Year three. Really? Yes! The team from Big Design put on another great year – and I was glad I could help in some small way. From bringing in top talent to Dallas – to being the one big event each year where all Dallas area designers can meet and mingle – Big Design is great at providing a low cost way to become inspired and network with like minded designers, developers, and social media mavens. Check out my cameo in the above video, and for more check out this year’s photo gallery.

This week the local Dallas UPA held a Big Design Preview event, where 40+ people got to hear 10 minute previews on some of the great upcoming talks here at the GameStop office.

There was a large turnout – and as always, the Dallas UPA is a great place to meet new people, get introduced to the local User Experience community, and hear from peers on new methods, books, resources, and more.

After the opening mixer, we heard from:

@BrianKSullivan
Designing for Awareness

@digitalcandy
Remove the Suck: Lessons in Product Differentiation

@mattdonovan
Defending Creative Designs

@marcelosomers
Use the Force To Build Your Strategy

@suredoc
Narrate This: How You Can Own Your Own Story

@schubox
Critical Thinking for Creatives: How to Make Decisions Faster

@AdamtheIA
Innovation: Ideas are Just the Beginning

Be sure to check out all the great speakers at this year’s Big Design: http://bigdesignevents.com/speakers

I also previewed my talk:

Game On: Everything you need to know about how games are saving changing the world

Gaming is at a tipping point, never before have games effected our day-to-day lives in such a substantial way. From entertaining yourself on the subway with Angry Birds, to solving the world’s greatest problems – gaming is quickly becoming a mainstream way to explore, communicate, connect, and work.

With “Game On” Jeremy Johnson will take you on a tour of gaming trends – which includes everyone’s favorite gaming buzz words: gamification, gameful, game layer, gamestorming, game mechanics, gameplay, game theory and good old video games. How’s that for a extra helping of games? Let’s top it off with a Call of Duty deathmatch – who’s game?

Along with the preview I handed out a list of books that will go well with this talk:

(Download PDF)

Big Design is this month! Get you’re tickets, and get ready for the biggest meetup of Designers, coders, technologists, and social media gurus in the DFW area!

Today I gave a short presentation on “Taking Your Content Mobile” at Open Camp here in Dallas. It’s now easier than ever to quickly create a mobile specific version of your site using a few simple tools/plug-ins. If you’re not ready now, you’ll need to start thinking about it – and I’ll show you your options.

Surprisingly when I asked how many people had a mobile version of their site, less then half raised hands. And this is coming from a more tech focused audience at Open Camp. I should of asked what’s stopping everyone, and it could be the “why?” – why go mobile?

While Apple continues the marketing of the iPhone viewing “the real web”, many sites are easier to navigate, view, and scroll around when modified for the small screen (not to mention load faster).

The options breakout something like this:

• hosted
• plug-ins
• custom dev
• themes / templates
• style-sheets
• adaptive-layouts
• auto-generate

In my presentation I go over each of these, with examples and links:

If you haven’t gone mobile before today, now is your chance!

A behind the scenes look at Big Design 2010. I was lucky enough to have a part in helping with Big Design in both 2009 and 2010, and look out for 2011!

The signage was bigger and better thanks to fastsigns being a sponsor this year.

It’s really amazing the great talent we have in the area, and this year we augmented with some great out-of-towners like: Jared Spool, Bill Scott, Chris Bernard, and Dr. Susan Weinschenk.

Stephen Anderson had us supplied with a mini-set of Mental Notes cards.

Many of the slide decks were out on Note & Point from the presentations at Big Design: Kelsey Ruger, Travis Issacs, and Joe Dyer. And a couple more presentations on the Big Design SlideShare group.

But what about the parties you ask? Yes we have those as well.

What does success look like for Big Design? A great group of people – wanting to connect, share and explore new topics.

Looking for more info about Big Design and how it went? Check out the #bigd10 hashtag, and some of the blog posts and photos that followed the conference:

My photos on Flickr

@michaelcummings flickr set

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-day-1-secret-entrance.html

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-conference-my-timeline.html

http://worldofdevign.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/putting-on-my-bigd10-yellow-hat/

http://www.mkanderson.com/portal/archives/1797

http://derans.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-design-conference-2010-recap.html

http://www.madmacgirl.com/2010/05/30/brief-reflections-on-the-bigdesign-conference/

http://baxie404.com/2010/05/big-d-conference-day-1/