Tom Coates
Designing for a Web of Data
2007
About this talk
Design patterns for brochureware and editorial sites are well-established. In fact, they’re so simple and formulaic that even waterfall development processes can churn them out. A producer has an idea, a designer mocks it up in Photoshop and then client side types and engineers go all agile on its ass.
But what happens when you’re pushing into web apps or social media? What happens when an absence of heirarchy makes left-hand navigation redundant? What do you do when design practice blurs into URLs and data structures, and where your service breaks the frame of the browser and starts appearing in hardware, in desktop applications or on other people’s sites?
In this session, Tom will talk about new literacies that designers need to build things that are native to a web of data, the blurring and interplay between designers and developers and what it means to rapidly iterate in small multi-disciplinary teams to find the heart and soul of a new concept.
About Tom Coates
Tom Coates works for Yahoo Brickhouse where he develops new concepts in social software, future media and the web of data. He focuses on the shape of the web to come and how to make things that thrive as part of it. He’s worked for many of the UK’s most prominent web companies including Time Out, UpMyStreet and the BBC where he ran a small near-term R&D team for the BBC exploring media navigation, annotation and distribution.
A regular speaker at conferences including ETech, XTech, IASummit and The Future of Web Apps, Tom also writes extensively at plasticbag.org as well as running the experimental online community barbelith.com.
