Your Keynote Speakers for Big Design 2012

When you go to a Big Design Conference keynote talk, these speakers will drop some knowledge on you. We go out of our way to purposely get a diverse set of speakers with various backgrounds, challenging them to come up with something fresh, new, and different. We proudly announce your keynote speakers for Big Design 2012. Get your tickets today!

Sharron Rush. The Big Umbrella of Inclusive Design

To kick-off the Big (D)esign conference, we’ll start with big ideas. What is your fundamental approach to design? Does it include all potential users? This talk will focus on a recent challenge – how to design a voting system that works for all citizens, including those with disabilities. Lessons learned – and those that we are still learning – have profound impact on design effectiveness and flexibility. As we design systems for inclusion, we find that as we remove perceived barriers we also solve unanticipated problems and improve user experience for all.

Stephen P. Anderson. To Boldly Go From Information to Understanding

We’re given a flood of information when all we want is the answer to a question: Which car should I buy? What’s the best treatment for this illness? Which software will be best for my business? Scientists struggle to find patterns in large data sets and marketers aren’t quite sure what to do with their analytics. Even in politics, bits of legislation are parsed out into fearful strands of rhetoric. For all our accumulated information there’s a clear absence of understanding.

Add to this the ever increasing data accrued on a daily basis, from simple site usage stats to embedded devices monitoring all manner of minutiae, and you see an historical moment in our civilization: While we have more and more data is being made available to us, our cognitive ability to cope with this information has not changed. We have an unprecedented access to information, but poor biological and technological tools to make sense of it all. We need new ways to help offload the mental tasks of understanding and identifying relationships.

Speaker Stephen P. Anderson will take a brief, historical look at this rise of information, and offer a glimpse at what working with and designing information might mean in the coming decades. He’ll share examples of how we might move beyond simply publishing and sharing information, and move toward tools that help us to interact with, think about, create, judge, and act on information. Are you ready for this bold step into the future?

Adam Hanson. Is the Cloud Almighty?

Cloud computing is here to stay. Research firm Gartner estimates that by 2014 the IT industry will spend over $10 billion in cloud-related services, a jump from $3.7 billion in 2011, but why should you care? If you’re a small business or start-up, being able to use cloud technologies will save you much-needed dollars during the first steps of your trek down the path of entrepreneurship. If you took the right steps, virtualization technologies will also help you continue running your business’s infrastructure seamlessly if you see a sizeable increase in production over a short period of time.

Even if spending is not a top issue for your business cloud computing can still be a boon to your operation, from data storage to content management. Attendees can expect to learn more about what businesses are ripe to take advantage of cloud computing technologies through typical use-case scenarios so you can make an informed decision of whether or not your dollars will be a part of the $10 billion by 2014.

Jared Spool. The Secret Lives of Links

Who knew links could be so interesting? Links are the fabric of a web site, holding all the pages together. They are the molecular bonds of a great web experience.

When we design links poorly, it’s painful for our users. When we design them well, it focuses the user completing their objective in a delightful manner. Getting the link design right is critical to a great web site.

Yet, we never talk about what makes great links great and what makes poor links poor. Until now.

Join Jared M. Spool as he shares his research with a ton of funny, interesting, and thoughtful examples and rules that reveal the secret lives that our sites’ links are living. You’ll learn the good and the bad from university web sites, news providers, e-commerce sites, and many more.

It is worth saying, again: Get your tickets today!