TEDx Newcastle

TEDx Newcastle (part of TEDx North) was held on 30th September at the Tyneside cinema and I had the pleasure to attend the event organized by Codeworks and Herb Kim.

TEDx is now a worldwide thing and it involves leading speakers talking about what they are most passionate about. By the way TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, with the x bit standing for Independantly organized event.

The first TED talk of the evening (shown by video) was given by Ed Ulbrich, he gave an in depth overview of the visual effects which were placed into the film Benjamin Button. I've never seen this film but It was amazing to see the effects and considering the first hour of the film is actually a computer generated face of Brad Pitt this is really cool, and makes you think how many more films they can make in the future using fully 100% digital actors.

The second talk of the evening was given by Mike Stenhouse, a User Experience and Interface Designer from Trampoline Systems, his talk revolved around Pattern Recognition & the Power of Story in Product, Experience & Interface Design.

The third talk of the evening was a very interesting talk around Privacy, Anonymity and the Futur, presented by Chris Stainthorpe of the B Group creative industry. He went into things such as even if Twitter ends, your tweets will still be stored somewhere and how we need to regain privacy. He also talked about how the older generation are more careful about giving using Facebook as they are worried about privacy, however the younger generation go in with all guns blazing and upload give away o lot of information about themselves by the status updates they post and the pictures that they upload.

Herb Kim from Codeworks then presented the Thinking Digital 2010 launch video, he discussed what the conference is all about and speakers which where expected for next year. Tickets are still available.

The fifth talk of the evening (shown by video) was a video of Dan Pink talking about motivation in the work place and different types of working environments and how managers can reward workers (or not) depending on what they have been working on.

The sixth talk of the evening was a very informative talk about the User Experience Curve given by Andy Budd from Clear Left in Brighton. Andy talked about things such as people remembering the good points and bad points of something and how you normally remember the start and finish of something but not necessarily the middle section of an experience, and how these can be transferred to websites for users.

After the main event, food and drinks were served in the bar as part of Codework Connect's Think and a Drink (TAAD) series of meetups. It was good to catch up with Greame Littlewood, Ashley Green and Dan Scott from Fusebox, Alistair McDonald, Ross Cooney and Alex Kavanagh.