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November 23, 2004

Design Engaged retrospect

It’s now been a couple of weeks since Design Engaged. I wanted to post some thoughts about it, and also to write a bit more about how we went about planning it. I’m afraid this post turned out to be not terribly self-critical; if you have any feedback—positive or negative—please send it to me.

You might want to look at:

• the Flickr Design Engaged group (about 350 photos)
• all photos at Flickr tagged with “designengaged” (800 photos)
• a list of presentations

I was really pleased with how it came out. Although how could it not with the amazing, scary-smart but also really nice bunch of people in attendance? How did I convince those people to send me money and fly to an exotic meeting room? Anything I describe below really only contributed one twenty-fourth of the overall goodness of the weekend. I want to especially thank Molly Steenson (girlwonder indeed), who not only took on running the brainstorming day, but also helped me think about the whole weekend over the last few months.

Here’s how the three days of Design Engaged were structured: Day 1 was entirely given over to individual presentations, generally on the themes of complexity, metadata, and design process (but note that I didn’t set themes in advance; everyone was free to present on whatever they liked). The morning of Day 2 was also individual presentations generally dealing with mobility and design for urban (and suburban) contexts. The afternoon of Day 2 we went on an “algorithmic walk” in Amsterdam in small groups. We spent all of Day 3 doing brainstorming. (More about Days 2 and 3 below.)

I want to be very clear that I stole the best ideas from other conferences, especially the Blur 2002 conference, which suggested the cards and day-long small group brainstorming activity. Clay Shirky’s summary of Blur 02 was in many ways my guide to planning Design Engaged (it’s interesting to read even if you’re not planning a workshop.)

When I welcomed everyone on Friday morning, I talked about drawing some inspiration from Eno’s Oblique Strategies. I mentioned three in particular: “What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?”, “Try faking it,” and “What’s the simplest solution?” I thought I’d try to organize this summary by those same three principles.

“What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?”

My motivation for DE was really simple: to try to purposefully generate the “restorative feeling” that comes from being with other smart creative people who I otherwise don’t often see. Adam Greenfield wrote a post at marginwalker where he described the “floating neighborhood” phenomenon (the “restorative feeling” phrase is Adam’s). I also found myself agreeing with Thomas Vander Wal’s comment that he feels like he “telecommutes to his personal life.”

In general, conferences aren’t set up with the goal of generating an emotional response, and obviously big professional events like SXSW probably shouldn’t be. But I, and I suspect a lot of other people, invariably find that the most interesting and memorable parts of even the best conferences I’ve been to, like Doors of Perception, happen in the hallways or over dinner. For instance, I barely remember last year’s SXSW panels as well as I can remember evenings and conversations afterwards at the Hotel San Jose.

The design problem, then, was how to elicit that restorative experience in a slightly more structured and productive way than sitting around having drinks. How to take the good parts of other conferences and workshops and social events but end up with something more playful, collaborative, and informal, and less polished and official than other conferences. I felt very much that we shouldn’t just all sit together in a room for three days, but neither should we have a three-day dinner party.

So we combined traditional lecture-style presentations, some messier group work, and some scheduled social times. The weekend was planned with a few specific structural ideas in mind:

• One, to progress from more formal interactions to less formal ones; that is, to start out with prepared presentations but end up with messy improvised group work with lots of post-it notes everywhere.
• Two, to go from, um, “higher density” to “lower density.” That is, everyone in a single room all at once at the start, to smaller groups mostly on their own at the end.
• And three, to move from “mine” to “ours”, for people to present their own work at the start, but end up with collaborating on brainstorming activities at the end.

One of the nice side effects of incorporating several kinds of interaction was that it tends to make everyone able to contribute somehow: some people are best when standing in front of a group talking, others prefer being one voice in a discussion, and others feel most comfortable in a group of six, not twenty-four.

“Try faking it.”

Planning Design Engaged forced me two wear two hats I’ve never really worn, and which I’d always assumed would fit me poorly: “entrepreneur” and “project manager.” Having never organized anything like this, I actually found it worked pretty well to just… assume I could. The interesting thing about the “faking it” technique is you don’t notice when you pass the threshold of “actually doing it.” (And by the way, I was quite proud that we ended up on budget and on time to the minute. If anyone’s interested in the logistics, just ask.)

