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HOW to survive Boston
After leaving my house in Vancouver at 5AM, flying all day to finally check into our hotel in Boston at 6PM, Mark and I were exhausted. Time to check in, take a nap and then find a good meal. Not only did we arrive at a super swank boutique hotel called The Liberty Hotel, but when we checked in we were greeted with a glass of champagne. Not a bad welcome to Boston. Not only was The Liberty a great hotel (a recently renovated jail… get it… Liberty), but was also one of the finest brand applications I’ve seen. Everything from the names of the in-hotel bar and club (Clink and Alibi) to the “Do Not Disturb” signs (renamed “Solitary”) right down to the last detail of the fine print on the back of the menus; everything echoed the brand. Coming from a designer… that’s some fine work!
The choice of presentation topics at major conferences has always interested me. There were just under 4000 people at the 2008 HOW Design Conference representing an extremely diverse level of skills and interests. As is the case with any conference, I found some presentations that captivated me, and others I walked out of after three minutes. Three sessions stuck out for me and I am looking forward to seeing their influence start to appear in my personal and professional life.
Sunday began with Ilise and Peleg from Marketing Mentor’s workshop on marketing and pricing for designers with some great advice and strategies applicable for both newbies and the most seasoned professional. Lunch was a dynamic and engaging networking lunch with Speed Dating-style time limits on how long everyone could spend speaking with a particular person or group. This truly was the ice-breaker and got the social flow started for us.
Sunday afternoon Mark and I both took part in a session run by Kathy Burton called Can’t We All Just Get Along centered around the DiSC personality assessment. The concept seemed simple, you take a personality test, you get your results back and then you learn how these results tell you more about yourself. Except we talked about the results in a pretty unexpected way. The DiSC profile sets out four character traits, and provides a breakdown of which traits are dominant. The results are designed to give us the tools to better communicate with, manage and interact with people in our lives. Not exactly the stuff blisteringly hot blog posts are made of, but it gave me some tools that I will use on a regular basis from here on out.
Sustainability is an increasingly frequent buzz word and designers, at least Canadian designers, seem to be increasingly interested in it. Eric Karjaluoto has been a leading advocate for sustainability within the Vancouver design community. Tired of having sustainability be an afterthought in the design process, Eric and his firm, smashLAB, developed DesignCanChange.org which is an educational site on sustainability aimed at designers. I have found that the audience for sustainability talks are often made up of the converted and I can include myself in this category. After all, I was the converted right? Recycle, don’t load up on paper samples, I’m doing my part. Right?
Except this presentation shifted my thinking in only an hour. The majority of us have gotten from point A to point B in the sense that most offices have recycling bins and we all use FSC paper. The fact is that getting from point A to point B isn’t good enough and we need to get to point C, or D, or Z. Greenwashing, is fairly rampant in all industries (and political elections of all sorts) and complacency seems to be setting in over the continued pursuit of sustainability. Eric outlined the example of “upselling” a client from 3000 to 5000 direct mail piece because the cost per unit would go down saving the client money in the long run regardless of whether the additional units would be used. Simply recycling is not enough anymore, we need to start to looking for our ways in our industry to reduce the need for recycling. The lasting impact of this presentation was a call to action for all designers to visit DesignCanChange.org and take the pledge about how to to increase sustainability in our practices.
One of the most impactful points that Eric made was that in a society where sustainability is a (seemingly) huge concern and certainly all designers should be aware of it, if not actively practicing it, it wasn’t practiced at this conference. There were no recycling bins anywhere in the conference center. Cans and bottles went in the garbage. On top of that, everywhere you looked paper handouts were being distributed. Now, sure these were printed on FSC Certified paper, and can be recycled when we don’t need them anymore, but that should be considered an antiquated view of what sustainability is. We got a HUGE binder in the registration package and we literally saw people walking out of trade booth exhibits looking like Himalayan Sherpas carrying all their free schwag home—ultimately to throw nearly all of it away. Not only that but people got so much, the FedEx booth was backed up the last day while everyone shipped their stuff home. Is this the best way? Is this sustainable? While I commend HOW for putting on a great conference, this needs to be addressed in upcoming conferences.
Some highlight’s on Monday included Joe Duffy’s “A Designed Life”, an informative presentation on design research by EnSpace’s Jenn and Ken Visocky O’Grady and Andy Epstein’s perspectives and suggestions on how to survive as a designer in a world of words. There were also a number of practical informative sessions for the more inexperienced young designer on planning, communication, management and prepress techniques. The day ended with a “happy hour” which was more like 4000 people standing in line for a free drink, so we bailed and went to an Irish pub across the street (we were in Boston after all).
