kottke.org posts about conferences
Are you at the AIGA conference? Are you taking notes? Are those notes on a computer or posted to a blog? There are several sessions going on at a time now and I’m trying to get to as many as I can without, you know, going insane. If you’ve got notes (especially from sessions I didn’t get to) and you don’t mind sharing them, send them along and I’ll put them up on the site. If you’re blogging, send your links or post them in the comments below. Thanks!
ps. Did anyone go to the yoga at 6:30am this morning? What percentage of the participants were hung over? Was everyone in black?
UnBeige blogged the blog panel that I participated on with Michael Bierut, Jen Bekman, Armin Vit, and Steven Heller. More here and here.
Design for Democracy is utilizing the skillset of designers to improve the election process in America, including ballot redesigns and polling place signage.
In preparing for the conference, I read up on the last conference (held in Vancouver in 2003) on the Speak Up design blog: 1, 2, 3, 4.
As part of the conference within a conference for students, Michael Bierut listed 20 courses he did not take in design school (I think I got all of them):
Semiotics
Contemporary Performance Art
Traffic Engineering
The Changing Global Financial Marketplace
Urban planning
Sex Education
Early Childhood Development
Economics of Commerical Aviation
Biography as History
Introduction to Horticulture
Sports Marketing in Modern Media
Modern Architecture
The 1960s: Culture and Conflict
20th Century American Theater
Philanthropy and Social Progress
Fashion Merchandising
Studies in Popular Culture
Building Systems Engineering
Geopolitics, Military Conflict, and the Cultural Divide
Political Science: Electoral Politics and the Crisis of Democracy
His point was that design is just one part of the job. In order to do great work, you need to know what your client does. How do you design for new moms if you don’t know anything about raising children? Not very well, that’s how. When I was a designer, my approach was to treat the client’s knowledge of their business as my biggest asset…the more I could get them to tell me about what their product or service did and the people it served (and then talk to those people, etc.), the better it was for the finished product. Clients who didn’t have time to talk, weren’t genuinely engaged in their company’s business, or who I couldn’t get to open up usually didn’t get my best work.
Bierut’s other main point is, wow, look at all this cool stuff you get to learn about as a designer. If you’re a curious person, you could do worse than to choose design as a profession.
I’m sitting in a huge room filled with ~2,000 people at the opening remarks of the AIGA Design Conference and there’s no single other person on Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) in iChat:
I may be the only person in the entire room with his laptop open. Instead, everyone is listening to the speakers. Like Jeff, I’m torn: is this lack of a back channel a good thing or does the presence of an online component of a conference make the experience more rewarding?
One of the pre-conference events was a talk at Fenway Park followed by a tour of the ballpark. Janet Marie Smith, VP of planning and development for the Sox, kicked things off with how the team (especially the new management) works really hard to preserve the essential character of Fenway while at the same time trying to upgrade the park (and keep it from getting torn down). She talked about the advertisements added to the Green Monster, which was actually not a purely commercial move but a throwback to a time when the Monster was actually covered with ads.
Lots of talk and awareness of experience design…the Red Sox folks in particular kept referring to the “experience” of the park. One of the speakers (can’t recall who, might have been Jim Dow) talked about how other ballparks are becoming places where only people who can afford $100 tickets can go to the games and what that does to the team’s fan base. With Fenway, they’re trying to maintain a variety of ticket prices to keep the diversity level high…greater diversity makes for a better crowd and a better fan base and is quite appropriate for Boston (and New England in general), which has always been an area with vibrant blue collar and blue blood classes.
Janet also referred to the “accidental” design of the park. Like many other urban ballparks built in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the placement of the streets constrained the design of Fenway and made it rather an odd shape….these days larger plots are selected where those types of restraints are removed. And over time, the game has changed, the needs of the fans have changed, and the fire codes have changed and the park has changed with the times. In the dead ball era, the walls of the stadium weren’t for hitting home runs over; their sole function was to keep people on the street for catching the game for free, so the Fenway outfield ran over 500 feet in right field — practically all the way to the street — where there’s now 30 rows of seats. Jim Holt observed that American butts have gotten bigger so bigger seats are called for. Fire codes helped that change along as well…wooden seats, bleachers, and overcrowding are no longer a large part of the Fenway experience (save for the wooden seats under the canopy).
