SXSWi: Living in an App City
After checking in at the Austin Convention Center using the location-based app Foursquare, it told me the place was “swarming.” I read a little more and discovered that I was there with 377 other people, including four of my friends who also checked in on Foursquare. I shared my location with my Twitter and Facebook friends and snapped a photo of the sun-drenched escalator using the “1977” filter on Instagram. The check-in earned me eight points and I moved up one spot on the leader board. Sweet!

Wait, what?

Checking in | Photo by David Bellona

I attended South by Southwest Interactive for five days and experienced what it’s like to live in a truly connected environment. Every venue and every street had free and open wi-fi so I never worried about being able to access information using my mobile device. Every digital interaction felt easy, and every person had the power to download, create and share content with the tap of a button. The Austin Convention Center (ACC) — which covers four floors across four city blocks and offers its own dining facilities, lounges, power stations and transportation system — is ready to support the mass of people who have come to SXSWi expecting a comprehensive and immersive experience. For five days, we are living in a miniature city, an “app city.”

Austin is a relatively small urban scene with a population of about 800,000. The influx of 18,000 people in attendance for SXSWi transforms the city into a mecca for designers, developers, journalists, media representatives and, perhaps most importantly, entrepreneurs who are there to introduce a product they hope will become the next big thing. A trade show acts as a center of commerce where vendors and sponsors can share their latest work with attendees, an opportunity to show the human side of their digital products. There’s something new on every corner, with each scheduled time slot providing at least twenty different options for a panel, lecture, conversation or party.

Photo by David Bellona

Group Texting
The minute I landed in Austin I started downloading some of the new apps I’d heard about. Like many other groups, my friends jumped on the major buzz at this year’s conference: group texting.

Because of its simplicity and good design we decided to use GroupMe, an app that “lets you effortlessly group text with the people in your life that are important to you. It’s your real-life network, in your pocket. It’s totally free and works on every phone.”

The value of the service was clear the first time we lost each other in the giant SXSWi crowd. By sending a single “Where are you?!” homing beacon SMS, I could immediately locate my missing group members. Our text-based chat evolved to more interesting topics, including banter about entertaining presentations, crowded lunch spots and the quality of free party venues.

Time and Place
Like many conferences, a constant chatter of tweets created a back channel of commentary for the presentations and social events. The conference organizers assigned a unique hashtag for each speaker’s session to help audience members keep track of the conversation. Most attendees used the location-based apps Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook Places to check in to venues, report activities and locate friends.

SXSW as seen through Instagram | Photo by Katie Koch

On-The-Fly Creation
The ease of online publishing has made mass communication accessible for more people, and now that concept is being translated for our mobile devices. One of my favorite apps, Instagram, is a photo capturing, filtering and sharing app. It enables any user to take professional looking, retro-styled pictures and share them with their online networks. Instagram’s popularity reflects the growing trend of using on-the-fly creation and sharing tools to turn everyone into an amateur photographer, journalist or designer.

QR Codes
Paper fliers were plastered to every wall in the convention center, many of them featuring QR codes for passersby to scan and gain access to information. A QR code is a square barcode that can be read by camera phones and QR code readers to point a viewer to specific web or SMS content. A QR code is best used as a quick gateway to unexpected content. A great example at SXSWi was from Skype, who posted small fliers with a QR code and the handwritten words “scan me for a good time.” Upon scanning, I was quickly directed to the Skype SXSWi party page with all the details for when, where and how I might have a good time.

Photo by David Bellona

The Game Layer
The topic of “gamification” as a method for user engagement was on the agenda for many presenters at the conference. In his keynote, Seth Priebatsch asserted that we’ve just left the “decade of social,” predicting the next decade to be “the age of the game layer.” The success of badges and points in Foursquare has inspired a new class of designers interested in leveraging the competitive benefits of games into their app designs. A new topic in game design was transmedia gaming, or the idea that games don’t have to solely exist on a device or screen. They can involve real people in the real world, using mobile devices as a channel to connect individuals and groups. The idea of getting users off the screen and into the world creates new opportunities for engaging people within communities in a city.

From Local to Hyper-Local
Services like Yelp and Groupon, and the most recent iterations of apps like Foursquare, are now providing deals and community feedback for local venues, sparking the larger trend toward hyper-local community awareness. Users can read reviews from only their friends and trusted networks and get directed to services in their immediate area only. It’s a move away from the overwhelming flow of content we receive every time we use a social media app by enabling users to filter their feeds down to only the most important or relevant stories from their vicinity.

Apps in the Cities of the Future
With all of these new tools in our hands any person can observe and interpret the environment around him, instantly creating and sharing new ideas. In the near future the way we use our mobile devices will be less focused on content consumption and more focused on creation. It’s not important what we create or how we do it, but that we’re able to share it with the communities that matter most to us. In context of a city that means our hyper-local community: the neighborhood around us.

As cities adopt free, public wi-fi, more people will have the ability to create and share, and the need for better filtering will grow. The feed from our hyper-local groups could be the only content we’re interested in receiving, helping us create meaningful relationships in our physical communities through a virtual medium.

Overall, many of the over 18,000 patrons to this year’s SXSWi came to Austin expecting to see a new company or new product that would change their perception of interactivity. This year’s conference was hyped as bigger and better than ever before, but without any groundbreaking new release, all that potential energy fell flat. I hope next year’s festival trims some of the hype so it can reestablish its position as a hotbed for new ideas.

SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive took place in Austin, Texas from March 11-15, 2011.

Austin Convention Center | Photo by David Bellona

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Katie Koch is a web designer from the Midwest, by way of Brooklyn. She has designed and developed interactive projects ranging from corporate and nonprofit websites, online communities, mobile applications, and user interface designs. A typographer at heart, Katie is a details and information enthusiast whose passion for simplicity drives every aspect of her work in design and user experience.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.