Odopod Designer, Linzi Bergmann shares her experiences from this year's FITC San Francisco.

I am super excited that FITC came to San Francisco this year. The conference was smaller and more intimate than FITC Toronto, so you were able talk with and learn from the speakers on a more personal level. There were some key themes that continued to stand out throughout all of the presentations and an overwhelming amount of awesome content, topics and speakers. Here are some of my highlights from this year.

Recurring themes:

• Embracing serendipity
• Stepping outside the computer screen (physical computing and Flash & AIR for Android)
• Developers love the challenge of coding trees and nature

I was particularly inspired by many of the physical computing experiments because I share the excitement around blending something tangible and personal with digital technologies to create enriched experiences.

Notable presentations:

Steve Mason's Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous
• In this lecture, Steve focused on installations that Obscura Digital has made for private clients that the public will never be able to interact with like the Esquire pool table.
• Obscura uses Touch Designer for most of their recent projects. It's a node based environment that works like a combination of Photoshop, After Effects and Cinema 4D. Needless to say, it's pretty awesome technology for designers and coders alike.

Jared Ficklin's Eyes can Hear, 5 Ways
• The inspiring and energetic Ficklin, showed us his many experiments in physical sound visualizations and the awesomeness of corn starch. Check him out on YouTube.
• Non-Newtonian Fluid on a Speaker
• Harold Daw Flame Table
• Augmented Reality Porta Potty

Jared Ficklin presentation

R Blank's Hearing Pictures
R Blank walked his captive audience through his process of turning a picture into music through Synthia. We learned the difference between creating sound through pixels vs music. He creates musical patterns using the pixels and histogram of an image to give the music feeling. A blue image would compose more somber music than a red one. In the future, R Blank hopes to allow people to play with the music their image creates. Check it out: Synthia

Scott Dadich & Jeremy Clark's After Magazines: WIRED's Digital Rebirth
• Before the iPad came out, WIRED planned for the magazine to have an interactive tablet version
• They wanted to retain the essence of the magazine, promote new forms of advertising, invent a new publishing process, and - as always - put readers first
• They build 3D models for many of the images in the print magazine, so the tablet version allowed them to use these assets interactively - breathing new life into the once static images

Kyle Cooper's Others: Content and Creative Community
• Others: collaboration (working with others) & the audience (involve them emotionally)
• Listen to your work, be open to accidents
• It's more important to tell a story and involve the audience than make something big and flashy with the newest technology
• He loves the editing process & to tell someone a riddle through his work, when they get the riddle - they feel emotionally connected to the piece
• Examples of his work: Wimbleton & Se7en

Erik Natzke's Art of Play
• Erik uses photographs to evoke emotions but not directly - very abstracted (past the abilities of a photoshop filter)
• Just because you don't know something, doesn't mean you can't learn it
• What is learned from a project is more important than the awards
• Do what you love and the money will follow
• What you've done is what you'll do (meaning: do what you want, and then clients will come to you to do that kind of work)
• Check out Erik on Click for Art

Erik Natzke presentation

Grant Skinner's ADHD, FTW, LOL!
• Passionate Procrastination: put something you really like into your client work - make it more interesting for yourself
• Avoid boredom
• Experimenting helps you develop skills
• Stay on task, make micro-deadlines for yourself and give yourself micro-rewards
• Go beyond failure and embrace serendipity
• Simplicity = Complexity; one simple line of code can create something beautiful, it's all how you play with it
• Example of work: Nexus One gas pedal that controls remote control car using Air for Android

Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille's Design IO: Interactive Installations
• Gave the audience a behind the scenes look at how they created their famous installations. They showed the character design for their creatures, drawings for their environments and their various tracking tests for each installation
• They're word of advice for installation artists: take a ton of video of the space you'll be showing in before you start working and make a mock-up to test
• Funky Forest
• Knee Deep
• Rise & Fall

Robert Hodgin's Practice Make's Perfect
• Doing a lot of work with reaction-diffusion and magnets.
• Inspired by nature (common theme of the conference). When he looks at something in nature, he thinks "how could I create that through code" - for example: a cuttlefish's color changing skin
• He does his work because he wants to appreciate nature and science more

Robert Hodgin's work

It was an exciting and inspiring event and I can't wait until next year.