There were lots of amazing speakers at day 5 of SXSW 2019. While I’m only writing brief snippets of my lessons learned, I plan to write longer pieces to provide more context once SXSW is over. Read on for lessons learned.
- General SXSW Lessons:
- Over-prepare for your presentation. Estimate spending 80 to 100 hours on a 15-20 minute presentation, especially if it’s your first time presenting in front of large crowds. Practice in front of friends, family, and people you don’t know and ask for honest feedback. Incorporate the feedback and do that again. If you spend the time and work up front, you’ll set yourself apart from 95% of the people presenting.
- Tell stories that are relevant to your topic. Do not include slides about you unless they are directly related to your presentation and the message you’re conveying. It’s not about you, it’s about your audience and the value you’re providing to them.
- SXSW is a phenomenal platform to share your lessons and provide value for your audience/attendees. Also, see the previous lessons about preparation and storytelling.
- Start working on your project today. It may sound cliche but, once you start the work, unseen opportunities and connections will come your way.
- Create a larger than life persona (i.e., brand) for yourself for your on-stage performances. You can always scale back but it’s hard to scale up. This is will help set you apart from your competition, make you memorable, and allow you to perform at a higher level because you can get lost in your character.
- Featured Session: The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World by Professor Jamil Zaki
- Empathy can be taught. Let’s re-evaluate the existing paradigms (e.g., Roddenberry Hypothesis) that we share about empathy. Let’s find ways to study new principles and use the scientific method to support them.
- We can use empathy to “mend the tears in our social fabric.”
- “Callousness is hard close up.”
- Carol Dweck’s mindset concept influenced Dr. Zaki. Mindset stems from ancient philosophers.
- Convergence Keynote: Jessica Brillhart
- “It’s important for us to make it [technologies] accessible to others.”
- Consider accessibility when designing products. If we do, we’ll make even better products than we would have otherwise.
- Ask yourself: how can I encode culture in our experiences/products? What role does direction/orientation play?
- “Immersion cannot be contained.”
- JB started creating experiences by having fun along the way (watch the conditions at Omaha project if your curious as to what this may look like).
- Remember that game design is the foundation of good product design for VR/AR/MR
- Featured Session: LOONSHOTS: How to nurture the crazy ideas that transform industries by Safi Bahcall
- The scientific method was a crazy idea at the time that “birthed modern science.” However, it changed our lives because we could test and reproduce results. This allowed us to create universal truths. Western Europe became the world leader because it nurtured “LOONSHOTS,” something that the great powers at the time – China, India, etc. – were not fostering.
- “You need both your artists and your soldiers…you need both working together”
- We must learn to create life at 32 degrees Farenheit, the temperature at which 2 phases…”blocks of ice and pools of liquid”
- ” Be a gardener, not a Moses…nurture the balance between the artists and engineers.”
- “Love your artists and soldiers equally”
- “Sometimes the deepest questions are the simplest questions.”
- Challenge traditional and/or historical beliefs. Doing this will help you discover real truths in the process (recurring theme of SXSW 2019).
- The technology may ‘work’ but a user interface that doesn’t work or is bad means people won’t use it.