The Secret Life of Comedy

It has never been easier to make a web site, and our digital toolbox has never been greater. At the same time, we seem more concerned with automating our process and systemising design than with creative thinking and generating ideas. Is web design purely about utility? Is it all about convention? Is it a science? Or is there room for beauty, expression and art?

In this talk, Espen will take a tongue-in-cheek look at the state of web design, explore different creative mindsets, and show how adding a pinch of comedy can make a real difference to the bottom line.

Evaluating Technology

We work with technology every day. And every day it seems like there's more and more technology to understand: graphic design tools, build tools, frameworks and libraries, not to mention new HTML, CSS and JavaScript features landing in browsers. How should we best choose which technologies to invest our time in? When we decide to weigh up the technology choices that confront us, what are the best criteria for doing that? This talk will help you evaluate tools and technologies in a way that best benefits the people who use the websites that we are designing and developing. Let's take a look at some of the hottest new web technologies and together we will dig beneath the hype to find out whether they will really change life on the web for the better.

What we talk about when we talk about web performance

As the numbers of people who access the internet continually grow, and the devices they use diversify, one thing is clear: speed and performance are a top priority.

Despite this, the average web page size has more than tripled in the past 5 years, and many techniques, platforms, tools and practices don’t champion performance or consider its implications. One of the biggest challenges is simply the absence of good information to build awareness about performance impacts.

Luckily, our conversations about performance-related choices are getting better-informed: in the past few years, compelling tools and data are helping us measure, track and understand the real state of performance and how it affects our audiences; and techniques are emerging to make responsible design and coding choices.

Storytelling in JavaScript

Many of us are telling stories on the web – whether it be expressing concepts with data visualisation, the story of how our product works, or simply writing good documentation. JavaScript is insanely powerful for gradually revealing information through animation, manipulating graphics with SVG, Canvas, and WebGL, or allowing users to guide themselves through interaction.

In this talk, we’ll explore how our minds work on the web and how JavaScript can reach to new heights of composing experiences that attach to our limbic system and captivate us. We’ll deep dive into some of the how’s about these type of implementations and create live demos that bring these concepts to life. We’ll talk about React and Vue implementations and how to make expressive but practical interactions work with the virtual DOM for everyday use.

Machimaginarium

A Journey into Artificial Creativity

Chess, Go, Poker, Doom, Breakout, Space Invaders - the list of games where machines have already become better players than us grows every month. This might make you wonder when they will beat us at the one game where we still consider ourselves unique: creativity.

In this talk Mario will introduce you to some of the latest research in deep learning, in particular in the field of image analysis and generative art. He will show examples how he uses neural networks and open data to augment and extend his own creativity.

What you want is not what you need