but about experiences. Designing for experience will in fact result in smaller, less complex sites because you remove all unused features. He also spent some time on the familiar Web 2.0 topics like the long tail, offering online what bricks-and-mortar shops cannot.

Jesse James Garrett tossed – as expected – the term Ajax regularly while describing the current activities of Adaptive Path, on user research (field research), information architecture (tagging) and interaction design (Ajax ofcourse). Unfortunately, he stayed very close to the surface, whereas I had hoped on more depth.

Joost Willemsen, Onno Bakker and Yohan Creemers also covered Ajax and SPI (Single Page Interface). Also here, too bad that much time was used covering the basics, which left less time showing cool interfaces like the excellent D-Reizen website (not live yet) presented by Joost Willemsen.

Next, a panel discussion was held on design patterns, with Bill Scott (Yahoo) and Martijn Welie (Satama) as the panel. The discussion was very interesting, for us (Tam Tam) more so because we ourselves are discussing possibilities in creating our own pattern library.

The third keynote of today was held by Steven Pemberton, who showed the audience that every ‘new’ Web 2.0 aspect was already thought of much earlier, but that at that time, the concepts weren’t recognized as being very distinguished. He gave some hints in what type of problems should be addressed when we will be thinking of Web 3.0.

Finally, all keynote speakers (except Garrett who had to leave early) sat down for a very entertaining panel discussion.

Besides all the presentations, it was nice to see many familiar faces, of people who I am meeting more and more often at conferences, cocktail hours and so on.

* My own articles on Web 2.0:

• Internet changes, online marketing as well?
• Web 2.0: Let go, share, build upon others, free your data