Darius Kazemi
Tiny Subversions
Context, or, How to trick your users into thinking you're a genius

When you ask someone to design software that seems smart and lifelike, it's likely that the person will immediately think of complex algorithms or data sources they can draw on to accomplish the task. But software designers can rely on cultural and contextual cues to offload this hard work onto the humans who end up using our work. This talk will discuss some silly, simple tricks to generate content and interactions that humans find genuinely engaging.

Darius Kazemi is an internet artist under the moniker Tiny Subversions. His best known works are the Random Shopper (a program that bought him random stuff from Amazon each month) and Content, Forever (a tool to generate rambling thinkpieces of arbitrary length). He has a small army of Twitter and Tumblr bots that he builds because they make him laugh. He founded NaNoGenMo, where participants spend a month writing algorithms to generate 50,000 word novels, and Bot Summit, a yearly gathering of people who make art bots. He cofounded Feel Train, a creative technology cooperative.