The design talk continued on the tour of the park. Our guide detailed how ballparks are built around specific ballplayers. Yankee Stadium was the house that Ruth built but it was also seemingly (but not literally) built for him with a short trip for his home run balls to the right field wall. Boston added a bullpen to make the right field shorter for Ted Williams. Barry Bonds does very well at PacBell/SBC/WhateverItsCalledTheseDays Park. And more than that, the design of Fenway also dictated for a long time the type of team that they could field, which had some bearing on how they did generally. Players who played well in Fenway (i.e. could hit fly balls off of the Monster in left) often didn’t do so well in other parks and the team’s away record suffered accordingly.
In preparation for the AIGA design conference[1], I’m looking over the session descriptions and speaker list. The theme for this year is “Design”, which seems a little broad but somehow appropriate given how much design has been taken up by the press (especially the business and tech press) recently as something Important and the design profession may be in need of a little wagon circling to figure out how to effectively explain design to someone who is all fired up about incorporating it into their business process because they read a blurb in Fast Company about Jonathan Ive and the iPod.
My knowledge of and involvement with the AIGA up to this point has been fairly minimal, which either makes me the ideal person (fresh eyes!) or a horrible choice (head up ass!) to cover their design conference. I’m particularly interested in learning how they’ve incorporated the fast-changing disciplines of Web and digital design into the mix. When I was working in Minneapolis as a Web designer in the late 90s, my company got me an AIGA membership, but I never used it because although they were trying to be more relevant to those of us working on the Web, my perception is that the AIGA was still largely a graphic design organization and I was finding more of what I was looking for on Web design sites like A List Apart. Now that the Web design profession has matured (and Web design practitioners along with it), it seems to fit better with where the AIGA is going (and vice versa). After all, design is design, no matter what word you stick in front of it.
So, back to the speakers list, I’m looking forward to hearing from Michael Bierut, Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Steven Heller, Matthew Carter, John Maeda, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path, Ze Frank, Stefan Sagmeister, Steff Geissbuhler, Caterina Fake, and Milton Glaser (but no Malcolm Gladwell or Errol Morris, both of whom I swear were on earlier speaker lists), some of whom you may recognize from past mentions on kottke.org. They’ve also added some sessions in response to Hurricane Katrina on design, safety, risk, and disaster management, which is an excellent use of the opportunity of having a bunch of designers in the same place.
If you want to follow along with the complete conference coverage here on kottke.org, here’s the AIGA 2005 page. As I mentioned previously, I’ll be opening up comments on most posts (incl. this one), but will be active in gardening off-topic and trolling comments.
[1] I just realized all these URLs are going to break when the next conference rolls around in two years or so, which is disappointing. Would be nice to have something like http://designconference.aiga.org/2005 that would permanently point to this year’s festivities. Bloggers like permanent links (well, this one does anyway).
From September 15-18, I will be attending the AIGA Design Conference in Boston. As an experiment (for both the AIGA and me), I will be covering the event at their request[1] on kottke.org. I’ll be covering the conference as a blogger, but the easiest way to think about it in terms of a conference is that I’m a speaker[2]…a sort of roving speaker with the readers of kottke.org as the audience and my topic is the conference itself.
As usual, I have no solid plan as to how this is going to work exactly, but I’m looking forward to seeing how the conference goes and adapting accordingly. I’m hoping to provide a moving snapshot of the event so that readers of kottke.org can follow along fairly well without being at the conference. I’ll probably have comments open on most posts so hopefully those reading along at home and those reading along at the conference can have some dialogue, with each little world spilling over into the other a bit.
One other quick thing…if you’re going to be at the conference and plan to blog it, let me know…I’ll definitely be linking to other people’s stuff. I’m sure Design Observer and Speak Up will be covering things pretty well. I’ll also be watching Flickr and del.icio.us for links and photos…I’d suggest tagging relevent entries with aigadc2005 for easy aggregation.
More next week as the conference draws near.
[1] Disclaimer: Kottke.org’s budget for covering out-of-town conferences with costly entry fees is limited, so I’m exploring other ways of gaining access to be able to bring you some interesting content that you might not get otherwise. The AIGA is a curious organization and they’re looking at various ways of using weblogs, so they asked me to come and blog the conference as an experiment. To make it economically feasible for me to be there, they are paying me a small speaker’s honorarium and putting me up in a hotel.
