September 13, 2012
John Davey on stage at Reasons to be Creative
Every year in September John Davey organises an excellent conference in Brighton. Until this year it was known as Flash on the Beach, now it’s called Reasons to be Creative. This is a reflection of the conference has grown from focusing on Flash, to incorporate sessions on design, illustration, web and mobile app development and this year cybernetics. The conference format, parallel sessions of three different speakers for most of the day, ensures there is always somebody of interest to listen to. Every year I come away tired, but enthused by all the great work and enlightening, informative sessions. I always take notes from each session, so I can follow up ideas later. This year I used Twitter for note taking and sharing. However, such is the flow of information on Twitter, it can be difficult to find a nugget of information at a later date easily. Therefore, I’ve decided to write up my notes, for my own benefit and anybody else who’s interested. I’ve written a post for each day of the conference, covering the speakers I saw. For each speaker I’ve written a brief summary of the talk and the key points. Links to the speaker’s sites, Twitter feed and resources mentioned during the talk are also included. Any memorable quotes by each speaker have been re-produced; though I should point out that, because the quotes were originally recorded on Twitter, they may be paraphrases, rather than verbatim records of what was said.
Every year John entices great speakers to Brighton, this year was no exception. For me the highlights were (in no particular order): Des Traynor, Brosmind, Evgenia Grinblo, Grant Skinner, Christian Heilmann, Kevin Warwick and Yves Peters.
Finally, I’d like to acknowledge other people whose tweets helped jog my memory, or captured a memorable nugget of information that I missed at the time. Therefore, respect and thanks to the following people: Laura Kalbag, Dan Mall, Johanna Kollmann, Ian Hamilton and Alex Jegtnes.
Reasons to be Creative round-up: Monday