Design Engaged

Thanks once again to the good folks at Kimo Bean Company, I'm now sufficiently Kona'd up that I can maybe roll back the fog of jetlag a little, and begin relating to you my impressions of the second annual Design Engaged nanoconference, held this year in Berlin.

Our venue was Spreeblick, a sort of blog empire/design shop in the worn, funky and heavily Turkish Kreuzberg district, two or three blocks from where the Wall used to tear through the city. It was weird for me to be back in the former SO36: as a result of the Wall's utter undoing, an area which was marginal in every sense on my last visit to Berlin, in that fateful summer of '89, now finds itself at the city's geographic core.

It wasn't until late in the trip that I realized that, but for the hours passed at Spreeblick itself, Nurri and I spent every moment of our few days in Berlin in a zone of previously denied space. It was a measure of how very much has changed in the intervening sixteen years (!) that, but for the occasional Ampelmann, you had to actively think about it to discern the traces of the DDR; Mitte's boutiques certainly rival, if not surpass, their Omotesando, Apgujeongdong and Greene Street equivalents.

What of the conference itself? I guess I'm going to step warily into the role of loyal opposition here and express a degree of disappointment with my experience - through absolutely no fault of any of the brilliant participants, the charming and capable host, or indeed the unflappable Andrew Otwell.

Design Engaged, this year, was simply too big. At 32 or so participants, the event just breached the threshold where instead of cohering as one big group, it hived off into only semi-permeable orbits of comfort. I spoke to fewer new acquaintances than I did last year, and while this is probably my own tendency at work, I was indulged in it rather than being challenged.

I think it was partially also a matter of physical layout. While comfortable in every other regard, Spreeblick simply couldn't afford the roughly circular seating set-up we enjoyed in Amsterdam. There was definitely a more traditional lecturer-and-audience feel, complete with the traditional attention gradient (folks openly surfing or even nodding off in the back of the room). It definitely contributed to my sense of an only impartial fusion.

Of course there's an impossible tension between the competing prerogatives of wanting to maintain a small group, not losing any of the cherished voices that make DE what it is, and welcoming new ones. (I've got a few ideas up my sleeve in this regard, and will tell all at the right moment.)

And I didn't come home with any new toys. Possibly as an artifact of being more readily able to physically see what people had on their screens, I signed up for Flickr and downloaded Konfabulator for the first time within hours of seeing them in Amsterdam. This year? Nothing equivalently new, despite the year's profusion of (yawn) "Web 2.0" startups, mashups and fuckups.