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November 27, 2005
Design Engaged 2005 Retrospect
It’s been two weeks since Design Engaged 2005. My most sincere thanks to those of you who made it a really wonderful experience. And thank you again to Nokia, who kindly (and unobtrusively) provided sponsorship that let us provide travel stipends.
Since Adam and Anne have both already posted thoughtful and quite thorough summaries of the presentations, I wanted to write a bit more about the structure and logistics of running it. There’s also a growing list of links to presentations, notes, and other writeups at the main Design Engaged site.
Location
This year, we rented the offices of my friend Johnny’s Spreeblick in Kreuzberg. In a lot of ways, the space was a huge improvement over last year: we could easily go outside for fresh air, and we had our own bathroom and kitchen. And Spreeblick’s divided into a front room (which we used for coffee breaks and for our fantastic buffet lunches), and a back room, which we used for presentations and pretty much everything else. Being able to leave the main workspace for breaks was really nice.
Spreeblick wasn’t quite big enough to fit tables that we could all sit around, so we had a more traditional lecture-style room setup. That worked fine, although there was a lot of shuffling of chairs when we wanted to have group discussions. In future, I’d like to make sure that we have the space to set things up seminar-style, where everyone sits around a single big table. It was nice last year to let some people give their presentations from their seats, and not to make them stand behind The Official Speaker’s Table At the Front.
Overall, Spreeblick was fantastic, and I think everyone really liked having our own space for three days. I can’t thank Johnny and Tanja (and our patient kitchen staff!) enough. I want to go back for some Futura Bold parties!
Structure
In many ways, we didn’t do anything too different from last year’s DE, which I wrote about here almost exactly a year ago. My intention was to mix of individual, small group, and big group interactions: over course of the weekend, things started out with a day and a half of individual prepared presentations to everyone; followed by an afternoon strolling around the city in small groups of about 6 or 7; and finally about a day of messy collaborative work in the same groups with lots of yelling and post-it notes flying everywhere. With this group of people, at this size, this structure seems to work pretty well (though see my comments about Size below).
Walking
Walking was a slightly bigger deal this year, thanks to Mike Kuniavsky’s tireless (and stressful) work in finding local guides to lead our groups around different Berlin districts. This was really a great idea, since Berlin is so enormous and was unknown to more of the group. I think undirected or algorithmic walks (like we did last year) would have been frustrating. There was some scrambling at the last minute to replace one or two volunteer guides who couldn’t make it, but I think all but one of our groups had good experiences. (Chris Heathcote has a set of photos from his group’s walk.) I was lucky enough to be in the group led by Erik Spiekermann (yes, that one), who led us on a quick architectural tour around his very normal Schoeneberg neighborhood. He and his girlfriend Susanna Dulkinys (.pdf) were gracious and friendly guides to a section of Berlin I’d never set foot in before.
Brainstorming
We spent most of Sunday in small groups responding to three questions I posed as sort of a design brief: “What is your favorite place? how do you know when you are there? How do you let others know when you are there?” Having even that hastily-invented set of questions seemed to get the ball rolling more quickly than last year’s attempt at collectively deciding the day’s assignment. For the most part, the groups drew on things they’d seen or talked about during their walks the day before. The group that visited Friedrichshain considered gentrification, and our group came up with a (rather grim) idea for a service to help co-opt cute foreign rituals as souveniers after wandering through a St. Martin’s day parade of lantern-carrying children. Matt Jones’ photos include some good shots from Sunday, and here’s one of us surrounded by lots of peices of different-sized colored paper: a sure sign of productive work!
Size
Up until about two days before the event, I’d expected 38 people at Design Engaged. One person wasn’t able to get a visa in time, and at the very last minute three more had to drop out. As dissapointing as that was, it did allow us some desperately needed flexibility in the schedule, which we ended up needing pretty badly. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really any time to breathe, or to wander off in discussions. I felt like I was too often rushing people, or having to cut off conversation just as it got started.
There were usually about 32 people in the room, out of the 34 participants. Last year we were 24 people. I think that for an event built around personal interaction, thirty people is pretty clearly the upper manageable limit. Beyond that, it’s not reasonable to be able to spend enough time with everyone you want to talk to, and the natural tendancy is for people to clump into groups of friends. Since the room was crowded, there was also the natural tendancy for people in the back to end up checking email or dozing off at times. I did try to organize the walking groups into sets of people who (I hoped) were least likely to know each other already. It was actually quite difficult to do that.
Und sonst?
Overall, this year’s version feels pretty different from last year’s. I do think the best parts of this one—some of the ideas of the Day 3 brainstorming, several of the presentations, our dinner—were more successful than the best parts of last year’s. But in rereading my post about Amsterdam, I realize I didn’t immediately come away from Berlin with quite the same feelings about it. Right now, my first thought is, hey, that came off pretty much right on schedule and under budget. Which is a bit lame, because my second thought is pretty much this picture and indeed of the people, expressions, and small details in these pictures.
But: I’m really proud of what Mike and I did this year, and I’m excited about doing it again in the future (and about other ideas to be announced). Matt’s comment that it left him “looking forward to being a designer in 2006” makes me really happy. It was great, folks, and I can’t wait to see you all again.
Posted by Andrew at November 27, 2005 09:05 PM