Last June I met Jay Cousins (twitter), a “maker” and member of the collective Open Design City based in the Betahaus in Berlin, who is experimenting with home-cooked bioplastics and different products that can be derived from them. Jay and his group follow the philosophy of Open Design*.

At DMY 2010, the international design festival that took place in Berlin from June 9 to 13, Jay demonstrated how simple it is to produce bioplastics from a basic recipe using corn starch, vinegar, glycerin and water (recipe and instructions area available on this online community). The result is a bioplastic sheet that can be cut, sowed or joined together using several different methods.

“If you understand the material, essentially you can create anything” Jay Cousins

I was attracted by the idea of making a conference greener by replacing the plastic badge holders like the one shown the the left with a bioplastic version that would have a lower impact on the environment.

Jay discusses some issues and possibilities like scalability, raw materials, cost and ideas to make this kind of product in the near future.

* From Wikipedia: Open design is the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information. The process is generally facilitated by the Internet and often performed without monetary compensation. The goals and philosophy are identical to open source, but reside in a different paradigm

During the 2010 edition of the Glastonbury Festival a huge panoramic photo was taken, including more than 70,000 attendees. Now people have the possibility to tag themselves and their friends on it, creating a wonderful archive of the event. Wouldn’t it be useful (& fun) to do something similar at your next conference to document who participated and enable post-event matchmaking between them? It’s also a good example of Social Media into action through creativity.

Now this picture, which was snapped during the halftime of the England-Slovenia World Cup Match, is being circulated around the web and tagged via Facebook Connect. The panoramic photograph has already been tagged with thousands of people and is, in all likelihood, the most-tagged photo in existence.

The experience is a bit like Where’s Waldo for the digital age, where oddly dressed cartoon characters are replaced by real people. If you enable Facebook Connect, you can tag yourself and your friends. Just be a good sport, and don’t tag people you know aren’t in the photo. That would ruin the game for everyone, wouldn’t it?

(via Mashable)

Venues and event organizers work in a symbiotic status of mutual need but often engage in conflicting relationship because they don’t recognize each others needs. Yves Cretegny, now CEO of Lift Conference and in the past as CTO and CFO of Geneva-Palexpo (an important venue in Switzerland) thinks that in order to create a win-win experience, both sides should open their strategies to co-create solutions that are useful (and profitable) to either side.

Venues often sell their services in a way that is irrelevant to the event organizer (e.g.: square meters) instead of developing services that add value to the experience that the conference is creating.

For example, a venue that hosts several events during the year could team up with a series of suppliers (printers, web developers, graphic designers, swag producers, etc), negotiate a high-volume discount and provide dedicated design and production services to events. Another clear case is a service like wi-fi internet connection. Why try to force a conference to buy just the basic connectivity at an expensive cost -which nowadays represents just a commodity- instead of offering advanced networking services to better use the available bandwidth or offer extra services to the attendees?

The venue should give the opportunity  to its clients to acquire an outstanding service at a competitive price that will enhance the event (by making it more attractive to delegates & sponsors, professional, innovative, etc).

As Yves suggests, one way to co-design solutions valuable to both actors is to have in the advisory board a member of the opposite side, that clearly understands the business needs of the client.

The web is all about customization and the Next Conference 2010 in Berlin offers to it’s attendees to make a personalized T-shirt of the event by integrating an online design tool from custom apparel printer Spreadshirt (I’ve used Spreadshirt in the past and their products are high quality and durable).

The Next10 website holds an embedded T-shirt design tool from Spreadshirt which has the event’s logo pre-inserted on the product and allows you to add text or other designs on top of that. While this move requires that you lose the creative control of how your logo is applied (but hey, people could do it by themselves anyway!), it stimulates a creative engagement with the delegates attending the event. The implementation cost should be low (I guess you just need Spreadshirt’s permission to embed the tool) so you can adopt this idea for your event too!

