Hasta La Ideas

Photos courtesy of SEGD

Xlab is a one-day themed conference (this year’s being “Experience + Interaction in Public Spaces”) led by the Society for Environmental Graphic Design—an entire day that will leave you with a tension headache, a rough bout of writer’s cramp (or carpal tunnel) and mental fatigue. But, believe it or not, those are all good things.

The annual event took place last Thursday, October 24, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens—a fitting location for the conference, with its modern architecture and attention to user interaction through projected images and user-focused exhibits. The day orbited around five different sessions with two speakers featured at each. The guests of honor included (among many others) Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities; Jeff Grantz, founder and creative technologist of Materials&Methods and one of the architects/artists behind New York’s Nuit Blanche; and J. Meejin Yoon, an installation architect who was featured at the Athens Olympic Games. For a one-day conference, the speaker list was quite stacked—I have to admit that it may have worked better as a longer event. The 15-minute “networking sessions” just didn’t do much for me in terms of clearing my head.

For the sake of brevity and in the honor of not boring you with every single personal revelation I experienced/witnessed, I’ll share the moments and speakers that stood out the most for me—whether it was for their passionate and prideful tears (big, strong creative technologists have feelings, too) or their insight into the world of spatial interactive design.

Photo courtesy of Vijay Mathews

“The future started five years ago.”

This could have been the tagline for the event. Speaker Anthony Townsend—the research director at the Institute for the Future in New York—was the one with these wise words. His reasoning? “In 2008, more people lived in cities than in rural areas, there was more mobile broadband connections than fixed, and more ‘things’ were connected than people—you know, like when that grad student hooked his toaster up to Twitter.” It’s a thought that caught me off-guard and got me thinking: So what’s next? Our spaces are getting smaller and we’re finding more ways to connect with each other and our environment. Where does it all culminate? Later on in the day, another speaker took on this idea—intentional or not, it pulled some thoughts together perfectly.

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