2008 Conference Summary
What's in a Theme?
2008 Conference + Expo explores Collaboration, Synergy, and Delight.
Conference themes are a dangerous thing, Austin designer Marc English warned the opening general session at the 2008 SEGD Conference + Expo. Difficult to orchestrate and impossible to fully exploit, they just never seem to fulfill their promise.
Of course he had never attended an SEGD conference.
By conference end, attendees at the 2008 SEGD Conference + Expo-held in Austin on May 28-31-had thoroughly explored this year's theme of "Interplay: Collaboration, Synergy, and Delight!" A record 800 attendees packed the meeting rooms at the Hilton Austin, boarded buses for SEGD's signature Workshops on Wheels, and discovered new products, services, and techniques at over 70 Expo exhibitor booths.
Austin was the perfect venue for exploring the theme, says Leslie Wolke, who co-chaired the conference with Steven Stamper, her colleague at fd2s (and SEGD president).
"There's a lot of interplay in Austin: high-tech and artisan, urban and natural, art and commerce, global and local, entrepreneurs and hippies," she explains. "And it's not just about opposites-it's about the fact that opposites live, work, and play together, stirring up controversy, sharing perspectives and, just like the dictionary says, 'exerting influence on each other.'"
Film Festival
For the second year in a row, the conference kicked off with a film festival, this time featuring Bomb It!, a Jon Reiss documentary on global graffiti culture. Reiss and Austin graffiti artist Nathan Nordstrom were on hand for questions and a lively discussion of the feature-length film, screened at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.
Getting out there
SEGD Conference attendees are always instructed to "Go out and play!" and this year was no exception. Pre-conference tours on Wednesday, May 28, included funky signs and East Austin galleries, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (with a side trip to the famous Salt Lick Bar-B-Que), visionary architect Charles W. Moore's home compound, and a private tour of the Norman Bel Geddes collection at the University of Texas' renowned Harry Ransom Center.
Workshops on Wheels (Thursday, May 29) allowed attendees to explore more of Austin and see their peers' work in context. The hardest part, of course, was choosing which venue to visit. Options included the Long Center for Performing Arts, Dell Children's Medical Center (with its organic wayfinding program and architecture by Karlsberger), the University of Texas at Austin (with a new wayfinding program by Cloud Gehshan Associates), the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems ("Max's Pot"), Urban Austin with hotelier (and conference speaker) Liz Lambert, the LEED-Gold Certified Austin City Hall (designed by Antoine Predock), a behind-the-scenes tour of Frog Design (with Frog's head of digital design, conference speaker Mark Rolston), and the Harry Ransom Center (with environmental graphics by fd2s) and Texas State History Museum.
Got inspiration?
The trademark of the SEGD conference is its ability to both inspire and instruct. Blue-sky presentations in the general sessions often provide a design flavor other than EGD-and that's the point.
At the opening general session Thursday, May 29, presentations by four key speakers were diverse but interconnected.
Boutique hotelier Liz Lambert quit her job as a state's attorney and transformed a seedy motel into the hip Hotel San José, helping to revitalize Austin's South Congress district in the process. "One thing wrong with the gathering places in this day and age is they're so homogenous, they could be plunked down anywhere," she said. "A lot of what I do is inspired by the community and a communal sense of design." Lambert's newest projects include a kibbutz in the desert near Marfa, Texas, and a rock 'n' roll-themed hotel on a Victorian estate near Austin.
Mark Rolston provided a peek into the workings of Frog Design, the 500-person Austin-based firm where he directs groundbreaking new media and digital product design. In an increasingly hyperconnected world, he says touch is the key to bridging the physical and the virtual. "Even now the most high-tech laptops and cell phones we design are divorced from our existence, separate from our environment. Touch will allow us to create moments of interaction where we can bridge that divide."
Terri Ducay, former head of design strategy for Cheskin, now focuses on using cultural design to meet the needs of emerging and "bottom of the pyramid" markets in a socially conscious way. People living on less than a dollar a day are a huge potential market for consumer-goods companies, and Ducay uses an ethnographic approach to identifying their needs. "Most companies make the mistake of taking a product from the top of the pyramid and eliminating features," she said. "That won't work. It has to be good, sustainable, and affordable."
Technology is everyware
And attendees also heard from Adam Greenfield, instructor in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Greenfield spoke about urbanism and technology, and how new media can be used to actually improve urban living.
Urban "junk space" is at best homogeneous and at worst littered with interventions that make it harder to be in, he noted. "So why wouldn't I go into my own little psychic space if I can?" The real question, he told attendees, is "How do we articulate that wonderful, luminous, organic sense of the city, but in a way that is appropriate and organic to our age without being nostalgic?"
Everyware, he explained, is a specific class of technologies embedded in everyday objects and surfaces-clothing, personal objects, navigational devices, appliances-that are wireless, invisible, and imperceptible. Deployed in everyday life, they already make it possible to interact with a city and its other occupants in real time. He predicted that "ambient informatics" will help us make better choices, but entirely new behaviors will emerge as a result. "We need to design physical spaces that account for these new behaviors," he noted. "The sad thing is that there's something in the technical nature of product development that does not incorporate passion and love. That's the place to focus our efforts."
Deep dive
At the other end of the programming spectrum, deep-dive workshops and nuts-and-bolts technical sessions sent attendees home with tools they can use on their next project.
