Content is Design

The devil is in the details: Details matter.

Everyone understands that. But how much do they matter? In the world before the Internet, details did not matter as much.

We had industrial designs beautifully designed down to the knobs, but the rest of the world simply used copycats where all the details were messed up.

We had architecture with the most intricate assembly of Corinthian marble columns, but it vanished in time when new building technologies come around.

We had urban plans with intimate concerns for its residents and neighborhoods, but their influences are only local and did not spread far.

Unlike a stereo, a building, a city, or any designs for that matter, users have far less choices when it comes to the Internet, say, for a functional web site: Google.

There is only one Google.

“Unlike a stereo, a building, a city, or any designs for that matter, users have far less choices when it comes to the Internet”

Yes, there are alternatives such as Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo or Ask search engines, but they all work slightly differently. A calculator in the shape of a rectangle and a calculator with a Hello Kitty sticker plastered all over will return the same results after pressing the same keys, but Google and Bing will yield different results for the same search term. Therefore, there is only one Google.

With only one Google, a billion people shares the exact same design of a search engine in their web browser. As a result, everyone is equal on the Internet. They can all pay the same price ($Free), enjoy the exact same design, and share the latest and greatest iterations of the design immediately.

On the other side of the Internet, there is Facebook. With only one Facebook, 300 million people will have to adapt to any changes Facebook make to their Facebook home page. But social networks like Facebook is different from other web tools like Google. Besides the ability to output results, Facebook allows users to input a lot of information. It is a web tool that goes both ways.

Traditional mediums, such as radio shows, can from top down. Everyone gets the same content regardless of the size and shape of the radio. The radio shows, the actual content, was what mattered most, and was independent of the design of the machines that played them. However, in the world of social networks, every user provide the content for other users, with special rules designed by Facebook to organize their input efficiently.

Even though Facebook on the web, iPhone or an Android phone comes with all sorts of layouts and behaviors, the content remains the core of the design of Facebook: there will be still a news feed, a photo gallery and a list of information about every Facebook user. There will be no content if Facebook did not design how the content is generated, and there will be no design if no users generate any contents. “There will be no content if Facebook did not design how the content is generated, and there will be no design if no users generate any contents”

For the first time in history, content is design and design is content: They depend on each other. In other words, to change the design of a web site is to change the content of it, vice versa.

Aesthetics as a Tool

The user interface design of a web page had never mattered as much. While it has yet to be as important as world news or politics, new designs for Google, Facebook or Twitter often send shockwaves across the news headlines in the tech industry, as it affects millions and millions of users that depend on them.

A small change in the design of a web product can change the lives of its users: A small change in Google can change how we organize and perceive information. A small change in Facebook may change how we socialize and relate to each other. A small change in Twitter may change what news topic we all focus on as a whole.

Such changes may as well have the power of a city ordinance, like how a change in parking rules on the street will change the street patterns city-wide, and even reduce road traffic in long run, but without the instantaneity of the Internet.

Design had never had such direct and immediate power before, and with great power comes great responsibility. As the design of a social network yields great social power, there is social responsibility in the design of it as well.

Take the size of a textbox as an example.

The size of a textbox determines how much people are willing to input. And by people, it may mean more than a hundred million users, as in social web sites such Facebook and Twitter. The amount of people willing to input depends on several factors: the perceived limit of words one can fit inside this box, the peer pressure of how much others had typed, the rewards gained and efforts required for such input, and how much one actually has to say.

Twitter:

Twitter is clever in the way it has low expectations in what one can input, thus its 140 character limit, which may amount to less than 20 words. Such limit, however, is not restrictive but liberating, because most users feel easy to fill up the whole textbox, with its large fonts. Long-winded users will compress their input so they can be digested easily by others. Its results are impressively efficient: Information can now be laid out in a flexible and modular manner, as they are all in a similar compact size, which is easy to digest. However, the results are also devoid of pictures and media, and edges on the danger of generalizing information due to its repetition, thus devolving humanity into a giant database.

MySpace:

Peer pressure has a long lasting effect on the input, most apparently on MySpace. Before the new MySpace profile layout came around (which a meager amount of users had transitioned to), the old Add Comments box in MySpace had space for 10 lines and font size so small it suggested users to type more than 150 words. Users, of course, refused to type this many words, as the rewards gained for such comments are low, since MySpace does not have a system to post comments on comments to trigger meaningful discussions. As a result, most users simply input the least they can do, or worse, post a giant picture to fill the box. Peer pressure turned into cultural habits in long run, and it will take the web page years to repair the damage of what was initially a poorly designed textbox.

