SXSW 2012 is less than seven months away. Can you believe it?

Once again, several Springboxers have entered panels for your consideration. Check out their panels, and be sure to vote for (and comment on) your favorites.  

Design from the Gut: Dangerous or Differentiator? 
Phil Coffman

Do It Big: The Culture of Getting Stuff Done
Cecy Correa

Coexistence Between Developers and Designers
Eric Gehrman

Directing Technology While Bass Fishing in Austin
Tom Hudson

Everything is a Remix, So Steal Like an Artist
Austin Kleon

Building the Next Big Thing on a Shoestring Budget
Casey Locker

How I Learned to Let Go and Love the Agency Side
Leland Means

Curiosity Makes You Stronger: Testing UX Design
Ashley Moreno and Adrian Taylor

Agencies Making Software: Not Just Microsites Now
Mike Nowlin and Colin Walsh

It’s Good to be King: Context-Driven Design
Adrian Taylor

They say SXSW is what you make of it, so I'll take some responsibility for my general feeling of dissatisfaction with the past couple days of panels. Overall, the majority of the panels I've seen have been somewhere between acceptable and pretty good, but not great. I want to be wowed, I want to see and hear things I've never seen and heard. Am I asking too much? Here are some quick thoughts on ways we might improve the selection for next year:

Video panel submissions
Not every subject matter expert is a good speaker, so what if the panel picker included short video pitches for panels so you could get a sense for the presenter?

Extended panels
In talk after talk I felt that the hour provided didn't really give the presenter enough time to get to the good stuff. Lots of topics can can be covered in that time, but how about mixing in some longer form sessions for more complex subjects?

Truly expert-level panels
Sessions at SXSW are rated from beginner to advanced but so far they've consistently felt like they were trying too hard to accommodate all levels of experience. I'd like to see some really advanced, really challenging sessions that provided a couple of qualifying questions that could help attendees know if they'll be able to keep up.

No more sales pitches
I'm completely fed up with panels that amount to sales pitches. Yes, I've seen your website, I know your work is good, that's why I'm here. Same goes for attendees, if you are going to ask a question, we really don't need to hear about your entire business model first.

This probably reads like I'm totally anti-SXSW, but that is not at all the case. I've really had a blast over the past couple of days and it is always great to hear from the community and confirm that you are on the right track. I'm looking for strategies to help SXSW continue to evolve and mature into something that I'm excited to return to every year. If you have ideas of how to improve the fest or think I've got it completely wrong I'd love to hear from you.

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?

Springbox had the privilege to work with the Visual Arts Center (VAC) at the University of Texas at Austin, developing a new brand identity for the institution. I was on the Springbox team that created the brand identity and recently attended the VAC's grand opening on Friday, October 24th.

The new VAC gallery is located on the southeast corner of the Arts Department. Approaching the gallery, a series of steps takes you up to the entrance. This was the first chance to catch a striking glimpse of the work we created. The front side of every step is painted such that while you look at it from the base, it creates the VAC logo, which we designed.

As you walk in, the gallery opens into a large area where the artist in residence displays their work. The current piece titled ZZZ’s, by the Los Angeles-based artist Ry Rocklen, is a collection of found objects placed around a sequence of tiled carpets, which expands up toward the ceiling. It’s the kind of piece you can immerse yourself in and get a feel from all angles. Ry goes into more detail with VAC Director Jade Walker in explaining the concepts behind the sculpture.

Walking further back on the first floor is an exhibition titled Unveiled, which includes pieces by University of Texas students and alumni. This exhibition's theme centers around transparency, clearly noted by Self-Portrait, a column of neatly folded and stacked t-shirts belonging to the artist Arturo Agüero, reaching around 20 feet high and ordered in a sequence that flows through an entire color spectrum. Upstairs another group exhibition titled Deconstruct and Reconstruction included several visiting artists’ pieces, including sculpture, video installations and paintings.

The gallery as a whole is a large space with many large areas designed to give the pieces the breadth and attention they deserve, allow visitors to immerse themselves in the work, and, most exciting for me, our branding work is presented throughout the space on all types of media. I won’t lie when I say it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside to know that we were a part of this new and exciting space for intersecting ideas in art.

Next week, Springbox will be hosting an Austin Flash Platform User Group Meetup.

For you Flash pros out there, it’s a great opportunity to see our office and check out the work of our rich media and development teams. Drinks and refreshments will be provided. 

Roman Villareal and Chris Martinez of the Austin Adobe Flash Platform Usergroup will manage the meeting. They'll have some giveaways from Adobe, and there will be at least one, maybe two, presentations: 

• HTML5 and Flash, presented by Tom Hudson, Rich Media Manager, Springbox
• Face Recognition and Flash, presented by Steve Shipman (tentative)

Here are the details:

What:
Austin Flash Platform User Group Meetup 

When:
Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 6:30 PM 

Where:
Springbox office. 708 Congress Avenue, right across the street from the Paramount Theatre and Stephen F. Austin Hotel.  

Parking:
Up to you to find a spot. Spaces open up after business hours.   

RSVP here.