Design Conferences: Sustainable?
During the research and planning phase of an upcoming GDC event—Practivism: Practical methods for radical sustainability in design—I came across Alyssa Walker’s article Conventional Wisdom: Eight Ways to Save Design Conferences. In it Walker claims that design conferences have become “exercises in regenerated, wasteful spectacles,” feeling “less like intellectual retreats and more like conspicuous consumption.” In her forthright Core77 post she shares her perspectives and offers numerous ideas for making them more sustainable and relevant. Perhaps her most profound recommendation being to cancel conference plans altogether and replace them with more organic, local, spontaneous and sustainable alternatives.
Having attended numerous conferences and helped organize various events over the years, this article really hit close to home and resonated with me. I even did a little ranting about the traditional conference format myself after attending the HOW Design Conference in Boston earlier this year. But more importantly, it made us in the GDC/BC Executive reconsider our own choices regarding events and role in hosting competitions such as Graphex and conferences such as Icograda Design Week.
Our goal for the Practivism event is to host an enlightening, rhetoric-free evening of wisdom and discussion as our sustainability experts share their experiences and insights, attempt to demystify green speak and provide attendees with practical answers and strategies they can apply in their lives and design practices. But as we discussed the event logistics, such as printing invites, posters, flying the speakers from New York and California, etc, it was a harsh reminder of the impact we have on the environment even when putting on relatively small industry events such as these.
We’re making every effort possible to make effective choices to promote and host our event within realistic parameters, such as reducing our print requirements and ensuring we use production techniques with the smallest environmental input. We even considered remote web video technologies and web streaming as an alternative to needed the speakers to be on-site. Hopefully as we move forward we can make innovations to how events and conferences are organized an produced.
GDC’s Designer Speaker Series event Practivism: Practical methods for radical sustainability in design will be held on November 13th at Science World in Vancouver. Speakers include, Innovation and Sustainabilty Expert Marc Alt, Green Graphic Design author Brian Dougherty and Design Can Change Founder Eric Karjaluoto. Information and tickets are available at www.practivism.ca.
