I had the fortunate experience of attending the recent IxDA conference held at the University of Colorado on February 9th-13th, see details about conference at http://www.ixda.org/interaction/index.html

Below is a quick summary of the things I found memorable (and it was hard to reduce all that material into only 10) but look forward to hallway chats about this with each of you over the next several days.

1. Twitter - OK, call me a little behind the curve on this but I now have found that with enough people, all in an industry that embraces Twitter, all have diverse enough backgrounds, all watching the same thing at the same time, etc. Twitter can be very, very useful at a conference to get alternate views, “closed captioned” notes, or discussions of the presentations you are watching or missing. See a capture of the twitter stream from the conference--time based, showing the tweets by time of day, including who was presenting and then sorting out all the tweets by user, keyword and hashtag http://www.tweetscapeit.com/ (just don't try to do this on an iPhone, i.e. you should "borrow" an iPad for your conference)

2. “Chick + sent me + high E” - OK, how many people have ever tried to pronounce Csíkszentmihályi’s name? If so, you’ve probably read “Flow.” Now you should be able to remember how to pronounce it correctly. “Flow” was the basis of a presentation about understanding Rhythm in interaction design. A great piece that can be read at Slideshare:

3. “Flash is dead...”  - “...but it helped make interaction design better.” Lisa Strausfield of Pentagram (and infamous Quokka Sports) eulogized the death of Flash by showing some work that help people think about content as navigation, check out http://www.pentagram.com as a good example of they have taken their content and made is as navigation, and vice versa. And Josh Clark of Effective UI added “In the real world, buttons are an abstraction. Touch is changing the way people are thinking about interfaces. The information is the interface. The content is the control.” See more at http://blog.effectiveui.com/?p=6593

4. “Examples trump abstractions” - This line kept coming up because that is how we think and relate to one another but more importantly it was a rally-call to designers since we are seeing more and more executives involved in design decisions where examples make more sense (as in story telling) than models and structures. And the other (over-used) expression was "Easy to be different; it’s difficult to be better” (taken from Jonathan Ive of Apple) as reminder on how to sell concepts with others and executives.

5. “Pattern libraries can be the clip art of interaction design” - while there were many alternate views of this perspective it was provocative, especially in interaction designers defining themselves since the theme is that we defined by our output/work product, our process is not well understood or codified, and defined relative to other roles. A theme of the need to find balance between usability and desire in interaction design. Engendering desire in users sometimes requires us to explore unorthodox solutions. A humorous take at .

6. “If you don’t make something, are you a designer?” - a philosophical argument about the craft (or lack) of interaction designers. The conversation by Bill Verplank went to the Medium v. Methods argument (where traditional fields like architecture, graphic design, industrial design, etc. all have a medium to work in). Ideas don’t necessitate a process. They don’t require testing. Ideas are nice and soft; however, when you are faced with solving a problem you have to understand the parameters or limits of the materials with which you are working, be it technology, clay, paper, etc. See more of his thoughts at http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/BillVerplank

7. Conceptual design does not work well in an agile environment - a bit oversimplified but based on a project to build the NPR iPad app. He argued that they needed to sample many ideas and when engineers were brought in, they wanted to build something. He instead appreciated the diverse thinking of a team of interaction designers that explored ideas through conceptual design rather than functioning elements, building on what he called a “relaxing experience.” Based on “Thrive,” http://www.bluezones.com/live-happier/thrive-book/. It turned into the app at http://www.npr.org/services/mobile/ipad.php

8. “Interaction design helps people relate to one another with the mediating influence of products” -  an opening keynote from Richard Buchanan of CMU, arguing that we consider our interaction design being something that helps people connect with one another (not to a computer or vice-versa). How do you design for participation? Knowing that inclusion and being able to participate is important to people, how can we make experiences better? Highly based on the sociologist Erving Goffman, see his work at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman

9. Mise-en-scène - the often little understood term used to describe the magic used to make entertaining movies. While the presentation was not as effective as it could have been, he argued that we make interactions based on the skills learned from film makers, taking advantage of things like set design, lighting, acting, costume and staging. He demonstrated several movie techniques like storyboarding, motion and rack focus to consider. To build on this, several people used the Prezi software which if you have not seen, you need to, its fantastic, http://www.prezi.com/

10. “You cant give me everything I need, so stop trying”  - a thoroughly entertaining closing speech by Bruce Sterling, comparing what we do to a sci-fi writer, saying that we are spending too much time trying to get people to understand or appreciate what we do (as in many readers dont “get” sci-fi). If something it too well understood, or too accessible, it reaches complacency. He said our “reality is in permanent beta.” But my favorite tweet about this is “@MrAlanCooper: I enjoyed the hell out of @bruces 's keynote, but remember #ixd11 folk: HE WRITES FICTION!”