In talking with the AIGA about this, they’ve made it exceedingly clear that I’m to consider myself independent and write whatever I want about the conference, which is pretty much what I intend to do. If I thought the hotel room and honorarium would be a problem w/r/t my objectivity in covering the event, I would have declined them both. The bottom line is that if money were no object (if the conference were free and took place entirely within walking distance of my apartment), I’d want to go and write about it anyway.
[2] Although I will also be appearing on a related panel about blogs, journalism, and design with Steve Heller, Michael Bierut, Armin Vit, and Jen Bekman.
Update: I’ve changed the first paragraph slightly, from “covering the conference as a blogger/journalist” to “covering the conference as a blogger”, which under the circumstances is more accurate. I am not a journalist in this instance or any other.
Today’s helpful feature: how to tell if you didn’t get invited to the exclusive Foo Camp soiree. One method: see it referenced in a blog post and realize that it’s in 4 days and there’s no way your invite is still forthcoming.
Michael Hawley gave the Poptech audience a wonderful tour of Bhutan and the giant book that resulted from his journeys there. A couple of photos of the book at Poptech:
Turning the pages involved a short walk. If you’d like to own this baby, it’s available for only $10,000 on Amazon.
One of my favorite talks at Poptech was Janice Benyus’ presentation on biomimicry, or innovation inspired by nature:
Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. [It] uses an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works. What is appropriate. What lasts. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.
In the talk, Janine outlined 12 ways in which nature can inform the development of technology:
1. Self assembly
2. Chemistry in water
3. Solar transformations
4. The power of shape
5. Materials as systems
6. Natural selection as an innovation engine
7. Material recycling
8. Ecosystems that grow food
9. Energy savvy movement and transport
10. Resilience and healing
11. Sensing and responding
12. Life creates conditions conducive to life
Those are a little vague and I wish I’d written down more notes, but it was hard to type and really listen at the same time. To fill in the gaps, you can listen to the audio of her 30 minute presentation.
I’ll write more in-depth about a few of the speakers here, but for now, here are some soundbites (my comments in brackets):
- Andrew Zolli: All societies have an image of the future. Those that have optimistic images have better outcomes than those with pessimistic images. [The US right now seems optimistic overall, but getting a bit more pessimistic. At PopTech this year and last, about 1/2 the speakers said during their talks something to the effect of “we’re screwed”.]
- Malcolm Gladwell talking about a chapter from Blink:
One of the many ways in which asking someone what they think isn’t necessarily the best way to find out what they want: people move away from the more sophisticated idea and they go for the simpler choice because they don’t have the necessary “vocabulary” to explain their real feelings. [You may prefer The Hours to Goldeneye, but when asked to justify that choice, you may find yourself favoring the Bond flick more than you would if you didn’t have to justify it.]
- Frans de Waal studies primate behavior to gain insight into human behavior. One of his findings: aggression does not disperse, it brings primates together more often than normal. [Destruction is creative. Creativity is destructive. Or something.]
- Bruce Mau: Not all countries have embraced democracy, but most have embraced traffic (individual transportation). [There are many different ways in which openness can be introduced into a culture.]
- Thomas Barnett: China is 30% Marxist Communist, 70% The Sopranos.
- Phillip Longman: Secular societies that cannot reproduce will be replaced by fundamentalist countries where children are an economic asset and a gift from God. And in Brazil, television viewing time predicts birth rate…the more TV a woman watches, the less likely she is to have children.
You can always tell (well, I can always tell) I’m enjoying a conference when I’m not writing much about it at the time. I’ve got the computer open for taking notes, but that’s about it…not doing a lot of connecting the dots with online research or anything and not trying to write any of it up yet. In lieu of actual content, here’s some random stuff from the last day or so:
- The conference badges here are fantastic. The names are huge for easy glancing and the entire conference booklet (with schedules, author bios, etc) fits in the badge holder. It’s got all the info that you need and it’s still small enough that it doesn’t weigh you down.
- There is a 2 square foot area in the park across the street from the conference that is the only area in a 30 mile radius in which my cell phone gets reception. Hi-tech conference, hell.
