Google SPAN 2015
On November 12 I attended Google SPAN in London. A one-day design event that was also happening in New York two weeks earlier. The videos of most sessions are already available for you to check.
The sessions covered interesting and diverse topics about design. Personally I found very refreshing to hear about the experiences of applying the design process in areas that are far from my day-to-day experience. From the wide range of topics, I especially enjoyed the sessions about Virtual Reality (VR) and designing for kids.
Virtual Reality
Regarding Virtual Reality, two sessions presented two very different but complementary perspectives.
On the one hand, Jessica Brillhart from the Cardboard team at Google explained the challenges of creating films in VR where concepts such as editing and storytelling are getting redefined in this new context.
On the other hand, Ken Wong, the lead designer of Monument Valley, presented the challenges of defining new interactions for users in VR games such as moving objects around to solve puzzles without making the player dizzy.
Designing for Kids
The “Designing for kids” session was both informative and entertaining. Designers working on the Youtube Kids app and those creating the educational kits from Technology will save us, provided us with useful guidelines on how to design for kids: the relevance of visuals, the audience diversity (from all kinds of kids to involving the parents), adapting to their language, avoid dumbing the design down, or considering the responsibility of the product were some of the highlights.
Some of the ideas are available online but it is hard to capture the fun we had in the hands-on session with the electro dough kit.
and much more (in just one day)
Apart from the official sessions, the event was a great opportunity to talk with many attendees. The audience had just the right size to allow both meeting new people all the time to learn from new perspectives on design, but also meet later again to continue interesting conversations. You could find many people passionate about design and working on interesting projects including Google Material design guidelines, digital products from ustwo, motion design on Android, or even hobbyist carpet designers with branding expertise.
It was a great experience to be part of, and I’m happy to see Google Design organising events like this (and doing so in Europe too).