DCamp Bangalore rocked again(part 1)

It was time again DCamp or Design Camp Bangalore.  Amit Pande, Sarit, Muthu, Anil Gupta among others worked hard to get this event going. I must tell you that I had an awesome time there. The presentations there were truly awesome. Let give a short summary of the things as they happened at the DCamp, though Vinodhn already has kind of everything on twitter. So heres how the event unfolded for me.

I happily landed and Mekhri Circle expecting Aditi's office to be close by. So I begin walking from there towards Cauvery Circle. Cool I was looking for directions and I see someone looking at me from an auto. Oh ok I recognize this guy, hmmm....ok he is Gilberto from Thoughworks. Fine he is going to DCamp but is lost and does not know where is it happening. Ok fine I said, let walk to towards the Aditi Office and let so we walk. A few meters down the road, there is Muthu and Sudhindra at the gate of Aditi. So next thing we do is register and head for the terrace where the event was happening. Amit Pande was really busy managing everything there. And the talks were being put on the whiteboard.

So around 10:30 Amit Pande started with his talk. It had a pretty interesting title, UX and Design Inspirations from Science Fictions. Well he did have some interesting points to make. If you think of it then, Arthur C. Clarke, did mention or rather design certain things which at that time were mere fantasy. Then he showed certain examples from movies such as XMen(The virtual 3D map of a certain location), The Matrix(The direct human interface, the phone and several others actually), Minority Report(The awesome mechanism for dealing with so much information and the amazing auto updating newspaper) and Total Recall(The robotic driver and the 3D holographic trainer). Basically he wanted to show that Design is very much like speculative fiction.

Next was Param. He had done some research into Storage Space usage by Automobile users.Some interesting things that he told were

  • Some women keep an extra pair of clothes
  • people dont use ash tray in cars
  • Cup holders too are not used
  • people try to protect their car interiors using every possible means
  • Boot is often used for CNG kit

It was astonishing that Italian designers with little or no knowledge of Indian conditions and attitudes design cars for India. Amazing. the bigger problem is that India has way too many Indias in it. So difficult to understand them fully or satisfy each one of them fully is impossible.

Next there was this talk on how Welingkars Institute, Mumbai is bringing design in management. I did not attend it. Rather I had a nice time talking to folks about how Second Life is destroyed by spam and pr0n. How that wonderful technology still has a lot to do with improving the UX in it.

Then there was this DCamp Challenge, where in teams were formed and we were to come up with ideas on how to optimize the electricity usage in households. We all got together and tried to come up with best of ideas. What we had come up with was the fact that many appliances consume electricity even after they are done with being used. So some sort of smart device should there to automatically cut off electricity.

And it was 1pm and lunch was ready to be served. Let me tell you that it was really awesome. I had a nice time talking to Muthu and Ashish about how Firefox addons were making life simpler. We could do so many things with it.

Well there is a lot more...and will be posting about it more in my next post. Am really tired right now so keep watching this space Happy

 

Update:  Continues here http://the100rabh.blogspot.com/2008/08/dcamp-bangalore-rocked-againpart-2.html

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