Earlier this month, Team Clearleft headed up to London for a day of design related exhibitions: Bauhaus: Art as Life at the Barbican and (after a ride across the city on a ‘Boris Bike’) British Design 1948-2012 and Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary at the V&A.
Once again, I’m in Austin for SXSW Interactive; the forth time I’ve attended an event I find easy to disparage. Yet this is the first stop on a trip that will take in several hundred miles of Interstate highway between here and San Francisco; two points of familiarity on an itinerary that promises to be anything but predictable.
This years SXSW Interactive saw 1,041 sessions presented by 1,648 speakers, growing to such extent that its size now rivals that of the more popular music festival. Yet bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.
I’ve decided to attend next years SXSW Interactive festival followed by a tour of North America. The details of where I’ll be visiting and for how long remain undecided, but I imagine my itinerary will be varied and involve much travelling by train.
Once again, I feel the duty falls upon me to remind those attending this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, that you really need not pick up that big, heavy, cumbersome and frankly useless bag of marketing junk.
Friday saw the start of this years SXSW interactive, film and music festivals in Austin Texas, and once again they highlight the scourge of swag: the ‘stuff we all get’ that soon becomes the stuff we don’t want.