Facebook:

Facebook, in comparison, has a more lenient approach. Initially shown as a one-line textbox that can fill only one sentence, it expands into two lines on users’ click, suggesting that it can be expanded to fill even more lines. The box begins to show fatigue after 5 lines of text, as the density of the text compared to the rest of the page together with peer pressure begins to suggest the user to type less. This natural approach to limiting text gives users a smoother experience than the hard limit imposed by Twitter. As a result, Facebook news feeds often have text of optimum lengths, neither too short or repetitive, nor too long or with pictures too distracting. However, balance had yet to be struck between the intimidating length of the page and the inclusive height of each feed item.

Scientific studies can further verify how closely related human behaviors and aesthetics theories are. For instance, heat maps were used to study how eye movements across a web page correspond to what the users click. Like how primates identify faces from top left to bottom right, we read web pages the same way. Elements such as boxes, divider lines, and spacing between elements clearly affect how one perceive a web page, thus one absorbs the information on it.

Qualities that are used to be left in the realms of aesthetics such as proportion, alignment, distribution and colors are now tools for organizing information and guiding users to make suggested choices.

To the Hive Mind

In the beginning of the computing age, software used to be molded after human experiences in reality. The design of a word processor would mimic how a typewriter works, while the design of music creation software would simulate a piano. As time goes by, we found new shortcuts and abstract ways to achieve the same results with higher efficiency and more creative output. Electronic forms and new means of communication such as email would eliminate the need for traditional word processing altogether, while music creation took on abstract concepts such as loop-based timeline and modular programming to allow new genres of music to be created.

“Instead of creating user interfaces mimicking human experiences, these new tools are the other way around”

Web 2.0, meanwhile, has been a paradigm shift. Instead of creating user interfaces mimicking human experiences, these new tools are the other way around: New types of societies and human experiences are formed after them. Internet forums, instant messaging and personal news feeds are modeled after nothing we had every done before, but users adopted these new ways of communication in doves. Instead of being able to communicate face-to-face, one-to-one, or all five senses at a time, we can now communicate one-to-many, many-to-one and each sense at any time, forming a Hive Mind of collective consciousness and shared knowledge.

However, a misstep in the design of a web tool used by many can sterilize humanity of emotion, while a small meaningful gesture can help us better relate to each other to form a better world. The designers of the Web are the designers of the society of the future, and we should use our power responsibly by taking the details of our designs more seriously.

As our tools become more and more embedded into us in an intimate and microscopic level, the design of their intricate details is magnified in their importance. In the brave new virtual world that we all helped created and designed by filling in our own knowledge and information, nothing is arbitrary anymore.

I was recently asked to speak about campaign management at a Stanford conference aimed at inspiring students to come up with new sustainable business ideas that instill lasting behavioral shifts.

I was asked to speak because during the summer leading up to Barack Obama’s election, I started an online poster collective that connected hundreds of designers and aggregated about 400 posters in support of Obama’s candidacy. Thanks to Taschen books, Spike Lee, and Steven Heller, the best 200 posters of our collection were compiled into a book, Design for Obama – Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology, which was released on the anniversary of Obama’s election and is now on sale at book stores around the world. The surprising success of the project illustrates what a group of passionate and talented people can achieve together and it was an amazing experience.

Design for Obama happened to be the right idea at the right time. The will, eagerness, energy and talent of the designers already existed, I simply housed the community by providing the ability to share their work. The sense of belonging and common purpose was exhilarating and propelled us all forward. I have experienced the same feeling of communal empowerment in creative energy twice before, and it was no accident that I found it again.

I went to a public, performing arts magnet high school in Los Angeles. It was there that I was first surrounded by passionate people not simply enjoying, but living for what they were doing.  When I made the somewhat rash decision to pursue graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design (never having studied art previously), I found the same sense of belonging in a new art-form with a different group of people.
“Design for Obama happened to be the right idea at the right time”

Since graduating from RISD I have been looking for ways in which to manifest similar conditions and build new creative communities. The level of conversation in a community like this is not unintelligent, reactionary or fearful ; they are philanthropic, innovative and imaginary.

