Brooklyn Beta 2011

People in New York never really look both ways before they cross the street. Well, maybe they do, but they just do it so quickly and subtly that I miss it. Maybe I’m too busy twisting my head this way and that, trying to see what potential vehicular calamity is headed toward my own person to notice how the natives choose to engage their half-ton brethren.

It’s not as if I’m not used to dealing with cars: I have one of the most perilous bike/foot commutes in the country between my house and my office, and even was a little bit hit by one recently. However, based on my recent experience in NYC it seems that most New Yorkers either (1.) are wearing exoskeletons under their clothes, perhaps some sort of lexan/bubble wrap hybrid that protect them from danger, or (2.) my trip northeast last month was a dream, and those people weren’t real.

I made the long trek to Brooklyn last month to experience Brooklyn Beta, the “small, friendly web conference aimed at the ‘work hard and be nice to people’ crowd” with the reputation that has grown to almost legendary proportions over the course of the last year. When I got the email one March morning on my way into work announcing that they were going to open registration later that day, I immediately uttered “I’m totally going to that” to no-one in particular, and proceeded to settle in for a morning of Twitter vigilance. Once noon approached, this attitude was followed by an almost spastic bout of machine-gun browser refreshing until I was able to enter my credit card information (already copied into my clipboard, duh) and snag credentials for both the Wednesday Whatnot session as well as the main conference that would be taking place on Thursday and Friday. Thankfully, since I work at the greatest place in the world, my bosses retroactively approved funding for my professional impulses, for which I still owe them a hundred high-fives. Also, maybe a Brooklyn Beta sticker, or perhaps a genuine Invisible Dog as a pet.

As far as the actual conference day-by-day experience looked, there have already been a few solid roundups written by others. A couple of my favorites are those by Tim Hopkins and Phil Coffman, though you can also read a few more here. Tim specifically gives a nice breakdown for each day and the speakers involved, and really emphasizes the breadth and vision of the organizers and participants. I really felt like I was playing in an All-Star game for three days (albeit mostly from the bench, maybe as a bat boy or something) where everyone had left the egos at the door and were eager to talk about each and every idea as if it were perhaps the greatest idea ever conceived.

Another unique aspect of this particular conference were the deliberately long social breaks, with the idea that you can learn more from collaborating conversationally than you can sitting in a chair, listening to someone else talk. I totally agree. However, as an infamous recluse, I hit my social ceiling about 10am on Wednesday. This left me plenty of time to skirt the fringes and think about why I was there. I felt throughout that I was a bit of a professional anomaly, a fact reinforced by the quizzical looks I regularly received when I told people I worked at a “branding shop,” where we did old-school graphic designy things like “designing logos” and owned “Pantone books.”

The majority of the attendees at the event were web auteurs, and most seemed to be involved in startups. My position as not only a client-centric designer but also someone who only by happenstance works mostly on the web at all put me in an interesting position. I’m not passionate about code. Literally 80% of my graduating design portfolio was hand drawn typography. I vaguely understand what an API is. I’ve only recently designed my first couple of mobile apps, and don’t even let my kids watch TV (but that’s mostly because I’m a mean person.) When anyone in my office shows me a new email app or online mockup tool I crank up my headphones and wish that no rogue software would enter my perfect world of long-established workflow patterns.

But Brooklyn Beta showed me another aspect to that world, a bubbling cauldron of creativity and ideas that was powered by a group of Doers. Not just thinkers. Doers. This transcends a specific discipline, and really speaks to the mindset and motivation of true innovators. So, after a month of pondering my experience, here are a few of my very personal takeaways:

1. Design Deep

I’ve often thought about the inherent depth of web design, not just as a concept, but in terms of experience potential. Most experiences on the web really are pretty superficial, straight-up information transfers and content scraping. The modern out-of-body (“what will people think of me when they see/read this?”) era of over-sharing has cultivated a virtual landscape of candy-coated soap bubbles, fleeting but overwhelmingly dense packets of information and opinion that we have to constantly sift through in order to find information worth knowing.

However, somewhere beneath all the rubbish is a foundation that, if built on correctly, has almost unlimited potential for re-orienting how we communicate and distribute pivotal information and resources quickly and effectively. Essentially, that’s what we do, right? We try to create the most effective conduits for information storage and transfer. However, the really challenging part of what was presented at Beta was the idea that we are not only responsible for how information gets from one person to another, but what that information actually is. The medium and the message.

This was most strikingly illustrated by healthcare visionary Todd Park and charity:water co-founder Viktoria Harrison who both called on the attendees to take the initiative and focus their time and energy on creating work that works toward the greater good. We’re living in a time where the potential for creating literally anything we want is at our fingertips, and it’s time to step back and consider the ramifications of where we spend our time and energy. Let’s design deeply.

2. Iterate quickly, revise as you go

This concept was particularly spoken to by Cameron Koczon of Gimmebar (the sweetest thing on the web right now) and Luke Wroblewski, who just released his new A List Apart offering Mobile First.