Custom T-shirt tool by Spreadshirt on the Next10 website

Tweet from Next10 announcing the custom T-shirt feature

Last week I attended the SpinAwards after-event Party in Amsterdam and I wanted to share this nice idea: they used a black wristband (think of spongy tennis-like ones) as the ticket that granted you access to the party. Once you had it on your wrist you could move freely and get in and out of the venue as much as you liked (practical for smokers).

Not only it’s not the usual kind of ticket but it also becomes practical because once you wear it you don’t risk to lose it… and it acts as a gadget or souvenir.

SpinAwards Party Wristband

Photo by Stephan Fellinger

Conference delegates, especially in tech events, are nowadays armed with at least one of the following: a mobile phone or smartphone, a laptop, a digital photo or video-camera and – soon soon enough- a tablet (welcome iPad!). The elevated number of gadgets per capita in use at an these events makes it a common scene that many people will be desperately looking for a power socket to recharge her almost dead phone/computer/videocamera (any iPhone owners might find themselves well represented). Unfortunately most venues haven’t yet coped with the gap of an infrastructure created without considering easily available electrical power for the attendees. It just wasn’t needed a few years ago.

South by Southwest (SXSW) 2010 edition attracted thousands of visitors which often carried several of the gadgets listed above. SXSW Interactive in particular raved with hordes power-hungry geeks (I count myself amongst them) and you know what? It was very easy to find an available power socket and even an “energy-locker” where you could leave your mobile phone to charge without having to worry from it being stolen.

Paradoxically, the only places where power sockets weren’t readily accessible were in the middle of the bigger conference rooms (there were only a few electric outlets at the back of the room and on the sides, but the rooms where just too big for it to be practical).

If you’re managing a tech event -but not only- providing plenty of ways for getting electrical power and wireless Internet access is now a must, part of the basic service, and not an extra anymore. Venues, particularly older ones, will take some time to adapt but there are several things you can do to improve the situation and maybe offer some brand exposure to sponsors (see photos below for inspiration).

Belkin power strip to multiply the sockets offered by the venue

See more photos:

Attendees to SXSW sitting on the floor near to the power outlets at the back and on the sides of the room

Plenty of places where to plug your laptop during SXSW

Charging my laptop and iPhone inside one of the conference rooms

She's charging her laptop. He's charging himself.

How do you design an experience for experience designers? Interaction10 was the third edition of an annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) that gathered the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. Jennifer Bove, co-chair of Interaction10 together with Bill DeRouchey, describes the process of designing the experience of the conference in this article published in FastCompany. The lessons learned during the process are perfectly valid for other events.

Follows an extract of the main points described by Bove (I recommend you to read the full story):

Collaborating with a large team of designers, who all worked as volunteers, we decided to approach the conference experience as designers creating a service, taking every aspect of the experience into account. We thought through the lifecycle of the event, in light of the needs and motivations of the 600+ participants at the event, in their various roles from attendees and speakers to sponsors, volunteers, and conference staff. We used our empathy as designers to imagine what was important to each user at each stage of the experience.

Celebrate the diversity of the community

We had so many quality submissions that we decided to lengthen the curated short sessions, add more community-sourced sessions, and extend the conference from 2.5 to 3 days to make more room for both discussion and content. [...] With a diversity of topics, and more concurrent sessions, there would be something for everyone.

Create space for engagement

Instead of booking a sterile convention center, the conference was designed around the idea of a mini-village, with a tented square at the center, an old theatre, an even older restaurant, a pharmacy, a blacksmith’s quarters, and a library. Each of the venues was within walking distance, and each had a distinct character. We matched activities to venues–whether facilitating presentations, discussions, or a quiet crowd–and we designed the flow of traffic to encourage people to engage with the city, and each other, as they walked between venues.

Design for flexibility

While we tried to plan the hell out of everything we could control, we still had to be ready for the unexpected. [...] We quickly came to understand that, like a service, we’d never be able to specify how everything would work out to a T, and that we needed to create a framework for the weekend to flow in the ways we’d intended.