Tuesday began with an enthused crowd hanging on Charles S. Anderson’s every word in one room, while a more subdued group sat back and enjoyed Debbie Millman coo and coddle Pentagram’s Michael Bierut in the next room. The morning also saw David C. Baker rip through another round of his classically rational (”why didn’t I think of that?”) advice, this time on being a first time manager in a design studio environment. Rob Wallace from Wallace Church presented his thoughts on how designers can quantify design value to business clients, reinforcing the idea that design itself is finally being recognized as a core competency and that good design truly is good business and ultimately drives profit. A particularly popular presentation was given by Wayne Geyer of GeyerCom called “Write More Good: Copywriting for Visual Thinkers” which dove into some simple and easily applicable writing strategies that any designer can apply in his or her own practice.
To end the day Mark and I wanted to check out a presentation on Church Marketing due entirely to a project that we’ve been working on recently but after five minutes it was clear that it wasn’t for us and faced with an early trip to the bar, or check out the session next door, we wandered next door into a presentation that had been getting some good hype all day. Now granted this presentation didn’t have that much to do with design, but it was hands down the most entertaining one that I saw all week long. The presenter was Chad Pregracke speaking about his crusade to clean up rivers that started with the Mississippi 11 years ago and continues to expand to this day. The amazing part was the energy that Chad brought to the stage. The energy and passion was unreal but his sense of humour was off the wall and he talked a mile a minute. His story has been an unparalleled success story so far and I expected the presentation to end with a call to action about how we can get involved with his organization, donate money or spread the word. Quite the opposite; he ended with request to all of us to engage with something that we were passionate about, regardless of what it is. (to see what you missed check out a clip of Chad Pregracke on YouTube from a previous talk).
There were also studio tours, portfolio reviews, breakout sessions, book signings (for the design star f*ckers) networking lunches, happy hour receptions, parties and more. There was also the obligatory giant trade show area filled with booths from the numerous sponsors and the book store where you could easily spend the price of the conference on pretty design books to lug back home. We passed on lugging books around in favour of dinner and drinks with friends and explored Boston’s pubs and live music scene—oh yeah, and drank Bruce Willis’ vodka in his hotel room. (no Bruce wasn’t there!)
A longstanding tradition at design conferences are presenters merely showing pretty slides of their portfolio and telling anecdotes about their career or studio history. Even when organizers ask speakers to avoid this, it tends to frequently happen—as it did at HOW. I recognize it must be terribly difficult to balance speaker topic load and appeal for every attendee, and I heard positive feedback from these portfolio heavy presentations, but it really does seem wasteful and self-congratulatory when a successful designer stands on stage and regales the young and easily influenced with their sexy solutions with little or no explanation of context, rational, explanation of process, or information about the creative brief itself. Many people, like us, traveled great distances to attend HOW, hoping to learn new things and take some lessons back to their own studio practice. If we really wanted to see all the posters designed by a studio over the last 20 years, couldn’t we have viewed them on their website? Now if these lovely images were used as poignant examples of design methodologies or solutions to articulated business problems, then bring it on.
As is often the case when Mark and I travel together, he dragged me out to experience all the nightlife that Boston has to offer and on the last night of the conference, we ended our night with a 7AM breakfast, only to take a quick power-nap and head off to the closing keynote given by Bill Strickland described in the program as a story that will “inspire you as he explains the impact of art on his life and his desire to share with others what art has done for him. He’ll provide tips and strategies for inspiring others—and yourself—to excellence, and offer personal insight into overcoming obstacles and creating your own success.” Now one can’t dispute that Bill’s story is a fantastic one that is inspirational, but there were no tips of strategies given for myself or others. Inspirational? Sure. Relevant? Not a chance. As described in the catalogue with lessons on design leadership we could all take home to apply in our own careers? Nope. Worth the extra effort to attend after an all-nighter with friends? Not a chance.
I’ve returned from events such as these many times and every time I return spent (emotionally, physically and financially!) it’s tiring to absorb as many presentations as we did and it’s draining to meet and get the opportunity to engage and learn from so many inspirational people that I did but it is oh-so unbelievably worth it. There are many five minute conversations that I had and witnessed that had as much influence on me as some of the presentations and that’s the reason why I keep going back. But being inspired by four days away in a foreign city is easy when compared to continuing that inspiration and drive back into your regular life. Four days back into my “regular” life I find myself being snapped back to the norm and need to capture the heightened sense of creativity, drive and inspiration. HOW was just the latest stimulant for me to learn about myself, my profession and my craft; I can’t wait for the next.
Pictures of our time can be viewed online in this group call HOW Design Conference on Flickr.