At the Stanford Conference I began to notice a common theme in the questions I was hearing and discussions I was having. Everyone was coming up with ideas to collectively solve social problems but everyone was stuck at the same barrier: how to engage a group of people in a more meaningful way than voting or sharing or buying, etc.

I sat there getting giddier and giddier. I had the answer to everyone’s question. I had seen the types of communities they strove to build and energy they wanted to cultivate. Creative engagement is the key. If you can construct, grow and mobilize a community that reinforces and awards some form of creative expression and/or active engagement, then you will have created a vehicle that will create new things, ideas and solutions.

Since graduating and publishing Design for Obama, I have started a design studio with Tino Chow called Big New Ideas. We have setup shop and are growing a talented team that is helping us design businesses, non-profits, campaigns and events for entrepreneurs, activists and crazy people. We are also working on a number of our own big new ideas, like this publication for one.

Stay tuned, I’ll be moving out to San Francisco this Spring and setting up the West Coast branch of Big New Ideas.

]]> http://monthlydesignreview.com/pilot-issue/turning-points/designing-community/feed/ 9 http://monthlydesignreview.com/pilot-issue/turning-points/iz-a-pencil/ http://monthlydesignreview.com/pilot-issue/turning-points/iz-a-pencil/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:58:48 +0000 admin http://monthlydesignreview.com/pilot-issue/?p=17

Once upon a parallel universe there was a rebel named Iz and she was the first finisher of her world, called in after scientists had their moments of exploding sparks that settle into Eureka!

It was Iz’s job to finish a discovery, adding the unspoken, intangible thing that made human beings want to keep that discovery with them always and use it to bring their world closer to the spectacular image of rightness etched their heads.

Poor Iz. What she possessed in strength, ingenuity, and smarts was never quite enough; she never reached her pinnacle of a finisher—to do the job so well that she became invisible, as she believed that only the invention should be seen.  Be kind to her though, because in this story she is the only finisher in her entire world. It’s pressure.

Friends of Iz knew they could find her in one of two places. The first was in her studio at a desk, staring at a mound of pure powered gray graphite, just a mound of it, the newest recording discovery. She sat there for hours and days and weeks thinking, “Hmmm, something will come to me”. The second place to find Iz was in bed, asleep or not asleep or trying to sleep, or sleep-mumbling to herself about spheres and rods and cubes, sometimes even screaming out loud while being tossed in a gray powder hurricane at sea.  In the morning, she would wake up…

A sphere.

A solid graphite sphere.

To seize the day, she sat in front of the graphite and floated her imagination to people writing with different shaped instruments in all kinds of places–circles at work, cones, cylinders, doodles on the playground, ellipses, hexagons, irregular asteroids in transport, octagons, ovals, parallelograms on Sundays, pentagons, pyramids, rectangles on the moon, rods, semicircles at parties, spheres, squares, stars at school, trapezoids, triangles on the beach, wedges, whorls. The people in her imagination struggled.
“How do you help a person have their thoughts fly from their mind directly to the page?”

Iz knew the problems. How do you make the writing instrument portable? How do you make it easy to hold? How do you help a person have their thoughts fly from their mind directly to the page? To tackle the problem, Iz invited some friends over to see how people acted around this new graphite powder, how they made marks and what they felt when they used it. People used the graphite in two ways. Some would dip their finger into the powder and write on a piece of paper, as if they were writing a note on a steam-coated window. They were calm and soothed, but a bit spaced-out writing in this way. The graphite powder worked fine, until someone sneezed–indoor blackout. Others used the graphite in a way that greatly disturbed Iz. They would find a ragged chunk of graphite in the powder, a small fragile rock, grasp it between two fingers and a thumb, and start to write with a crumbling instrument, sometimes cutting their fingers and never making any legible marks, only sounds of ouch and clumsiness. They winced and hurt.  Instead…

A sphere.

A solid graphite sphere.

Okay, prototype. Iz drew up the specs for her spherical pencil, called one friend named Ilsa, who worked for a cricket equipment supplier and another friend Ama who specialized in developing high-tech polymers. A meeting of minds and materials and the prototype was cracked from its mold perfectly within 10 hours.  It fit exactly into the palm of the hand. It had a serious weight and mesmerizing veneer, a deep reflective gray.  The friends tried writing and the sphere glided smoothly across the paper. It didn’t crumble. The drawn lines were just varied enough to help word readability, and capture expression in drawings beyond anything ever before.

