Design is Fiction by Julian Bleecker, talked about how science fiction influence the widgets and gadgets of nowadays (like cell phones) and it’s necessity of having a story behind the object, there’s is a need to put the object into context for it to work.

Next, Bruno Afonso with “Why should I bother” as a self purposed session. Ok i knew it was about web-design - he told me -, he talked about why should be a designer, design a site and not a programmer and why this doesn’t occurs as often as it should. By the end the audience started participating and shown their different insights on the subject.

Headed over to Tiago Forjaz’s presentation, he talk about the need a to focus and differentiate that exists in almost everything (like in a social network), but people still need to have a common denominator sothey can relate to each other share, an affinity. By beliving in this he started the project, with Leo Xavier - futher down - called “The Star Tracker” which intends to create a Diaspora.

Mike Stenhouse just blew my mind and showed to me how should you approach the construction of a social network by show how human tend to behave. The ideia social proof, reciprocity, rapport, which and must be implemented on a network to benefit from the full potential of the community. He showed also common mistakes and some of the best examples that exists out there.

Nick Cristea & Sanky - “Designing with common sense” was about the common mistakes made in design and how people interact with. They showed also their work, really impressive!

Multitouch Barcelona “Gutten Touch to Natural Interaction”, show how the mouse and keyboard have stayed almost unaltered over the years and how it’s not a natural interface. Then they showed us their amazing work and spiced up your minds to make low-budget multitouch interfaces.

Leo Xavier “Global Portuguese Talent-Social Networking for a better country”, told is experience on creating The Star Tracker community, it’s ups and downs, problems that he and is team encounter.

On the third day, I started by attending to the Brian Suda’s presentation, where he how can semantics bring more “juice” to web apps, and how Microformats can help us achieve this.

After it, I headed over to Eduardo Manchon (one of the guys behind Panoramio) session, about the Rise of the GeoWeb, well I must say I expected more, but I agree with him on how the Web, made maps more common to people and helped the development of new ways to use digital maps. He criticized some social networks and other sites that have bad implementations of web maps, some of them to the point where they don’t actually need them. I expected a bit more from him, but 90% of the audience were programmers, so in a way I understood his lite session about the Geoweb.

Manuel Lima, “Visual Complexity: A visual exploration on mapping complex networks”, was more than I expected. he showed how huge sets of data can be processed and create from them visual information which can be easily comprehensive. But the site Visual Complexity speaks for it’s self.

Before the coffee break, I did a coffee break, then I went to the Stowe Boyd presentation (although I think should had heard the Fred Oliveira presentation). He talked about why and how the Web converged to what it is today and it will tend to evolve in the near future.

The final presentation i went was Tara Hunt’s “Making Whuffie: the power of social capital and online communities”, was a really good presentation where she explained at the heck is wuffie, and also how can raising up users on a online community, by growing your wuffie.

Where’s the flickr photostream and some of the presentations.

 A big thanks all of the Shift’s team, it really was awesome! See you all on 2009.