IDEA 2006 Conference, highlights from day 1
IDEA 2006 is here. Wasn’t sure what to expect — all sessions sounded promising enough, but you know how these events go. This is the first year, so as far as that goes I think everything has been running well, and speakers all seem well prepared, and they’re all well spoken. Unlike the Webvisions, it is about ideas and high trends. No talks about practical applications, but it’d still be nice to get some consumable take-aways at the end of each session. They talk for an hour and you’d think they’d repeat the three things everyone should remember at the end. None of them explicitly did that, but Linda Stone’s talk was well structured enough that you got her message (you were sleeping if you didn’t), and David Guiney from National Park Service had a really sincere, memorable approach to his presentation. Others were pretty standard, I thought.
- Our world is becoming noisier
- World is craving meaningfulness
- Sweetspot of a “phenomenon” is where human desire meets a product or a message that resonates with the desire — meaning a product/service might be great, but in order to take off, it needs to come at a time that coincides with our general consiousness
- From ’65 to ’85, the trend was me-me-me, self expression, creativity, and personal productivity
- From ’85 to recent years, we trusted the network, being connected
- Being always connected, always on means we’re scanning for activity — don’t want to miss something
- Linda calls this “paying continuous partial attention”
- But we’re all getting overwhelmed, leading to unfulfilled experience
- So we seek higher quality of information, higher quality of life
- We don’t totally give up trends from the past eras, we adapt and integrate to create a new trend
- We want protection from bad information, meaningful connections, authenticity, trust, values that resonate with ours, and clear signals over noises
- Tools that will flourish will in the next few years will provide these things
- Will help us make better choices — help us discern opportunities rather than make us scan for them
- It won’t be enough for products to be easy to use — they will need to improve the quality of our lives
David Guiney, Communicating the Stories of our National Parks
This was broken into two sessions, where he talked about the backgrounds and designing for the National Park Service in general in the first one, and about specific challenges associated in the second one. He is a passionate person who was impossible to not like. Don’t feel like posting everything I wrote down, so I’ll boil it down as much as I can.
- NPS strives to achieve balance between enjoying the park and preserving the nature
- Communication focus is on interpretation rather than straight education — what does it mean to you?
- Attitude of serving the taxpayers, because we pay for it all
- The slogan: Experience Your America
- Many contexts: signage, newspapers, films/audio, maps and guides, museums, websites, etc.
- Communication has many roles: safety, indicating historical areas, outdoor classroom, education about global climate changes, validation of what you learned in school
- Interpretation is about provocation (stirrs up something inside you), meaningful, and revelation based on information
- Successful if you come away being interested in things you didn’t know before, things you might not use in the future, things that might not be relevant to you, things you may never see again
The conference offered a nice spread of bagels and other goodies today, even though I did not take advantage. No tea, though. Just coffee.
Central Library is a nice space, but I haven’t had a chance to explore. Maybe tomorrow. Same goes for the food…
Also interesting to note is that this is the first event I’ve been where attendees are free to register for a blog account, encouraging participation by posting session notes, commentary, etc. This is a nice move.
