It is perhaps fitting that, as we scrambled to the finish line of Playful 11, the last thing we had to do was stack the chairs in Conway Hall so that the ballroom dancing could start on time.  Last time I stacked chairs to make way for dancing was at school, at a time when I thought the future was bright, shiny and full of opportunities.

Bemoaning the future now.

That time was the 1970s. But, as it turns out, not everyone who went to school at that time thinks the future now is as bright, shiny and full of opportunity as it could be. We saw touch screen interfaces. We got the iPad. We saw 3d chess sets, we got the Nintendo 3DS. We saw Logan’s Run. We got the Olympic village. Hal, Siri, etc. We’re creating bits of the future we’d like to have had in the 1970s. We’ve created a ‘middle aged future’. At least, that was the jet-pack thrust of what Marcus Brown (“more of a Mr Ben kind of person”) had to say in his talk, which I rather liked.

It wasn’t just Marcus who had a slightly disappointed view of the future now. One of the recurring themes of the event was a mild annoyance that we’re still looking at the Usborne Book of the Future (pdf) and comparing what we’ve done with what we predicted, like we’re somehow just checking it off on a huge future to-do list. We’re stifled by the science fiction canon. We’re sick of the near future. We’re not making a dent on the world, according to Toby Barnes.

Which might be true. It also might be a bit self-fulfilling. I like a bit of nostalgia and everything, but some people have never even seen Star Wars or Dr Who. Imagine that.

Relishing the now now.

So hurrah for the curious, delightful mix of presenters gathered at the event that had their own diverse, compelling, and ingenious offerings that, for the most part, simply revelled in the possibilities of the now.

The eminently likeable Matt Sheret described cities filled with buildings that can talk back to us and how we can develop personal relationships with epic things placed on a human scale. The utterly charming Chris O’Shea shared his wonderous work in progress on apps that encourage children to build their own physical worlds around them. And, oh my, following Brendan Dawes journey through his virtual shed (“my shed is a mental construct in my head”), I’ve immediately gone out and purchased an Arduino, to play, and make, to become better at my craft.

Slightly tangential, but nonetheless, most brilliant, was Matt Ward’s walkthrough of GREEN = BOOM, a project that started as an interest in a fictional bomb, but became an experiment in designing an environment that makes us feel like we’re in a cinematic experience full of tension – creating a ‘tense event’. This was playfulness at its best, albeit, a playfulness that wilfully stretches the boundaries of taste. In a fun way. With a bomb.

We were also treated to not just one, but two, possibly three design studios that talked about those most playable of things: games. Naughty Dog and ustwo Studios were in the house, but Emil Ovemar from Toca Boca seemed to get everybody most excited. His examples of their kitchen and store apps being used within real-world play scenarios were super-cute and I think half the audience cried a little when they saw the beautiful simplicity of the hairdresser app.

An embarrassment of riches

So chock-full of goodness was the day, that I can’t even give due credit to all the speakers I haven’t mentioned thus far: Al Robertson for his highly engaging discussion of science fiction, play and some wonderful references to H. P. Lovecraft and J.G Ballard’s contrary visions of the future and Martin Luther King’s message to Uhuru; Sami Niemela on how we find comfort in humanising the environment around us and what technology talking back to us might mean; Louise Downe for sharing her experiences at the Tate and how making things easy and fun can disrupt patterns of behaviour. And ferrets; Georgina Voss for her brilliant dissection of safe, sane and consensual play through the ethics of play as evolved in the BSDM community; and Paul Rissen, who proposed a genius reversal of ‘data to fiction to physical’ to encourage constructing data directly from fiction, and the atomisation of gaming.

We even had Scribble Tennis, featuring the fabulous Gemma Correll, Ian Stevenson, Rex Crowle and Mr Bingo battling it out, old-school, on an overhead projector. Happy to say that Gemma won the final, deserved for the Ipswich snowglobe, if nothing else.

The future’s bright.

I didn’t go to the pub. I had to get the train home. But, as I sat on the train and reflected on the day, I realised that the future’s bright. As Brendan Dawes said, ‘I love the future we’re in’. I also love the future we might make. Maybe my children will look back in 30 years and say ‘yeah, I mean, we got our own avatars, but I’m still a bit depressed’, but that shouldn’t stop us trying to make our world a better place. We should make a dent on the world. Let’s get playful and see what happens.

All images © Toby Barnes from Playful 11 on Flickr.

At the start of 2011, Flow joined forces with Foolproof to create the largest experience design group in Europe.

As part of the Foolproof group, Flow will now specialise in creating practice-leading interaction design. Our mission is to provide our clients with effective, elegant solutions to complex challenges. We plan to set the agenda, and the standard, for interaction design on the world stage.

We build upon fifteen years of heritage and experience, working with some of the world’s leading brands, to provide support and expertise for clients that know they need a fresh approach to design.

Our thinking and way of working is different. At Flow, we use human insight to drive and inspire creative thinking; we embrace co-creation, bringing clients and customers together, with us, on a journey to design interactions that deliver results.

We’ve brought together a team with rare expertise and skills that embody our new offering, and together with Foolproof we can support our clients with a depth and breadth of experience design services that are unrivalled.

If you’re looking for a new approach to design we’d love to hear from you, and we’re open for business right now.

When creating user experiences, you need to understand the problem you’re designing a solution for. You’d better engage the users, the customers and stakeholders. You’d better evolve those insights into concepts, journeys, information architectures and design frameworks. You’d better work with the best build and delivery partners.

Most experience design agencies are set up to be able to do exactly this. Most experience design agencies do it pretty well. Mostly.

Commoditisation of service offerings

However, as the experience design industry approaches a critical mass, such that it is able to commoditise its service offerings, those services cluster into a set of repeatable, predictable and marketable objects, like practice moths around a service flame. Some agencies might focus on the research cluster. Some might prefer to lead with the design and build cluster. Some might really be able to deliver them all as an integrated experience design offering.

But we’re evolving into digital utilities.

Designing without borders

While those commoditised experience design services help clients and agencies agree on deliverables, costs and timelines, the resulting engagement might be less collaboration, more subscription. If a client really does have an articulated, addressable problem, and the service offerings have evolved to the point that we can deliver great user experiences without too much operational overhead, thank you, then everybody is happy. But what about the client that can’t articulate their problem? What if they don’t even have a problem? What if they just have a feeling that things could be somehow ‘better’?

That’s where we need to take our experience design practice back to designing without service borders. We still gather insights. We still interpret and evolve. We still detail and deliver. But our engagement is based on our excellence in crafting experiences that delight customers and users. We don’t lead with services, we lead with design. Our designers are visionary. They understand the complexities. They’re vibrant, exciting and unique. They don’t shuffle into that workshop with brochureware, they walk in to that workshop self-aware. They boldly glow, and so they should.