Wednesday was the final day at SXSW for most of the team, while Jamie enjoyed a day extra at SXSW! We managed to squeeze in quite a few more sessions, panels and workshops. There was also a little bit of time for Tim to go shopping in old Austin on South Congress while Laura and Juliette gobbled up some famous Torchy's Tacos. 

"Chatbots & Robots Give Rise to the “Human” Brand" - Jamie

Chatbot session with Adam that went into how most branding processes now aren’t going deep enough. Super insightful and we are going to work with Adam on some tools and questions we can put together. Put simply:

“If you can describe your brand in the same way you would yourself – it’s not detailed enough.”

"How Uber Designs for a Self-Driving Future" - Laura

Before leaving today I saw 'How Uber Designs for a Self-Driving Future'  which was very interesting. It was all about how Uber are designing the experience of riding in a driverless car to create trust in the machine and delight in the novelty of it. Molly Nix, UX Design Lead Self-Driving, talked about how qualitative and quantitative data from over 50,000 driverless journeys have continued to improve their experience design.

An example I liked was how they noted that riders liked to take selfies in the car, but, a selfie in the back of a driverless car is no different to a selfie in the back of a regular car. So they placed a tablet in the back of the car that plays an animated visualisation of what the car 'sees' of the road with camera functionality that places a selfie onto it. This can then be posted to social media.

"How do you communicate the tech so people understand it without fearing it." 
_{- Molly Nix}

"Bird Feeder 3000: 3D Print a VR/AI/IoT Bird Feeder"  - Juliette

This presentation and mini-workshop aimed to show how you can combine different types of tech to create a product of value. The bird feeder was created using 3D-printing, VR, AI and IoT. It was great to see how a collaboration with a university was used to showcase that sometimes you do not need to start from scratch and can partner up to make something possible. There are also a lot of free resources out there to realise the creation of something, which shows it can be accessible to everyone even if there might be a slightly steep learning curve for coding. Here in the office we have of course also used IoT to create a function/feature we desired to have in the office that wasn't available to us before with our office IOMeter that we created, so the options are endless for both brands, how companies function internally and for individuals with a specific passion. You can read more about what the Internet of Things can mean for brands in our senior strategist Katie Dean's blog here.

Visual Diary

Amazing tech and art at SXSW from various companies and artists around the world.

A lot of installation and VR art was around due to the SXSW Art Program. This was an installation using projectors as well as sensors for a unique 'dinner table' experience.

Who did you meet?
We met lovely people in the evening and had dinner with a group of amazing people, and also met a lot of different interesting folks at the Trade Show.