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Web Directions Closing Keynote: Mark Pesce - You-biquity

Web Directions Closing Keynote: Mark Pesce - You-biquity

When we launched Web Directions this year we intentionally left the closing session on day 2 open in recognition of our belief that epiphanies are worth waiting for. In previous years we’d had the crazed irreverence of The Smackdown, something for which those involved are yet to forgive us, and then last year the excellent Jeff Veen on Building the Next Generation of Web Apps. At the end of two very packed days we think people want something which is content rich, but inspirational and thought provoking. And for ourselves we wanted something which really closed on the theme of this conference: standing on solid technological ground, with our eyes trained on the far horizons.

Anyway, John and I were talking through a few possibilities one day when we just looked at each other and said the same name: Mark Pesce. Or so the story goes.

Mark is a pioneering thinker, writer and speaker on media and technology, renowned internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web to invent VRML. He was enticed to Australia to chair the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at the world-renowned Australian Film Television and Radio School and has now gone on to receive an appointment as an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, as well as found FutureSt, a Sydney media and technology consultancy. And of course, you may know him from such ABC programs as The New Inventors. He’s such a perfect fit for how we wanted to close WD06 this year that we couldn’t believe it when he said yes.

So, we’re really excited to announce that this year WD06 will be closing with Mark Pesce on You-biquity.

It’s time to revisit the entire philosophy of interaction design on the Web, time to move the focus away from the site-as-resource, toward an idea of the site-as-personal-enabler. What we each bring to a website - or rather, what we should bring to a website - is a wealth of information about ourselves. This is the real resource of Web2.0, and the next place the Web is going. The exuberance around social networks shows us that people want to connect - it’s time for designers to build the tools which will truly enable that connection.

Posted by Maxine on 25/07/06 at 11:09 am