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Along with 2,000 of my best design friends, I attended the IDSA Connecting Congress in San Francisco last week. The speakers and presentations provided a huge dose of brain food, with designers, scientists and futurists leading us to think about larger issues in the world affecting all people instead of the narrow world of styling, production, and marketing.

Some of the high points (for me):

Hans Rosling of Gapminder.org kicked the whole thing off with a fantastic information visualization as he spoke about the changing demographics of the world’s population and misconceptions of separation of first and third worlds. His message boiled down to a sentence? "We’re more alike than we think." People all over the world are living longer, having smaller families, and making more money. How do designers deal with this shrinking gap?

Barney Hatt, designer, and Martin Eberhard, co-founder of the Tesla electric sports car talked about the design and engineering process that resulted in the fastest sportscar ever! I don’t really care how they do it – this thing goes 0-60 in 3.8 seconds. And even though Alex Steffan of Worldchanging poo-poo’d the value of electric cars, saying they are insignificant in the fight to halt global-warming, I’m telling you: if you can get gearheads like myself to embrace this technology and combine it with a movement to require manufacturers to take back the cars and recycle them at the end of their useful life, it would result in a massive drop in gasoline and other resource consumption. Do you really think that car enthusiasts are going to stop liking cars any time soon? No! You can’t change American culture just by trying to scare people. However, the Tesla and other fallout vehicles could significantly reduce carbon emissions and is the best way to start America on its way to oil self-reliance.

Janine Benyus, biologist and author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, which we used when developing a Storytelling Pod prototype for the SF Academy of  Sciences (left), spoke about the value of examining nature’s systems and structures for inspiration for new materials and systems for design and business. Janine currently consults with architects, designers, and other businesses that are interested in applying nature’s lessons to modern commerce and products. She mentioned several specific products and systems that have developed out of this type of thinking, the one that stood out to me was Teijin’s Morphotex, inspired by the color of the Morpho butterfly’s wings, which use a structural pigment where color is produced by light bouncing off of a particular alignment of fibers, instead of using dye.

Naoto Fukasawa – everything he makes is very beautiful, even his Powerpoint slides.

Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates – Things Can Be Different. I learned from meeting him briefly in the Fairmont lobby that Dev and his wife recently had a baby. Babies tend to change our outlook and prompt us to question what we’re doing in the world and how we’re leaving it for the next generation. Dev’s presentation was about how design can help solve the Big Needs of society by looking at several factors of human experience including 1. improving system conditions, 2. making abstract thing tangible (like Hans Rosling did with statistics), 3. making positive effects fun, 4. changing the context of behavior, and 5. making capabilities accessible (thanks Pete).  He illustrated these with examples that seem so simple but have had huge effects, like delivering fluoride through toothpaste to dramatically improve dental health and prevent infection and death in children. It is ideas like this, that seem so simple and are easily delivered in existing systems, that I think many of us strive for.

Core77
party at California College of the Arts. My alma mater knows how to throw a party and our department chairs know how to throw an afterparty! Giant robot made of milk crates + free beer + hippie marching band = CCA.

Steve Portigal hosted a fun breakout session with a lesson on improv and how it might apply to enthography and user research. A link to his presentation slide show with audio can be found here. What really made it fun was that we actually got to do something, namely get out of our chairs and talk to each other! I suffered a moment of performance anxiety when I couldn’t understand if the British gentleman next to me said "and" or "ant" during a version of the telephone game, but quickly got over it after I reminded myself that’s what improv is all about – mistakes, letting them happen, and allowing them repair themselves. Also letting silence happen, especially during interviews and learning to really listen to people instead of trying to fill in the blanks for them.

Yves Behar of fuseproject spoke at length about the One Laptop Per Child initiative and how his studio uses large-profit consumer products projects (such as the Jawbone Bluetooth headset) to fund these more meaningful social projects. This was the first time I’d actually seen the laptop in person and seen its capabilities displayed Apple-style via close-up camera as Yves walked us through the features up on stage. Mesh networking allows computer owners to connect to each other and the internet wirelessly without a subscription.

Tim Brown of IDEO talked about the value of applying design-thinking to organizations other than design firms, especially in the areas of public services, sustainability, healthcare, and products/services for the poor. A related exhibition is on display at Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Museum.