- Driving to the conference this morning, I noticed a car from New Hampshire in front of me. The state motto was emblazoned on the license plate: “live free or die”. But the screws affixing the plate to the car were positioned in such a way that it actually read, “olive free or dio”. Hmmm.
Some random notes from my three days at the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine:
- The substrate of complexity is irrelevant, whether it’s carbon or silicon. That is, a computer is a computer is a computer, be it a Powerbook or a human being. The level of complexity is the important part.
- Patent clerks spend an average of 4-6 hours per patent on a prior art search. Yikes.
- Lessig imagines an 18th century DMCA: the (D)aguerre (M)achine (C)ontrol (A)ct. I’ve seen Larry speak three times now; it’s interesting to see how he’s refined his argument.
- URLs cribbed from Golan’s presentation: Danny Rozin’s Wooden Mirror and Kelly Heaton’s Furby wall.
- Audience member on the Jewish perspective on stem cell research: “A fetus is a fetus is a fetus until it becomes a lawyer.”
- Cloning + embryonic stem cells is a powerful combination. Cloning takes “old cells” back in time, creating identical young cells. Embryonic stem cells can then be harvested from the cloned embryo and used to create new cells and organs for the original organism. Wild stuff.
- The Methuselah Mouse Prize is encouraging work on anti-aging, giving out prizes for the longest-lived lab mouse.
- Q from the audience about humans possessing indefinite life spans: “But doesn’t this mean there won’t be any children?” Answer from Aubrey de Grey in a most straight-forward tone: “Yes, it would mean a world without children.” At that point, a chill went up my spine.
- A population pyramid for the US from the US Census Bureau’s IDB Population Pyramid page.
- The shortest summary of the past 100 years I’ve ever heard: “the 20th century had its ups and downs.” - Clay Shirky
- James Kunstler: “We are creating places we don’t care about [living in]”
- Overheard about Virginia Postrel’s talk on the Age of Aesthetics: “for someone who thinks aesthetics is so important, you’d think she would have used something better for her slides than Comic Sans on light purple.” That and her increasing shrillness toward the end of her talk turned much of the audience off her argument I think.
- David Martin raised a question I’ve been preoccupied with for a couple of years now: “How much of the global economy is just an hallucination?”
- Geoffrey Ballard on the future: 12% of the population is currently ruining the planet. What happens when the other 88% get involved?
- Here are the goals that the 191 United Nations Member States have committed to meet in the next 12 years.
- An audience member asked space architect Constance Adams about sex is space (within the context of designing habitats for procreation), and she indicated that erections in space are difficult to achieve because in zero gravity, blood tends to collect in the head and feet.
- Robert Wright, author of the excellent Nonzero, is tall, handsome, witty, so very smart, and possesses impeccable timing. I think I am in love.
The badges at Pop!Tech were wee interactive computers called nTags. When engaged in conversation with someone, you could choose to send your contact information to that person, see what that person is interested in (based on your interests), get recommendations on people that they have met that you should meet, and generally augment (or hamper) networking.
Many attendees liked them and used them happily, but others revolted. Some people started trading their badges with others. Early on during the conference, Whit Diffie hacked his nTag badge to send a sleep command to any nTag badge in range, effectively deactivating them. As word spread of the hack, people sought him out to sleep their hated badges. Others were pissed that he was turning off their badges without permission; someone asked at the end of the conference if sending a sleep command constituted an attack (When Sleep Attacks!). Following Diffie’s lead, a woman hacked her badge to send the sleep command and a disgrunted Pop!Tech goer tried to rip her badge from around her neck (When Liberal Nerds Attack!).
I didn’t particularly like my nTag badge (it was too heavy for one), but I can’t argue that it didn’t result in some interesting social behavior, though perhaps not the behavior that the nTag folks promised in facilitating networking.
This is the second time I’ve listened to a talk about nanotech from someone representing the Foresight Institute (the first was Robert Drexler), and both times the talks were full of politics and not that interesting at all. They seem to have so much baggage attached their efforts that it’s impossible for them to take a fresh look at it. Disappointing.
I’m at the Pop!Tech conference for the weekend in Camden, Maine. Maine is the 47th US state I’ve visited…hopefully I’ll get to see a bit of it while I’m here. More to come if I feel like posting.
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