Saturday was a full day at the conference. Highlights?
1. Paula Scher, Pentagram; and Ben Karlin (writer), The Daily Show with Jon Stewart talked about the labor of love that was the 2.5 million selling America: The Book. They showed quite a bit of the process from initial sketches to literally hundreds of comps (for things like the cover, which Warner Books pushed them to make the type much larger and the picture of John far more dominant than they ever imagined AND where they had John S. posing with a gold headed eagle--later photoshopped to white--- because bald eagles are banned from use in photography as endangered species). The spread of the supreme court justices naked (actually nudists from a colony with photoshopped heads) got them banned at Walmart and a spot at the top of the best sellers list for 49 weeks. If they could combine this sort of humor and visualization of ideas with Sarah Vowell's true (and hysterical) historic journalism about our country it would change the face of history education in our country, seriously.
2. Ze Frank (who helped out with our Experience Design Conference a few years back) claimed to have been selected as the lead designer for the homeland security administration (he wasn't) and basically did a schtick on crappy design and in particular safety cards in airplane (why doens't the card ever show you what happens AFTER you've deployed the rafts and the sun goes down?... that's a whole other card...
3. Bill Strickland (My wife Lynn was a resident artist at Bill's Manchester Craftsmens Guild for a number of years when we first moved to the city so I've heard about him and attended some amazing openings and performances there but never seen him speak) not only choked up the entire 2000+ crowd with his autobiographical story of hope in the inner city facilitated by hands on education in the arts coupled with respect (his point was that art is a portal for poor, disenfranchised members of our society to find relevance, value and success) but also effective shamed the bellyaching "gee no one ever listens to designers, we want a seat at the table, how can we possibly help effect positive change in the world" defeatist element of the design community into understanding that the hard parts are easy (when asked by a visiting school teacher how Bill was able to get fresh flowers into his school he replied "I grab my truck and go to the store and buy them" and the easy parts are sometimes the hardest (ex. he planned on convincing senator heinz into funding a little bit of his carpenter/workman training center, John asked him if he could build a chefs school so Heinz could cover their equal opportunity requirements by having some black chefs to hire... Bill said "well, we don't really know anything about cooking," John said "what if I gave you a million dollars...." to which Bill replied, "looks like we're going into the cooking business," at which point they invited world class chefs to teach cooking, insisted that all students get to eat the gourmet cooking for lunch everyday and then he invited someone from Bayer (of asprin fame) to stop by for some salmon at his chef's school and by impressing the guy from Bayer so much with the cooking steamrolled it into a pharmaceutical training school and later a computer school, care of HP's lunch visit for salmon not to mention x number of jazz emmys after dizzy gillespie heard about the place... being agile enough to not only make the opportunities happen but to follow through and roll with the flow to actually get something done takes work). This was only a small part of the sorta unbelievable story of a poor boy who at 16 learned how to throw clay while listening to jazz greats in the classroom of a teacher who actually gave a shit, went on to pull kids off the streets to teach them and as of this writing is on the verge of launching art/technology centers in a number of cities based on his learning. 22 years being open, no vandalism, no security systems, world class facilities (they record their jazz records in a space designed by Paul Simon's sound engineer for free), tons of kids through college on full ride scholarships and a few earning advanced awards, a few block from where the same kids go to school amidst iron bars, armed security guards and grafitti laden school houses, can the rest of us please get off our a--es? His secrets included expecting people to act civilized in a civilized environment, expecting art and leading edge topics to unite disparate cultures rather than divide them, and blatantly asking for help from rich people and in a way exploiting their need to assage their guilt and their hope to find a way to spend money on something that actually could be effective. He has created a shadow local government from the ground up, while everyone stood around hoping that those poor people would just go away. I can't do his talk justice so I'll stop now and end with two quotes:
A. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
B. "Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
4. During the conference main session each day there were short interstitial presentations about design techniques (like collage, camera absentia, etc.) and today's best one was the idea of using a polaroid camera to create a film by shooting a hell of a lot of still shots and then stacking them up... (great if you have stock in polaroid)... I'm not convinced that the sample shown was actually done this way but it was so well done that I'm not sure if I care (each one of these interstitials culminated with a "Its been done before" example, I think this was both to celebrate some of the amazing work being done out there and to remind people that these sorts of experimentations have been around for quite a while so stop being so precious with your theoretically groundbreaking "big idea" for technique... someone already did it... like most conceptual stuff plenty of people have thought of just about any thought, its what you do with it once you think it that counts....) in this case it was a music video for Breath Me by Sia and directed by Daniel Askill (the song used at the end of Six Feet Under's Show finale)... see it here (small) or or here (large).
