By Gio Metcalf

Chris Heathcote of meta loca design consulting, will be making his first apperance at SXSW this year. Coming all the way from London England, Chris says he is tremendously excited to be in Austin for the first time and to be presenting at the conference. His panel will be discussing the latest take on something that a few designers have been working on for a while, the interface between computers and the internet. Chris has been designing for the internet for thirteen years and seven years with mobile phones. Some of Chris’s specialties include interaction design, product creation and branding.

Some of the issues that will be addressed on the panel concern user generated content, social media, and how it is extended into the real world. Chris has recently been working at Nokia for the past five years. The motto at Nokia is “Connecting People.” Chris says it is an innate universal human desire to want to communicate. Chris also commented on how initially people are surprised with all the new forms of social media such as Twitter, Skype, Facebook and SMS, but that anything that allows new forms of communication, if easy enough to use and cheap enough, are always embraced. Chris said, ‘ Lots of people talk about the Dunbar number. You can keep in communication at a sustainable level with 150 people, but it seems pretty irrelevant these days. I follow 400 people on Twitter, I subscribe to 1100 RSS feeds. I realize I’m at an extreme of consumption, but as tools that allow ambient awareness of others improve, the amount of communication can only increase.” With all the new advances in social media, critics ask whether the use of social media is “real” communiation? Chris replied, “real-time-one-to-one communication doesn’t now seem like the most appropriate method for most, but it’s no more change than we’ve encountered in the last 150 year, with advent of a fast, cheap, ubiquitous postal service and telegraph service.”

Chris has recently been researching and working with urban screens. Urban screens have recently been replacing billboards and traditional paper advertising. Chris said that currently the entire London underground metro system is covered in digital billboards. What Chris believes is most interesting about this phenomenon is that while traditional paper advertising is disappearing, things that look like computers are rapidly appearing in urban environments. “It’s happening before there’s really been any civic discussion about what this means, and in private spaces, that don’t require planning permission,” says Chris. “I’m interested in what designers and others who have been researching technology and urban environments can do to make screens more useful and more interesting, to the public as well as advertisers or owners.”