I’m terrible at this, personally. I’m not necessarily an overly meticulous person, but I do tend to tweak, and then keep tweaking until the sun goes down and I’ve convinced myself that what I’m doing isn’t actually that important. However, more than anything, I think that’s a way for me to avoid getting my work to a point where it can be publicly evaluated and judged. What struck me at BB was that the most effective way to get your product to a finished state quickly is to allow users to engage it at every step in the process.This is such a simple concept, but one that really requires a lot of resolve to implement, at least in my case. I prefer to feel like something is finished, and then release it into the wild like a dove, perhaps never to be seen or touched again. Investment in a long-term vision for your product requires constant molding and feedback from a body of users, not just some internalized spark of an idea. We’re not John Galt here, people. That dude was fake.

3. Community > Networking

This is always a particularly important point for me. Part of the reason I rarely involve myself in industry conferences and events is because they are so often filled with catalyzers, people who want to “show you what they can do for you” and “learn what you can do for them.” I think part of this is a regional issue, as Dallas as a whole is such a corporate environment, one filled with business card pushers and trade show cowboys who are really more interested in gaining new clients than in pushing the industry forward in any meaningful way. Not to say that those two goals are always mutually exclusive, but collaboration tends to play second (or third, or fourth) fiddle to commerce.

Brooklyn Beta was not like that.

On Wednesday I participated in Wednesday Whatnot, which was essentially a conference-wide think tank session curated by the group behind Greenville Grok. (I don’t know what’s in the water in Greenville, but it’s obviously something delicious that turns peoples’ brains into magical creation machines.) The point of the Whatnot was to give the floor to anyone who wanted it, and to create a situation where conversation was the only goal. The two or so hours we sat in these sessions really gave me a taste for the undeniable value of this sort of model. People weren’t trying to sell ideas or services, they were merely musing publicly, bouncing ideas off a group who’s stated goal was to help make every project better through the power of questions. It was gloriously refreshing. Throughout the course of the conference and in the airport before our flight home my fellow Dallashite (hilarious) Steven Ray and I spent some time discussing how we could create a similar event in The Big D. Last week I had coffee with Kyle Steed, who I didn’t actually meet until after the conference, and we discussed how much creative potential is wasted here due to the disconnectedness of the community. Dallas is actually one of the major design and dev hubs in the country, but everyone is so spread out that they rarely have a chance to get to know each other. That’s something we’d like to change. So, Greenville Grok people, you might be getting a few emails from Texans. I bet we can mail you some barbecue or longhorns or something if that would make you happy.

4. Make Something You Love

This one is easy, since it was inscribed on the hundreds of red plastic cups that we drank out of all weekend. I think this concept really hit home for me when we were treated to the world premiere of Girl Walk All Day, a creative interpretation of the latest Girl Talk record by a group of dancers who make their way through NYC in a fit of gleeful abandon. There was something delightfully free about the concept behind the film, and also something truly admirable about the amount of care that went into creating something that was obviously a work of passion, and a giant emotional risk to everyone involved. Hugely vulnerable, and that’s what I found the most attractive about the whole project. That’s what art is about after all, right?

5. Designers and developers are short human beings

(I was basically average height at this thing. That never happens.)

All in all, my visit to Brooklyn was a smashing success. Besides attending the conference I was able to cover some serious ground on foot, and hit some of the notable Brooklyn landmarks due to the peerless Twitter guidance of Chris King and Justin Pocta. Also, the actual real-life guidance of Cheyne Little, who is basically a Brooklynite now. You can tell by her glasses and how naturally she drinks fancy water out of shot glasses. Many thanks once again to Cameron and Chris who are the visionaries behind the event, and their posse of Studiomates cronies who helped keep it a well-oiled machine. I didn’t have an opportunity to directly interact much with any of these folks, but even the quiet, brooding, mysterious (okay, probably just quiet) people in the shadows of the room appreciated their humble guidance so much. Next year: handshakes.

In the spirit of most of the other BB posts I’ve read I’ll include a shout-out list, mine will be short, but warm. Tim Hopkins was the first guy I met on Wednesday, and an undeniably friendly fellow who also writes great stuff here. Dan Leatherman and I met through shared indignation, but bonded through things like being married. Also, he’s from Nebraska, so here’s a gold star for that guy. Steven Ray and Kyle Steed were my local yokels, though I didn’t know either of them before the event. It’s refreshing to know that there are like-minded people around me, and I hope we can help building something great in this city. Andrew Cohen likes Arsenal and mountain biking, enough said. Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge that tall German guy, who heard me blabbering on the last night about various types of beer that I thought were “too hoppy” and decided to intercede before I made a fool of myself. I raise my glass to you, friendo.

And I raise my glass to Brooklyn Beta. Making it to next year’s event is now one of my fondest wishes.

2 Comments to Brooklyn Beta 2011

  1. by Tim on November 17, 2011 at 10:21 pm

    Thanks for the kind words and the wonderfully detailed write-up. My favorite term in this is “Design Deep” by far. Well put.

    Looking forward to hearing more about the Dallas Grok-style meet.

  2. by Cameron Koczon on November 19, 2011 at 10:05 pm

    Thanks for taking the time to write this post. It’s excellent.

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