Designing for a Web of Data

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 hierarchy 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 start appearing in hardware, in desktop applications, or on other people’s sites?

In this session, Tom Coates 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 multidisciplinary teams to find the heart and soul of a new concept.