We are honored to have members of our team frequently speak at industry-leading conferences and events. Just recently, UX director Tim Wood and UX designers Lindsay Moore and Austin Brown presented at IxDA’s Interaction ’11 in Boulder, CO. Check out Lindsay and Austin’s well-received presentation on Slideshare, and watch for video footage (we’ll preview it here) some time in March.

Up next we are excited to announce that Lead Experience Architect Beth Koloski has been selected to speak at this year’s IA Summit, held here in Denver March 30 – April 3. Beth will present at 11:45am on Sunday, April 3, on the topic of workshops:

“Discombobulation, Fire-Breathing Dragons and Wet Noodles: Creating Productive Workshops in Scary Situations”

Workshops! We go in with big hopes for collaboration, collective insights and great ideas. Then come out with… a whole bunch of post-it notes and unresolved arguments.

Running a great workshop means being prepared to deal with a lot of potential situations, including: the fire-breathing dragon, who tries to dominate the workshop with angry naysaying; the wet noodle who won’t participate; and the utter discombobulation scene when the workshop goes totally off track.

In this session, Beth Koloski of EffectiveUI will give practical advice for dealing with these and other common, but scary, situations in running workshops. She will also talk about situations you’ve faced in your own workshops, and provide additional ideas of particular exercises that work well for design workshops.

Later in April, 360 Flex has invited both Senior Software Architect RJ Owen and Lead Experience Architect Leonard Souza to present at the Denver-based conference April 10-13. Leonard will speak at 4:10pm April 11 on “Microsoft Kinect and Molehill,” and RJ will speak at 5:30pm April 12 on “Five Reasons You Should Learn Flex Despite Apple and HTML5.” Previews of both:

“Microsoft Kinect and Molehill” by Leonard Souza

The Microsoft Kinect, with its stereoscopic, infrared wizardry, has given us a fascinating tool for rich interaction design. For the first time, a high-quality, depth-sensing camera is widely available at a price many people can afford. While this is exciting, equally so is Adobe’s new Molehill API, which takes advantage of GPU acceleration, allowing Flash direct access to DirectX and OpenGL.

The Kinect and Molehill are a match made in heaven. Come learn how to get the Kinect up and running on your machine, while also exposing it to Flash. Also learn the basics of Molehill and watch how Molehill and Kinect can work together.

“Five Reasons You Should Learn Flex Despite Apple and HTML5 by RJ Owen

These days the Web is regularly aflame with an endless host of pundits, bloggers, and twitter-junkies decrying the death of Flash at the hands of Apple and HTML5.  In this session we’ll look at the state of the Web, the history of Flex, and the future of the framework and give five solid reasons why it’s still one of the best things a Web developer can learn.  Whether you’re new to Flash and Flex or a seasoned developer this session will bring new ideas to the debate over Flex’s relevance and show why it is and will continue to be an important part of the Web-enabled application universe.  The future isn’t dark; as always, it’s simply different.

We hope you’ll tune in (either in person or via the Web as we post videos and slides) to these great events and presentations. Congrats to Beth, Leonard and RJ.