5. Colin Drummond of Crispin Porter + Bogusky (350 person ad agency in florida who do all the fighting chicken/fiberglass burger king and minicooper brand things) talked us through the process they used to research and define the differentiating factors of a minicooper and how they exploited media in non-traditional ways to drive the launch of the mini in the US (with a budget that was 15 percent of the budget that VW used for the beetle launch). Examples? they mounted minicoopers in malls as if it were coin operated rides (you could really get in them)... of course the price for a "ride" was $16k in quarters. They also did the fake robot builder website (robots built out of mini's are spotted in the english countryside ala the yetti), the CCC (the counter counterfeit commission to stop people from buying fake minis) and my favorite one, they negotiated (for 30k which is a pittance in Ad land) with the Weekly World News to use BatBoy (their best "property") in a promotion in their newspapers across the country (Batboy was on the cover along with a speeding mini crossing state lines and being chased by cops... apparently when he was spotted he grabbed one and ran... poor kid). Their point was to make the mini an icon rather than a fad. His icon building list?
A - Defining look (think absolut bottle). Mini has a contrasting roof so use it.
B - Unique ability to elicit an emotional response "Show them the car."
C - Take on and transcend characteristics from outside their catagory. imac=candy. (Associate the mini with a bulldog)
E - Icons have a unique "defining" differentiator in their catagory. The MINI is ranked among porsches for handling and exhileration BUT they're super cost effective (16k), so play up the fun/cheap angle.
F - An ability to connect with and reflect the values of a broad user base (so not a small demographic based on age, but rather based on attitude).
6. Sagmeister preached happiness which sounds so lame when I type it now, but he has always been inspiring and coupling Bill Strickland's bootstrap life improvement with Stefan's often simple but deviously clever (it is hard not to smile when you see the work he does and inspires in his students) design work and manifesto on creating things that bring a smile was the culmination of a powerful day (his list to himself of "lessons learned" in seeking happiness included something along the lines of "stop complaining and act or just forget it," and "being bold has worked for me.") To give you a sense of the sorts of things he's been doing with his students, he asked them to design something that would make someone close to them happy, design something else that will make a small group happy and design something that will make a large audience of people they didn't know happy. One team put a small viewmaster style thingy out on the street across the way from a major downtown building and when people looked into the viewfinder their blinking eyes where video'd and played back as a giant pair of eyes looking out through windows and blinking near the top of the building for the city to see (I suspect that the view was out into the city from the top of same building). Another designer did a day planner that was thick enough (enough days) to cover your entire life from birth to death (87 years geing the current average), with a handy bookmark strip to help you see how much more life you had ahead, or how little time you had left... the book had a spine that was about a foot thick.
6. The last part of the conference was the gala party at the Museum of Science. Yes I finally got to see Mathmatica by Charles and Ray Eames (can someone please stop telling people that "experience design" started when the dot.com boom began?) if you get to Boston, go to this place. There is more to say about the party but until I get the pictures from the camera loaded up I'll suffice it to say that we spent the evening as an entourage/pr/comedy troupe (well, in our own minds we were amusing) for a conference celebrity. More to come.
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