Think of the little things

The joy, and challenge, of designing a conference for designers is that they can be the most vocal critics when something doesn’t “feel” quite right. Experience is attention to detail. Much like any other design project, no one particular detail should necessarily steal the show, but the sum of the little things should expose a narrative through which the experience unfolds. [...] From “Welcome Interaction10″ banners in the airport to the soundtrack between sessions, to the amenities in the restrooms, we worked to weave a narrative that evoked surprise and delight, as well as anticipating the needs of attendees during different stages of the event.

The badge design was a key area of improvement for us, as we wanted attendees’ badges to merit their usage throughout the event. We saw this as an opportunity to rethink a traditional conference artifact with an aim to make it more useful, more relevant, and environmentally friendly. Our design team worked diligently on prototyping badges that would fit the bill, and settled on folded cardstock that featured each person’ first name in  large bold letters for easy scanning and quick identification. The folded badges formed a pocket that fit a conference map and daily schedules, easily to pull from the badge quick reference and recycle after use.

We took a similar approach to recognizing our speakers, sending them Scott Bekrun’s book Confessions of a Public Speaker (ndr: Amazon link) as a pre-conference gift that they could read as they prepared for the event.

Feed people well

In collaboration with local restaurants and caterers, he chose a conference menu that challenged traditional conference food, with enough sweet and savory/soy- and veggie-friendly/protein-rich and low-fat fare to keep people going throughout the day.

Document everything

[...] all of the talks were recorded and are available online. Essential for a conference with four tracks of programming, as no one can take everything in at once, recording sessions for later viewing allowed the attendees, and the committee, to relax about what they were missing, with the knowledge that they could experience the weekend as it happened, and catch up with the content at a later date

Interesting ideas on Conferences for Kids, Inflatable Multimedia, Holograms and more…

Via Trendhunter.com

The times when you could pull off a successful conference by just gathering in the same room a speaker (good or bad), a bunch of chairs and some people are over. If it’s only about the content, you can now avoid going to an event by finding it on the web or reading the latest book of that topic. Especially for paid conferences (but applies to free events like BarCamps or book readings as well), you need to give something back to the attendees, a gift.

Something similar has happened to the world of advertising. According to Jessica Greenwood, Deputy Editor of the excellent Contagious Magazine and expert on branding and technology:

“[...] people don’t need advertising, it’s not an essential attribute of their lives. [...] now [advertiers] have to give something back. You have to do something that’s at least useful, at least relevant or at least entertaining in order to get through. [for example ] if you create content that is interesting enough for people to want to spend time with it, then you should never need to buy media ever again ‘cos you just create the stuff and people come to it” “. Jessica Greenwood during PICNIC Festival ‘09

…and then there’s the “holy shit” aspect that’s often difficult to categorize.

So what are you doing to transform your conference into something useful, relevant, entertaining and bearer of a holy shit moment? If you don’t do it, someone else will. Times have changed, innovate or… disappear in oblivion.

Watch the full presentation of Jessica Greenwood on branding & advertising during PICNIC Festival ‘09 and think of the numerous ways of translating what she says into your own event world.

A typical mistake of many stage setups is that of hiding the speaker from the audience by adding (or not removing) obstacles between both. The most obvious obstacle on the podium is the lectern.

The TED team is famous for taking care of details that might seem minor but that have a huge impact in creating a positive atmosphere inside a conference room. During TED 2010 in Long Beach, California, the lectern is still there but it has made invisible by using a transparent material. The lectern still has a useful function, that of supporting computers or papers necessary to the speaker, but has disappeared as an obstacle in the line of vision that connects the attendees with the speaker.

Follow some photos from Jamie Oliver’s talk during TED 2010 (watch Jamie’s TED Prize wish presentation, it’s very good, inspiring and courageous too).

The lectern does not obsturct the visual of the audience

The speaker is visible behind the lectern

The effect is the same that Philippe Starck achieved when he designed the “ghost chairs” for Kartell (see photos).

Loui Ghost chair designed by Philippe Starck for Kartell

La Marie chair designed by Philippe Starck for Kartell