The next morning, Iz delivered the prototype to her client and manufacturing began. One hundred million units. Ninety million units sold within the first week.  People began to write. Whenever, wherever.

But there were small frustrations. Iz would often see a man in a business suit chasing a dropped sphere down the street. The hip pouches people used for their spheres caused bruises for the owner or an innocent bystander on a braking subway car. Spheres were not nameable, so a lot of theft took place without any way to identify whose sphere was whose, really. The graphite stayed on the skin for too long and it was nearly impossible to write something down and then attend a party without smudging another guest by accident. Embarrassing. These seemed like small things. Writing with the spherical pencil seemed quite normal, and everyone was enthralled at the ability to write without clouds of dust or injury. The inconveniences of the sphere faded into normal. “A meeting of minds and materials and the prototype was cracked from its mold perfectly within 10 hours”

Over time the world changed in ways that only Iz could see. The sphere had had taken on a life of its own. People began to purchase black clothes to camouflage graphite smudges and marks, and the fabric industry jumped to meet the need. Within a year hardly any colored fibers were produced. Color became a black market. Looking from the top of a building people appeared as dark dots shifting and moving throughout the world. Every so often you could see someone dressed completely in white our yellow, broadcasters who wrote on their clothing to express themselves to the world. There was a movement of people who refused to write with the sphere, because the embedded graphite on their hands made fingerprints wherever they went: an uninvited tracking system.

“Finishing is a lonely job,” she thought as she walked toward the global president’s warehouse of discoveries. She needed to pick the next discovery to finish, to bring its Eureka! moment into the everyday. “Wait…maybe anyone….” The next day she invited a hundred people (including her friends Ilsa and Ama) to the warehouse, people she knew and liked.

The one hundred designers worked together to unpack one hundred discoveries.

They began…

Our culture has been poorly designed without much intent beyond economic dominance. A dominance without concern for consequence.

While no single entity is necessarily responsible for this condition, many contribute. Consumerism serves as a counterweight of support for our capitalistic, economic and democratic attempt at supremacy. Unfortunately, our mindless over-consumption has pushed the cantilever beyond its limits and is nearing a breaking point. Our culture cannot continue to support this fatal state of imbalance. We have delusions that salvation will triumphantly arrive by way of an elusive, somehow strategically planned road map full of tactical solutions. All of which provide complete allowance for our lavish, consumptive nature. We have placed our trust for salvation in the hands of others. But why would we trust in the likes of technological advancement, our governments, or the world’s corporations?

“Technological advancements change the world, but to what end?”Technological advancements change the world, but to what end? Electric cars, windmill farms, solar panel arrays, and oceanic turbines will help alleviate our dependency on fossil fuels, but our dependence will simply shift. The pendulum of government never ceases to swing. The current U.S. government promised hope and change during the charge for office, but are now faced with prioritizing unexpected, seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Then in another three or seven years, an entirely new administration will take the reigns. And to consider the world’s corporations? Ha!! Executive management focuses on near term profitability for self-serving purposes. And to what end? To climb the golden corporate ladder? So the song remains the same, and the treadmill of progress continues.

These are just blatant examples, and are not intended to assume that all technological advancements, governments, and corporations cannot positively contribute to the culture. But why do we entrust our salvation to others? We have to question our ability, opportunity, or more importantly, responsibility to impact culture at large. Can one influence the rest? Can one individual cause monumental social change to occur?

“Can one individual cause monumental social change to occur?”

The answer is yes. Whether we like it or not! Edward Bernays, the father of Public Relations and nephew of Sigmund Freud, is single-handedly responsible for doubling American Tobacco Corporation’s revenue. All in a days work. In one instance with the flash of a camera, Bernays was able to architect an event that abolished the taboo of women smoking cigarettes by making the act a sign of women’s liberation. (watch video)

Cigarettes became women’s “torches of freedom”. At least this is what Bernays leaked to the press. That headline hit every newspaper in the U.S. in 1929. At that catalytic moment, the condition of the culture began to shift. The understanding or perception of what was good or bad, or taboo changed. All this lead to billions of dollars in revenue for American Tobacco Corporation. All this lead to billions of dollars in health care costs. And much, much more. One man. One idea. One day. It changed a generation and generations to come.

