Normally, you hear my voice in words on the screen, so here instead – courtesy the talented video crews at Toronto’s NXNE – is me communicating on camera, prior to a talk on tablets, music, and design.

The conversation is one I find myself having with a lot of people these days offline, away from the Web. It goes something like this: “sure, the iPad has been a big thing, and you can obviously do music with it, but what does that mean? Is it going to stay around? Does this change what we’re doing?”

For my talk, rather than examine a device like Apple’s iPad as an isolated phenomenon, I chose to look at the bigger picture, and consider what it can mean for design. Those design lessons could be applied anywhere. I’ll try to finally turn that presentation into an article next week, but as a teaser, here’s the video interview I did at NXNE. And perhaps that’ll start some conversation (or even disagreement) prior to the article. Discuss.

Side note: North by Northeast is a brilliant festival. It has the cross-media notions of South by Southwest, as well as the rich musical lineup, but it’s small enough that you can actually get around and see stuff. There’s a different content mix than you get in Texas, and Toronto doesn’t get overwhelmed by the festival in the way that Austin does. SXSW is great, too, but NXNE is like a more livable version.

Other side note: I think my head looks huge in this video. Part conehead / all egghead?