I'm just back from the
AIGA national design conference (themed 'Next') in Denver. I
didn't have time was too much of a slacker to do daily blog posts from the event like our compadre Alissa Walker over on
UnBeige, but I thought I'd do a quick post-conference, um, post.
So, let's get this out of the way: The AIGA national gathering and the
HOW Design Conference are two very, very (very!) different things, for two very different audiences. My most recent AIGA experience was two years ago in Boston, and I felt this year's event was more structured, cohesive, organized (in Boston, it wasn't uncommon for general sessions to start 20+ minutes late). And Kurt Andersen was a more engaged and engaging moderator than the previous host, John Hockenberry.
AIGA does well to weave its theme throughout the conference, and many general-session speakers discussed what's on the horizon. Overall, the sessions (as with most such events) were uneven, ranging from truly inspirational to entertaining to boorishly self-absorbed. One comment I overheard in the hallways (aside from, "Wow -- this is really different from the HOW conference") was that some of the general-session speakers would have been better in breakouts, and vice versa.
The two top sessions, IMO, were pure inspiration: biologist and "Biomimicry" author
Janine Benyus speaking about what designers of all stripes can learn from nature (or "life," as she called it), and
Maira Kalman in a Q&A with the host, a delightful exchange that revealed Maira's charming and incisive way of looking at her world. I dashed off to catch my flight and missed Alex Steffen, founder of Worldchanging, whom I'd have liked to see.
I'd have liked to hit more affinity sessions both days than I was able to (a clone would have been helpful). Several that I attended delivered some take-away information that benefited the audience; others were simply discussions on a topic. A few of them, both affinity and general sessions, were portfolio-presentation lovefests—an occasional criticism of HOW speakers, to be fair, but, in two instances that come to mind, more obnoxious here.
But the absolute, very best part of the conference was
Command X—an on-the-fly, reality-TV-style escapade hosted by the ubiquitous Michael Bierut. A group of seven young designers (chosen in advance) worked to tackle a series of design challenges, and each day two were eliminated until the winner was chosen. The last project (which the three finalists tackled at special workstations set up in the "Living Room") was to create a design (it could have been a poster, a website, an event, whatever) to prompt 18- to 24-year-olds to vote in 2008. Kelly Dorsey, Matthew Munoz and Nichelle Narcisi all developed great solutions, but Narcisi truly hit it out of the park: Her series of PDFs, which she explained that young people could download, print and plaster in dorm rooms and coffee shops, featured simple typography and killer copywriting. This girl's got it going on. All of the participants had such remarkable presentation and concepting skills, that they were truly the talk of the conference.
As in years past, this AIGA national conference was a microcosm of the important-with-a-capital-I people, issues and ideas at the forefront of the design field. And in that regard, it was highly successful. I'm curious: Today, back at their desks and rifling through emails, fielding client calls and dealing with the day-to-day, how do attendees find their work or their practices changed by the event?