Design is a signal of intent. Consider Bernays’ intent when he took on the American Tobacco Corporation as one of his early clients. His intent was to cause a paradigm shift in the culture at that time; to design a coup that in an instant overthrew a taboo, which in the end was a profitable success. Whether good or bad, it worked. So design is much more than mere visual aesthetic, or decoration. It’s not type selections, material choices, color options, well structured grids, or any other aspect that addresses a superficial, surface level need for arrangement. We’re not playing with crayons. The heart of design is to identify and refine a problem to its core, then devise an exceptional solution.

Architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart make an excellent case for the role of design in Cradle to Cradle, where they address the simple fact that much of design still feeds the wasteful over-consumption that sickens our culture today. McDonough and Braungart present a seemingly straightforward challenge to designers to fully realize the implications of the life cycle of any given consumable. As designers, we have a responsibility to be mindful of the context of our designs. Not only how a given product, publication or business card will be viewed, but how they exist in the larger ecosystem of our culture and our world. And the use of “recyclable” materials just isn’t going to cut it. Being less bad is not good enough. Cradle to Cradle paints a very clear picture that the language surrounding much of the “green” movement only truly supports the idea of less destruction: reduce, avoid, minimize, limit. Being less destructive only prolongs the inevitable. Being less destructive is not a solution. This is not design.

“The use of “recyclable” materials just isn’t going to cut it. Being less bad is not good enough.”As designers, what is our intent? Our goals cannot be to merely sugar coat information, products, buildings, or any other consumable. The proposition is simple. Create a healthy, truly sustainable culture. At the core, a change of heart is all that is truly required. To create a change of heart for the entirety of our collective culture, could be our greatest design challenge. If Bernays was able to devise a shift in the social condition at large and cause the values of the culture to turn on a dime, then we can also influence a turn. A turn that directs the condition of our culture to a healthy, truly sustainable path.

In short, if you’re looking for the world to change, then it’s quite simple. Be the change you want to see. Age and experience do not define us. Our capabilities truly define who we are. Therefore, know not what you will become, rather know where to set your sight. So, to where is your sight set?

A “turning point”, for me, is when new technology lines up with larger historical shifts, unrelated to or predating by decades, the so-called “tipping point”.  For example, I see a contemporary turning point in the new location technology of The Universal Address System and related Natural Area Code (NAC) System, developed by Dr. Xinhang Shen. His NAC Geographic Products, Inc., is a Canadian company founded in Toronto in 1995, and it is not simply a coincidence that this new mapping language was developed in Canada during that country’s peak crisis over: “Is there a place called Canada?”  And: “how can we reference a country comprised of such different group identities?”

“How can we reference a country comprised of such different group identities?”Since the crises over unity of the 1990s, Canada has emerged as a pioneer in practicing how one place can belong to many. This multicultural country’s different constituent nations of the English, French, and aboriginal, as well as recent immigrants – each with their own history and structures of knowledge – have uniquely negotiated a way to collectively co-exist. The Canadian example of mediating between hard-won individual freedoms and the collective rights of radically different groups will undoubtedly come to be studied more and more closely in this our young but old, conflict-ridden, globally multi-cultural, twenty-first century.

How Canadians have choreographed this politics of recognition should be of great interest to designers, especially those developing new location based services. As GPS and other location data become a ubiquitous commodity, it will require another step to acknowledge the cultural dimension of social interaction with a place, and to invent a common physical language for a digitized landscape. It will be a design problem to show how locative media can best manifest the competing histories and identities tied to one place.

Among other things, the Canadian experience highlights the need to conceptualize a new standard for referencing place that will be seen as an acceptable multicultural compromise, arrived at transparently. In my opinion, it appears likely that the Universal Address System will become that new standard. A Universal Address is not any longer than a phone number, and provides a unified representation of GPS’s cumbersome longitude and latitude designation. For example, the Universal Address for the Statue of Liberty is 8SVM PRFC while a recent news event in Baghdad would occur in the range of LN-P NJ. The Universal Address System is flexible enough to refer to any size area, from a country down to a building, object, or any one-meter square location anywhere on Earth. With an additional character string, it can refer to any location in three-dimensions, from a sunken ship to a penthouse to a mountain peak.

