What connects Abba, modern web design and the English seaside?

The answer, of course, is the annual dConstruct conference, held on the first Friday in September at the Brighton Dome. Which is also the venue where Abba stormed the Eurovision song contest with ‘Waterloo’ (more trivia below).

This one-day event has become a staple for us in recent years. Yes it’s a bit geeky (few other occasions will see so many smart-phones gathered in one place), but it’s also a chance to see where web technology and design are heading.

Riding the new media wave, and developing services and features that respond to the latest thinking and possibilities, is a bit tricky if your heads are always over a keyboard or round a table with clients. Sometimes you just have to get away from it all, take in the sea air and just imagine how things could be.

In doing this our creativity might be aided by a bit more improvisation. This was the theme of one speaker, Hannah Donovan – an accomplished cellist as well as web designer, who introduced her talk (or was it ‘set’) by joining two other musicians to do some jamming of her own.

The analogy is intuitive but also instructive. As in music, improvisation can help designers to creatively explore ideas and emotions without being constrained by a preconceived plan, score or wireframe.

But this does require a structure and framework. As in music, you need a holistic vision of what you’re trying to achieve, but also the freedom to explore ways of expressing or fulfilling this.

It’s also important to get the right blend of roles. The ensemble, or creative team, needs a balance of skills and tools/instruments that are consistent with the product that is under construction.

Of course, there are methodologies that make some of these points. Rapid Application Development, for instance, is focused on producing an environment where programmers/developers can build up and test pockets of functionality without having the final output detailed in advance.

What I liked about Hannah’s argument, though, is the call for frameworks that also allow the creative juices to flow; to let the designers bounce ideas off one another and remember that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - and not always best set out in advance to the last bar or style sheet.

Over the next few days we’ll be providing further reflections on what was discussed last Friday. For now, here are some more bits of music trivia, which perhaps are now causes of national embarrassment; but first some questions:

1. Given the UK didn’t win in 73, why was the 1974 Eurovision song contest in Brighton at all?

2. How did the Swedish orchestra conductor decide to attire himself for Abba’s song?

3. Which British group provided the interval entertainment while the votes were counted?

Answers:

1. Having won the previous two years, Luxembourg decided not to host again. The BBC offered to step in and chose the Brighton Dome as the venue

2. The poor chap rather lamely dressed as Napoleon (well, he wasn’t to know this would be a moment in history, nor that YouTube would come along one day)

3. I’m afraid it was The Wombles. Good fun if you’re 8 years old (as I was), but was that really the best way we could have projected our musical prowess to the world?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 10:39 am and is filed under General Interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.