Crafting Cohesive & Collaborative Spatial Social Software for Patrons' Permanent Pondering
Conferences are weird: paying a bunch of money to sit in a banquet room drinking stale urn coffee. But the hallway conversations — those are where the real design happens.
A few weeks ago, in between watching talks at Figma Config, my roommate & I were reminiscing about the “good old days” of design conferences that we had independently frequented in Europe.
I was due to give my talk the next day and was in the process of rewriting the entire thing while trying to rethink the metaphysical format of what a “talk” even was & how that should really manifest.
Conferences are weird: at their most surface level, they’re ostensibly just paying a bunch of money to travel somewhere and sit in an auditorium or banquet room drinking stale urn coffee, processing a hangover, and watching someone give a talk that would end up on YouTube by the time you’d returned home. Indeed, some were just like that - but the best ones I went to were transformational experiences. They were where I met & reconnected with hundreds of friends I’ve maintained across borders & oceans for a decade and where as a design student & new grad I first felt part of something bigger & more exciting than myself rather than an anonymous “designer” in London’s stagnant graphic design scene. They were more than just watching a future-video be delivered live: a magical form of collective energetic entrainment that could never fully translate by the time a video reached YouTube.
The chills, tingles & tears I experienced during the best conferences I attended left indelible marks on my perception of myself and the world. They were so much more than “just watching talks”; holistic moments of micro cultural zeitgeists.
The event producers at Config had also recognized that an online conference should be more engaging and interactive than “a streaming video embedded on a webpage”, and had arranged a whole program of experiences to bring attendees together between talks. You know how the process of finishing is though: before I could “finish my talk” I had to fully explore my own thoughts on conferences and connection.
As a musician it is my assertion that performers are only one component of the experience of a performance: an attentive & open audience is integral to co-creating the conditions necessary for really magical experiences. Public speaking is no different.