Over the last fifteen years, the Universal Address System has continued to make slow but steady headway toward becoming an international standard. Its earliest adopters have been practical problem solvers directly confronting the 99% of the world’s locations that cannot be referenced by a street address. For example, the government of Mongolia adopted the Universal Address System as a new national standard because, among other things, it made sense for a vast country with many nomadic yurts at temporary locations. For world travelers, the company Travel GIS showcases how the Universal Address System can eliminate the gap between a street address and map, and provide cross-national, cross-language, turn by turn directions that are consumer friendly, especially when traveling in parts of the Middle East, Asia, or Africa where there no street addresses, or where, for other cultural reasons, Google Maps or Blackberry Maps ( before NAC enhancement) simply failed.

Business sectors like the petroleum industry recognized early on the ease of NAC codes for communicating precisely where remote resources were located. Other proposed applications include using the Universal Address as a new Global Postal Code that would facilitate mailing from “the world level to a final mailbox”. Probably the next stage of interest will be from the growing “Where” business, which seeks to monetize geodata. Obviously, this kind of internationally standardized place locater would be helpful in a variety of design application from visualizing the chain of food production to succinctly communicating cradle to cradle information on the resources used in manufacturing a product.

An earlier proposal was NAC founder Dr. Shen’s Time-Space watch, a product that displayed both the time and the Universal Address location. As he pointed out, a watch is just a mobile clock, and since accurate watches helped form the industrial age, Time-Space watches will symbolize our coming integrated, digitized world. That moment is here.

It is time to discuss new standards with which to talk about place, not unlike the way the euro was finally agreed upon by the distinct countries with distinct histories that comprise the European Union.  It may well be that a proprietary place-naming system, like the Universal Address System, is a non-starter, but there are models for that with early road systems and utilities. It could be that any rational and mathematically based system would be too loaded for a broad consensus, for obvious reasons. But some system will become normative, and a critical conversation at this juncture seems overdue.

To date, every article about the Universal Address System has focused on its utilitarian functionalities. Alongside these pragmatic and market-oriented initiatives in location services, there needs to mature a cultural expression worthy of being called locative media. And to achieve this transformation, I would suggest going back to the founding historical context of this new technology. Our Earth’s survival requires us to find ways to co-exist, with each other, and with the planet. Adopting something like the Universal Address System is not meant to erase the history of place, but rather to provide a “neutral” platform so that many can speak. And after that it is up to all of us. Locative media can become nothing more than the digital cemetery of the twenty-first century. Or locative media can envision a new theater mediating the possibility of place and making the polis whole through shared stories. What will that theater look like?

A few examples will suggest the pitfalls and possibilities. The European cultural heritage initiative, iTactitus, is a prototype augmented reality tool for visualizing the physical appearance of a site at another time in history. As a model, it is one of many “stop and pop” passive interaction projects that provide site-specific content on demand, but with no social interaction. Here, the introduction of a Universal Address would primarily facilitate identifying and locating the site where the content then becomes relevant.

More playfully, the coming domestication of GPS will let people visualize their life as a sketch upon the landscape. We should expect to see more sites like Everytrail, where people can, among other things, upload routes designed to draw abstracted patterns in the landscape. The appeal of GPS drawing on the planet already has inspired a BMW media campaign.

But a more substantively social and conceptual approach is suggested by the work of the Amsterdam-based new Media artist, Esther Polak.  For example, her recent project, NomadicMILK, used GPS to document the two Nigerian dairy economies that co-exist in the local marketplace. One is nomadic and the other corporate, and the performance of the life cycle of milk production makes visible to the other the different worlds each group inhabits in the same country. An earlier project used a GPS diary to trace milk production from the cow in Latvia to the consumer in the Netherlands. By visualizing this knowledge, Polak asks, “Can you see what I know?”

It was only ninety-two years ago that the US Congress formally recognized the standardized time zones we rely on today without thinking. This “tipping point” occurred decades after Greenwich Mean Time was adopted, and this agreement was only reached after decades of confusion caused by the new railroad networks trying to arrive on time at the hundreds of locally determined time zones in effect across America. Since the 1990s, we have been at a turning point in how to talk about location, just as we were more than a century ago talking about time. As this conversation goes forward, I hope it will be joined by a broad coalition of thoughtful people committed to exploring the broadest range of possible implications: popular, poetic, political. We need a common understanding of a sustainable future. Talking about “where” will be part of it.

