SXSWi Day 1

I felt I had more to say than I could accomplish 140 characters at a time, so I'm going long form. Being able to experience SXSWi is a huge treat, and I'm very appreciative that I was able to come. The event seems to have really exploded this year in terms of media coverage; it's always exciting to be in the epicenter of something with such buzz.

Here are some brief reflections on Day 1:

• Gaming is the new Social. Many people and companies here seem to think that gaming is where it's at and where we're all headed in great swarms. There are numerous sessions about gaming -- design and development, user testing, using game theory to make other activities more collaborative (and more popular). If we make something into a "game", folks will want to play and strive to win. If we could harness the power of this, we could creatively encourage people to tackle big world problems. Or just entice them to play the next version of Farmville and chat with their Facebook friends. Either way, it's fun, right?


• Geeks are now beyond cool -- the cool kids are splintering into groups of still cool and no-longer-cool. There something interesting going on here, a kind of a war between the true small-and-emerging startup wunderkinds (still cool), and the older established tech giants (perhaps no longer cool). The startups don't really want the tech giants coming to Austin and spoiling their alterna-tech party. And yet, the tech giants are heading here by the truckload. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook...you name it, they're probably here. And it's making the startups mad. As I have to depart mid-festival on Sunday, I'm hoping to make it out of here before the Lord of the Flies energy reaching a tipping point.


• Everyone loves to make fun of focus groups. A couple of years ago, I presented a paper on employing a multidisciplinary approach (ethnography + market research) at an ethno conference, and caught a bit of flack for taking about silly MR at a conference filled with anthropologists. Today I sat in on a panel discussion with several user experience designers and one of them proceeded to attack focus groups as worthless (and to claim his approach as superior). This singularity of vision bothers me. All research approaches -- whether based on observation, interview or biofeedback -- have pros and cons. A good research practitioner will understand the pros and cons of various approaches, will have the savvy to select the most appropriate approach for the information need at hand, and will employ that approach to its best effect. I'd like to think that multidisciplinary thinking (and doing) is what we're moving toward. Can't we all just get along?