2011 Big Design Conference!

2011 Big Design Conference Dallas, TX

I attended three presentations at The Big Design Conference in Dallas TX of 2011:

1. The Hiring Squad
2. Games: Rules For Living
and 3. Ideas and Innovation

These presentations were all interesting and educational in their own ways, however the two that I found the most eye opening were The Hiring Squad and Games: Rules For Living

Keith Anderson, Dan Ferguson, Sean-Michael Daley, Kari Drews, and Patricia Korth-McDonnell were the speakers for The Hiring Squad. This presentation was more in a panel form than anything else. Questions about how to get hired in the design industry were taken from the audience and also read off of premade note cards and answered by the above people. I learned that interviewing and hiring in the design industry is a lot more relaxed and honest than in other environments. In fact, the first question that was answered was something along the lines of “How do you feel about face book pictures with drinking in them?” This made me think of what my dad always tells me: “Never ever put anything on facebook that you wouldn’t want a company who is interested in hiring you to see.” This always made me think ‘hey, no drinking pictures…’, but to my surprise, the first answer was that she drinks and meets other designers to drink and has pictures of drinking on her facebook! It’s something that people do and as long as you don’t have any wild pictures of yourself doing a keg stand (or something along the lines of such), you should be fine. The next answer was ‘It’s facebook. Facebook is for your personal life and we are more interested in your actual work and what you would bring to the design team than your personal life.’ These answers were not what I expected and I found them to be eye opening! I suppose I could work these thoughts into my digital marketing plan by having a relaxed approach to marketing myself rather than a strictly “overly professional” approach that may instead ward game/animation companies off.

David Hill was the speaker for Games: Rules For Living, which was a good presentation about how “Life is like a game”, meaning in games players have challenges to accomplish and by accomplishing these challenges, they get rewarded, or rather by failing to overcome the challenges, the players can become punished. Either way, people love to be challenged, and are likely to accept challenges when presented to them. In games, you need to make sure people will want to make the "investment" in a game or a challenge and in order to do that there must be a reward. For example, once Microsoft added Achievements to 360 games, people slowly started becoming obsessed with as many achievements as they can in every game they play. This is because having achievements is like having trophies that say they completed each challenge that that achievement represents. Psychologically, people instantly feel rewarded and a level of stress is relieved. Which brings me to my next point, something I had learned from David Hill that I hadn't realized or grasped before: that people need a certain level of stress in their lives in order to really live or have a purpose. The example the speaker gave is that it is nice to sit around all day and watch Cartoon Network for hours but after not really doing anything for that long, your brain will "vegetate". We, as humans, need some level of stress in order to engage our brains in daily life.