In life, we often try to over-organize and micro-plan, loosing sight of the fact that the most wonderful part of our days may be the most unanticipated. Sometimes we can plan for the unexpected to happen, and other times it comes as a surprise and sweep us off our feet.

A Better World by Design: A Conference where people from around the nation to deepen our understanding of the power of design, technology, and enterprise to reshape our communities and sustain our environment.

Having attended multiple conferences around the world and have started the “A Better World by Design” conference, I have come to appreciate the hard work and planning that goes into producing a well-designed event. Like all great design, the details of a good event are well considered, yet  I have found that it is often hard to put your finger on what makes your experience unforgettable. Great speakers may serve as highlights, but ultimately, it is the unanticipated and intangible elements – unexpectedly connecting with interesting people or discovering new perspectives through conversations – that provide the unforgettable experience of a great conference. For this reason, it is important to design spaces for the “unexpected” to occur.

Spaces that generate conversations

Transitions are often the most under-appreciated elements of a conference, yet they are like the invisible glue that holds everything together. They encompass everything in-between the main events at a conference – the intermissions, the travel from one event to another, the pathway to the restroom and even the designated smoking areas. Similar to a play, when the transitions are done well, it goes unnoticed; but when they are ill-considered, it can result in a sour impression of the conference. For this reason, carefully considered paths and location of services could make a huge difference in the overall experience of the attendees.

The Better World by Design conferences attracted leaders and advocates from an array of industries, and it is important to us to make space for them to converse, inspire one another and generate new ideas. We deliberately plan for long breaks between sessions and carefully consider the flow of people to get as much face-to-face time throughout the conference. The attendees cross paths while they traveled from the different events. As they travel to the various panel discussions, they pass through open foyers where they find tall tables and clusters of seating that creates pockets of spaces for conversation. Food and drinks are made readily available to set a relaxed tone, allowing people to let their let their guard down and connect with others.

You never know whom you are going to meet and what they could offer. At the 2008 conference, a few of the presenters stayed behind after the sessions were over and brainstormed ways of working together. Many of these conversations have solidified into actual projects that are being implemented. They are a direct result of encouraging these influential leaders from affordable housing, education, mobile technology and design talk about how they could make the world a better place. This is more than what any conference organizers could ask for. It fulfills both the vision and goals of the conference. As a result, we (will?) put a bigger emphasis on social events and made more space for these discussions to happen during our next conference.

Accepting the Unexpected

TED Conference: Technology, Entertainment and Design. Founded in 1984, the conference has grown in size and have broader their focus to include conversations from the frontier all fields. Annual conferences are held in California and in Oxford, while having held one-time conferences in Africa and India.

The TED conference is one of the most respected, exclusive and well-produced conferences in the world. Even at TED, however, things don’t always go smoothly. At the 2008 annual conference, a technical issue during the BBC debate put an uncomfortable pause in the program. As the whispers in the crowds got louder, a man who was sitting in the back row spoke out and broke silence. Everyone turn to find the man who being rude and making his thoughts heard, only to discover Robin Williams. Thrilled, the organizers invited onto the stage in a sea of applause to perform an impromptu stand-up comedy to buy the technical team time. It broke the tension in the room, everyone was delighted and entertained during this unexpected break. Perhaps the delightful nature of a surprise is why we call moments like these ‘happy accidents’.

Conferences may plan for the unexpected to happen, but at times, organizers are confronted by circumstances that are beyond their control.  Even in times like these, the ‘unexpected’ still finds its foothold and it is just as beautiful and rewarding as when it is intentional. Robin Williams need not have announced himself, and the organizers need not have invited him to perform, but yet it happened. It diverted people’s attention from the awkward void and produced an unforgettable memory. That video have since been published online and have gone viral, having seen by thousands.

Letting Go

You should plan as best you can in life. But at the end of the day, you have to simply let it happen. Inevitably, there will be times that you enjoy more than others, things are going to go wrong and it is going to be stressful. You have to concede that you can’t be in control all the time. And when things don’t go as plan, do not underestimate the adaptability and creativity of those around you. Some of them just might surprise you.