Pre-conference workshops on Wednesday, May 28, included Documentation and the Design Process, an in-depth look at documentation from the earliest stages of concept visualization to nailed-down construction documents. James Keppel of LRK Architects, Jan Lorenc of Lorenc + Yoo Design, and Mick Markham of Gensler shared their techniques and philosophies from the designers' perspective. Mark Andreasson of Design Communications Ltd. explained how designers can optimize drawings and descriptions to communicate the most information to fabricators, and calibrate the level of documentation detail to the designer/fabricator contract arrangement. Bill Phillips of Icon Identity Systems moderated.
Continuing SEGD leadership in ADA education, The Complete ADA workshop explored legibility and ADA compliance from the perspectives of colors, fonts, materials, technologies, and methodologies. Presenters included Grady Brown of ASI-Modulex, Dave Miller of Nova Polymers, John Souter of Accent Signage, and Matt Williams of Dixie Graphics. SEGD's ADA Committee has published a series of white papers to guide designers, architects, fabricators, and clients through the process of creating ADA-compliant signage. The workshop was a pilot event for an ADA certificate program soon to be offered by SEGD.
Technical sessions during the conference included Green Digital Printing and Dynamic Design, Light and Legibility, ADA and Key States, Design for Maintenance and Management of Outdoor Signs, Creating a Public Bid Package, and Selecting Materials for Cost Savings.
A Saturday track on Designing Green/Designing for Longevity included a review of SEGD's Green Paper and Green Audit process and sessions on Recycling, Modularity, and Materials and Green Interpretation and Green Audit Exercise.
Shining the light
One of the traditional highlights of the SEGD Conference + Expo is the SEGD Awards Luncheon & Fellow Celebration, which honors outstanding leadership in EGD and recognizes those who have contributed to SEGD's success.
This year was the first time that SEGD Awards designed by Massimo Vignelli and fabricated by Design Communications were distributed.
The 2008 SEGD Fellow is Ronald Shakespear, often called "the father of EGD in Argentina." Founder of Buenos Aires-based Diseño Shakespear more than 50 years ago, he is the creator of urban sign systems for the Buenos Aires' underground, city hall, public hospitals, zoo, and city wayfinding. His work has been exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Triennale de Milano, and Icograda Helsinki. Shakespear presented a moving retrospective of his work, philosophies, and poetic approach to design.
Expo experience
At Friday's Expo, attendees had access to 70 exhibitors showing off new products, technologies, and projects.
The day kicked off with the annual Computer Savvy Breakfast, which focused on advanced software integrating 3D design and color concepts. Design principals and partners gathered for lunch and group discussions about building their businesses. Attendees took advantage of morning and afternoon tech sessions and then ended their day with the annual Auction for Education & Cocktail Reception on the Expo floor. The auction raised almost $24,000 for SEGD educational initiatives.
Past, present, and future
Saturday continued the Interplay theme, this time focusing on the past, present, and future of EGD and how they inevitably influence one another.
SEGD turned 35 this year, so a look at its beginnings kicked off the morning. A film by former executive director Sarah Speare and her son, NYU film student Nicholas Brennan, chronicled the beginnings of SEGD from its infancy at a three-person meeting in Detroit in 1973 to its maturation as a 1,500-member educational foundation. After the film, a panel of SEGD-member 30-somethings pondered the future of EGD and where it's headed.
The "present" portion of the program focused on how EGD has grown into a global undertaking that touches all facets of a company's operation. Procter & Gamble, the world's number-one consumer products company, is using EGD to express its corporate brand in workplaces around the world. Kelly Kolar (Kolar Design) was joined by her client, P&G global architect Serge Bruylant, and Abelardo Tolentino Jr. of Aidea Philippines in sharing how P&G collaborates with a global "community of practice" consisting of architects, designers, engineers, and other consultants in manifesting the company's brand essence in its research centers and offices worldwide.
Lars Uwe Bleher of the German design studio Atelier Markgraph provided a peek "Through the Looking Glass" into EGD's future, predicting how dynamic new media will profoundly reshape our thinking about communication design in the built environment. He noted that immersive spaces-and the human desire to convey information and emotion-date to the dawn of human existence. "Communication is still communication."
While new media and technologies will allow seamless integration of physical and virtual spaces, high levels of interactivity, and convergence of the receiver and sender, the same basic design principles apply to dynamic environments as to traditional ones. "The story is always the most important."
Saturday's SEGD Design Awards Presentation & Luncheon honored the winners of the 2008 SEGD Design Awards, ranging from graphics and signage at a German coalmine to an ephemeral "poem pavilion" that casts shadow poems that change based on the time of day and angle of sunlight. SEGD Design Award pieces designed by Massimo Vignelli and fabricated by Design Communications were introduced this year. Winners are featured on www.segd.org and in the No. 21 issue of segdDESIGN magazine.
Saturday afternoon, attendees could choose from five tracks each including three 45-minute sessions: Designing Green, Exhibit and Museum Design, RFPs to Contracts, Dynamic Environments, and SEGD Design Award Winners.
All this and shindigs, too
Social events are always a highlight of the SEGD Conference + Expo, and this year was no exception. Thursday night was the annual President's Reception, held at the historic Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin. Attendees dressed up in their favorite cowboy boots and hats to enjoy drinks and dessert while meeting new friends and getting reacquainted with old ones. And on Saturday night, the conference ended on a high note at the famous Stubb's Bar-B-Q, where attendees danced to a local band and enjoyed a barbeque buffet.