Faking it also led to some happy accidents. The group size, twenty-four, wasn’t something I planned. It was basically the number of people I thought I could reliably convince to participate, and then later it was the number of people that would fit in the room I’d rented. It turned out to work really well: I think most people knew 5 or 6 others well, a few people knew more than that, one or two knew no one, but no one knew everyone. As a result most participants, including me, got to meet people they’d never had the chance to meet in person before. Seeing people make these connections (and of course making some myself) was for me the most satisfying part of the whole experience, and probably would have been almost impossible to have planned for in advance.

“What’s the simplest solution?”

Talking, walking, eating, and sketching were the four words that eventually seemed to be the “simplest solution” to the problem. In particular, I was happy that walking worked out well. The afternoon of Day 2 we broke into groups of 6 and followed rules for an “algorithmic walk”: from a starting point, take the second left, then the second left, then the first right, repeat. (Anne Galloway had actually suggested to me months earlier. I also wrote this long post about algorithmic walks and British artist Richard Long.) I threw this right in the middle of the weekend as a sort of transition from the “talking” day to get people out of the meeting room and moving around. It really followed nicely from the presentations on mobile interaction design and the urban landscape we’d heard that morning, particularly Timo Arnall’s fantastic presentation on urban markup. The tangible outcome of the walk for most groups, aside from hopefully getting to know each other a bit better, was the frankly shocking number of photographs people took. I was pretty surprised at how different the groups’ walks were: some abandoned the algorithm quickly, but wandered all over the city together. Some stuck to the algorithm strictly, and found themselves far afield when they got “stuck” up against a long canal. In retrospect, I wish we’d taken the time for each group to briefly describe their walk to the whole group.

The same groups of six spent all of Day 3 together brainstorming and sketching ideas. Again, this was an idea stolen largely from the Blur 2002 conference. We wanted to make sure that the smaller groups did something productive together, not just spend social time together. I really enjoyed this part of the weekend, although it verged on too amorphous, since groups were totally free to go in any direction they wanted (although we didn’t diverge as much as we might have). In future, I would try to set some concrete problem which all the groups would try to address (in fact, this was Stefan Smagula’s suggestion just before we started). Molly had also tried to push me to firm this part of the weekend up beforehand, and I’ll admit that I should have nailed it down better.

Social props.

Another idea, stolen almost wholesale from the Blur 2002 conference, although adapted a lot by Molly and me, was a weekend-long card game. Each participant was given two cards, any of which when handed to another participant, would act as something between a conversational icebreaker and a creative technique. For example, the Hypocrisy card, when given to another player, would force the recipient to immediately begin arguing the opposite point of view from the one he or she’d been arguing. The “Consult” card would allow one group to temporarily borrow a player from another group. In the end, our group I think was so comfortable with each other (even people who hadn’t previously known each other) that they didn’t need the artificial social license the cards might have provided other groups. I would certainly use the card game idea again, though.

The importance of place. Why Amsterdam?

Amsterdam was not only centrally located for many of the participants, but it’s also small, walkable, dense, vital, complex, efficient, stylish, and civilized. All of which make it kind of perfect for a bunch of designers to wander around for three days taking thousands of pictures. I’ve felt that Amsterdam tends to embody naturally whatever theme Doors of Perception’s focussed on: from “lightness” to “play” to “flow”.

I also have something of an obsession with appealingly-lit rooms, and the Dutch seem to have a genetic ability to get that right. Our meeting room had three separate dimmers for the lights, including the massive surgical lamp hanging over the meeting table. (It also had big windows that could open, and was about twenty paces from a bar. Probably for most people these were more important characteristics.)

The other “place” involved was the “backchannel” of IM and Flickr. I’d been really hesitant to include this, since I’ve thought it was a painful and at times disrespectful addition to other conferences I’ve been to. Maybe it was the smaller group size, but it seemed to fit so naturally that I’ve become a convert. (That, and with about 80% Mac-users, Rendezvous makes it almost unavoidable.) There was far less overt gossiping over IM than I’d feared, and even in a small room, it’s a great way to “whisper” mundane things like “is there still coffee in the pot? Do we need more water for tea? How much time does he have left?”

My favorite “parallel channel” was actually the ink sketching that David Erwin and Dan Hill were doing throughout the weekend. Here’s David’s sketch of Ben Cerveny (more of these here), and my very favorite artifact from all of Design Engaged, Dan’s bridge drawing, done during a rain shower.

Local friends

I wanted to also especially thank my three “local” friends who participated in Design Engaged: Stefan and David from Austin, and Niels from Amsterdam. It was great to have you guys there.

Also.

This is my favorite photo.

Posted by Andrew at November 23, 2004 03:00 PM

Comments

Posted by: Dan Hill at November 23, 2004 04:30 PM