After the great success of the first Mobile Design Session of last year, this year we repeat and extend the session format turning it into the first Mobile Design Conference. The conference is organized by dotopen and the Barcelona Design Centre (BCD) and is scheduled on October 21, 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (MACBA) during the Barcelona Design Week.

BCN Design Week is an international business focused congress framed in the field of design and aimed at those companies and professionals in any industry or productive services that use knowledge and creativity as a driver of its business activity. Under the slogan “Facing New Challenges Through Design” BCN Design Week 2010 aims to make known the role of design as a key element of innovation and competitiveness both for businesses, professionals and institutions, and for entities and organizations of all industry and scope.

Mobile Design Conference

I am really happy with the top quality speakers we were able to bring together this year. It is definately one of the MUST BE international events if you’re designing for mobile and working or interested in the topic of the Networked City.

At the beginning of a new decade, the technology paradigm of anytime, anywhere, anyhow has become a reality in our everyday lives. Location technology is now integrated into nearly every new mobile device, opening exciting and challenging paths for the discovery of new services around the user.

With improved capabilities of devices such as sensoring technologies, we’re moving towards networked and context-aware environments. Embedding computational power into the objects and environments that surround us (also known as ‘urban’ or ‘ubiquitous’ computing and ‘locative media’) clearly marks the next steps.

This new technological potential renders the discussions about open or locked-in solutions even more important – especially for urban environments with multifaceted stakeholders:

• what is the potential and limit of ‘open data’ in the context of a networked city?
• what is the role of locked-in solutions, how do we define ownership?
• how do we engage users in the creation of complex systems?
• what are general benefits, challenges or dangers we face in these networked environments?

Knowing that currently more then 80 % of Europeans live in cities urges us to better understand how these new mobile ecosystems work. Particularly navigating the complex relationships between mobile technologies, infrastructure, private and public stakeholders becomes increasingly important for any designer working in this space.

For the Mobile Design Conference, we’re inviting some of the most forward-thinking leaders in Mobile, Co-Creation, and Urban Design who will share their view on the role of design in an increasingly complex ecosystem and the challenges they see lying ahead: designing mobile services for a total mobile user city experience, respecting the needs of the user within her environment.

Speaker 1: Kevin Slavin (USA) - Co-Founder and Chairman of AREA/CODE Entertainment

Speaker 2: Matt Jones (UK) – Director of Design at BERG

Speaker 3: Usham Haque (UK) – Director of HAQUE Design + Research Ltd

Speaker 4: Blaise Aguera y Arcas (USA) Architect of Bing Maps at Microsoft

The program concept is the following:

1. Four 30-minutes keynotes

2. A highly interactive panel discussion

3. An afternoon workshop led by Liz Sanders (USA), Founder of MakeTools and inspired by each of the keynote speakers.

4. A closing session where the workshop ideas & prototypes will be shared

Ticketing will open soon at the Barcelona Design Week website. There will be limited seats available to attend the workshop in the afternoon.