Everything That Happened At This Year’s SXSW Interactive

All of our SXSW wraps were created with and are proudly presented by the Microsoft Surface 2 — the one device for everything in your life.

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Visiting Austin, Texas during March is like having the most enlightening dinner conversation of your life, while attempting to go 13 rounds with Mike Tyson. As any previous SXSW Interactive attendee will tell you, it’s physically impossible to see even a fraction of the 800+ events held over the course of just five short days. With many queues starting several hours before a presentation and snaking around entire buildings, any attempt to see more than just a handful of the incredible content on offer can reduce even the hardiest festival goer to tears.

So instead of trying to cover everything in detail, here are some key insights and recurring themes from the huge variety of topics featured in this year’s program.

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The Keynotes

There were too many amazing speakers to mention, but here’s a glimpse at a few personal highlights.

Adam Savage: ‘Art vs Science’

This was without doubt 20 of the most frantic and insightful minutes from the entire festival. Adam Savage — the excitable redhead who makes up one-half of the duo who host the long running pop-science show Mythbusters — is as passionate as he is brilliant, taking the packed theatre on a race through his art-filled childhood to his love of science and discovery.

Adam has dedicated his life to helping more people appreciate the creative side of science and maths through the art of storytelling. In addition to Mythbusters, he and co-host Jamie Hyneman also experiment with lots of other interesting ideas at their ‘digital funhouse’. 

Neil Young

Let’s just say this guy believes in the power of music. He’s been writing and performing at the highest level for longer than most of us have been alive, and he thinks it’s time we had a way of listening to music as artists originally recorded it, instead of the “inferior CD or MP3 formats”.

So how does the Canadian ‘Godfather of Grunge’ propose to help the digital generation hear the real stuff again? It’s called ‘Pono’, and some of your favourite musicians seem to think it’s a winner. Judging by the insane amount of money he’s raised via Kickstarter overnight, they’re not alone.

Portlandia: ‘Behind The Scenes’

Portlandia flies under the pop radar like the Death Cab For Cutie of sketch comedy: it’s relaxed, insightful, and so cool it hurts. With one of the longest lines in SXSW history, their rabid fanbase turned out in serious numbers to hear the show’s creators Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein discuss the development of some of their most beloved characters, and premiere clips from the upcoming fourth season.

In case you’ve ever wondered, pretty much everything and everyone on the show is totally real. Each season, Fred and Carrie invite Portland locals to be a part of the show, and they film in real locations with almost zero set design. Oh, and that feminist bookstore is a real place called ‘In Other Words’.

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Mobile

The hypothetical year of ‘mobile technology’ has well and truly passed — we’re now firmly inside the mobile era. Companies of every size and shape held panels and featured sessions explaining how they can finally personalise ads and brand experiences for every person holding a smart phone… and yet the official SXSW app still crashed every time you used it.

In stark contrast to that mobile experience, Microsoft have been kind enough to let me test out one of their awesome new Surface 2 tablets while travelling through the USA. Besides old favourites like Skyping with my family back home and the intuitive home screen search functionality, I got super excited about a little Windows app called ‘Choremonster’ that makes chores fun for kids, and was showcased at the MS Studio earlier this week (other notable sessions in the studio included the Design World Café and Questlove gig). 

I loved that last year’s big empty buzzword ‘gamification’ is finally being put to use in some really innovative ways. I can really see these concepts coming to life in workplaces, and especially in the brilliant BodyWise app from Australia. It’s going to be a very exciting year for mobile and tablets.

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Wearable Tech + Digital Fashion

One of the biggest trending topics this year is wearable technology, and young Australian designers are really showing the way. I attended the aptly-named session ‘Tech Off Your Clothes: Naked Truths Of Wearables’, led by the Founder of Australian company Wearable Experiments. They’re responsible for some mindblowing fash-innovations, including digital lingerie called Fundawear, which allows you to pleasure yourself or your partner with a mobile app, and a jacket called The Navigate, which helps you get wherever it is you’re going.

Another big fan of wearables is the Shaq Attaq himself. The former basketballer talked about how much harder it is for a guy of his size to stay in shape after retiring, crediting fitness measurement device FitBit for consistently helping him smash out 10,000 steps and “keeping my 4-pack from turning back into a no-pack”.

So what will we see in the future of body computing? Think creative collaborations between brands like Opening Ceremony and Intel, who are already creating intelligent fabrics that can sense the weather changing and warm up when you leave the house. Imagine a world where your favourite pair of jeans communicates with the designer who made them to ensure your replacement pair arrive before you even notice a rip in the backside — it’s not too far away.

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No Boundaries

Two of the biggest events at SXSW this year didn’t really happen in Austin. Julian Assange attended digitally via Skype from his bunker in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, while Edward Snowden was beamed in from his pad in Russia, despite calls from one grumpy congressman in Kansas that his session be pulled from the SXSW program.

Covering a range of topics including online democracy and government surveillance, Assange also discussed life behind embassy walls, explaining “It is a bit like prison. But arguably prison is far worse in relation to restrictions on visitors, for example, and the level of bureaucracy involved.” He also told the audience that “the UK government has admitted to spending $8m so far just on the police surveillance of the embassy.”

Meanwhile, it took seven proxies to get Snowden on the screen at SXSW. In his rousing talk, Snowden passionately argued that government organisations like the NSA have shifted their focus from gathering intelligence on legitimate global threats to spying on everyone just because they can.

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Conscious Consumption

Personally, my favourite discovery from this year’s festival was a big shift towards developing more sustainable tech companies, while encouraging consumers to become much more aware of what they are downloading to their devices and into their bodies.

Two standout sessions were the entire day dedicated to ‘Conscious Consumption’ in the beautiful Wanderlust Yoga Studio, and the #SXgood panels at the Austin City Hall, where representatives of large organisations including Facebook were put through their paces by Chelsea Woodhead of local Austin company, Build-A-Sign.

Since 2008, Woodhead has helped give away more than 275,000 free ‘Welcome Home’ banners to friends and families waiting at the airport for loved ones to return from military service. As she put it in her opening remarks, “Giving is not always sexy”, but it’s great to see some examples of ways companies can help give back to the local community without just writing a cheque and walking away.

And then of course…

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The Parties

There ain’t no party like a Texas party, and this year I was super fortunate to hustle my way into some of the BEST OF ALL TIME.

From the quiet backyard of Threadgill’s with Mike Myers and Willie Nelson to the epic midnight launch of XBox’s new Titanfall with Childish Gambino to bouncing to DJ Shadow with Lady Gaga at AT&T’s Mobile Movement extravaganza, SXSW 2014 proved that it’s gonna be a tough one to beat.

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Check out more photos from SXSW Interactive here.