Springbox is sending a dozen employees to this year's SXSW
Interactive festival. So we asked them: "What topics are you interested in
learning more about at SXSW Interactive?" Here are Senior Designer Gerren Lamson’s topics of interest.
In a really broad sense, interactive is an extension and reflection of how we behave socially. I'm really interested in what that means for the symbiotic relationship between people (consumers), places (environments) and things (brands/products/services) with the continuing rise of mobile, social media and digital commerce.
Branding in the Future
I'm interested to hear how agencies handle branding on multiple channels in the digital future. Traditional identity design is now required to live in many digital experiences at a variety of scales, and the tone of the content is even more crucial in successfully guiding how the company's audience will define the brand through conversation. How do we guide this challenging conversation in new areas of interactive such as: contextual mobile experiences, mobile advertising engagements, geo-location social activities, social-media-integrated websites and user-generated content. We all witnessed what a crowd-sourced new GAP logo could have looked like.
Interactive Environmental Design
In the past few years, we've seen the rise of mobile, touch-technology, geo-location and social media get a lot of attention. But, there's an emerging trend that big brands are invading public spaces to educate and entertain the masses with their creative memes. From text-based games in Times Square to interactive shopping kiosks and video-based manipulated window displays, the small screen is going big. I'm curious to hear how this part of the digital experience will impact what constitutes interactive in the future.
Grassroots Everything
I'd like to hear more on how peers and agencies are leveraging their relationships to build charitable pro-bono projects, designer collaborated experiments, viral memes and more. I'm also curious to what extent we'll see geo-location and mobile empower the public to participate in self-initiated meetups, political movements and charitable donation rallies on a grand scale. Is it plausible that all nerds unite in a single geo-location-based, social version of Dungeons & Dragons? Could we see a level 88 cold spell being cast in the local grocery market by a dozen nerds holding up their iPhones? What if they win $100 gift cards for groceries for doing that?