I had the pleasure of spending  a memorable weekend in Nashville with the fine people of AIGA Nashville. James LaCroix kindly invited me to speak at AIGA ThinkTANK ’11 about the role of design and social services in social change, alongside a solid line up: Kate Bingaman, Justin Ahrens, and Joe Duffy.

For the first time ever, I opened a conference, and consequently, stealing at least one or two talking points from each of my fellow speakers – Hello Justin While almost nothing I said provided concrete professional assistance to the audience, I spent the best part of an hour discussing our role as designers working in current affairs, social and environmental movements, and how we can all simply and ethically change the world for the better. I showed photos of Tent City in Tel Aviv from my recent trip in Israel, discussed the true role of Twitter and SMS in the February 2011 protests in Cameroon, shared the extraordinary story of the One Million Voices Facebook group and protests in 2008 which ignited the events that lead to the dismissal of the FARC in Columbia, talked about the iPhone 4 antennagate in the summer of 2010 and told jokes about the “New-Now-Retired-Gap” logo. I was apparently hilarious which is one of the best compliments I’ve received for a talk!

Next was Kate who showed and spoke very eloquently about her work on obsessive consumption and her visceral need to draw by hand everyday. While most of us have bursts of creativity and seek inspiration in the extraordinary, Kate thrives on the mundanity of daily life and exerts monk-like discipline by producing work every day. Since 2006, she’s been drawing something that she purchases every day and with that created zines, exhibitions, artifacts to sell, but also published a book in the spring of 2010 containing a selection of the first three years of daily drawings. Kate is also a huge proponent of designing in the open, no matter how personal it is. In 2004, she decided to start drawing her credit card statements every month until they were paid off -it took her nearly six years.

After lunch, Justin shared his journey to becoming a designer and his recent experiences in affecting change through design in the slums of West Africa with Life In Abundance. When he first approached them to help redesign all their collateral, pro-bono, he was told by the Executive Director that he needed to go Africa before doing anything. So he did. Since, Justin has spent a significant amount of time in Kenya, Somalia, Soudan, Ethiopia, etc. documenting the work of various NGOs, helping them tactically and strategically with design to empower people, and more recently devising a program combining education, entrepreneurship and social commitment for craftwomen/men in the largest of Nairobi. Justin nearly made everyone in the room cry, several times.

Finally Joe Duffy closed the conference by talking about Country music, life, and design. Using his extraordinary body of work – from the Bahamas logo to Minute Maid packaging to Herradura Tequila, he shared his philosophy and approach to graphic design and thoughts in our role as designers in making life better.

The conference wrapped up with a panel discussion where we shared our day-to-day experiences as design practitioners. While none of us knew each other prior to the conference and have very different career trajectories, we all spoke about our role and responsibilities as designers in affecting deep positive change locally and elsewhere.

As with every conference, everyone ended up in a bar. One conversation after another, James and Josh Hernandez started to talk about Nashville underground wrestling nights on Fridays and Saturdays at Stadium Inn. Needless to say that within half an hour, we were all in a seedy motel next to the freeway watching amateur wrestling. All I will say is that I (Kate and Justin) truly hope that it will become a ThinkTANK tradition Enjoy!

All in all it was a fantastically well organized conference thanks to Stephanie, James, and all of the AIGA Nashville board and volunteers. Many thanks again for having me.

Today, IxDA president Janna DeVylder announced the launch of the IxDA Interaction Awards, a first-of-its-kind awards program dedicated to celebrating global excellence in the discipline of Interaction Design.

The inaugural Interaction Awards will recognize and promote 10 outstanding works completed in the last two years across domains, platforms, environments, and cultures, that embody and improve meaningful relationships between people and the products and services they use. Entries will be judged by an expert jury comprised of practitioners, academics, business leaders, and elected community members. The jury chair and members will be announced early next year. The Interaction Awards 12 will open for submission in the Spring 2011, and will be awarded at the Interaction 12 Conference in Dublin, Ireland, in February 2012.

There’s been a lot of talk, bashing, passionate rants, etc. about design awards and competitions in the past few weeks. We’ve been observing this tumult from the sidelines, anxious to join the conversation with a tangible, open, and inclusive proposal grounded in IxDA volunteer-led organisational philosophy.

The Interaction Awards program is a community initiative spearheaded and powered by volunteers dedicated to interaction design. Wherever you stand on the topic, please rise to the opportunity to actively participate in its development and success!

You can participate to the conversation on IxDA.org, but also on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Again, we really need volunteers to help make this program a success. If you’re interested, connect with us!

As mobile ownership and Internet usage continue to rise globally and as products and ideas spread at an incredible pace around the world, more and more designers are required to move from designing artifacts or services to creating new behaviors, experiences, and emotions that are utile, relevant, and meaningful for customers both close and faraway.

This panel will explore opportunities and challenges of designing products (bits and atoms) that are used by billions of people and discuss related techniques to successfully invent, design, and execute on a truly global scale.

As a panel we will answer the following questions:

• What are examples of products used by billions of people?
• What are the characteristic and commonality of these products
• What are the various product development methods and design processes ?
• What are the considerations for designing cross-cultural products?
• How do you design, prototype, validate and iterate in this context?

Vote for Panel 7699 by 11:59 pm CET on Friday, August 27!

I presented the Five Dollar Comparison at Design Engaged 08 in Montreal on October 3rd, 2008.

The fivedollarcomparison.org site explores the relative value of five dollars, we are collecting examples from around the world by asking people to submit photos of objects or services that cost the equivalent of $5. Participate…

No notes, no slidecast, you had to be there. Sorry.

This is the video of my presentation for the session “Aiming for a better society” at the Lift Asia 08 on September 5th. Knock yourself out!

I would like to thank the Lift team Laurent Haug, Nicolas Nova, Sylvie Reinhard, and all the others for the invitation and the opportunity to share the Homegrown story with such an amazing audience in a breathtaking setting.

Thanks to the Nokia Design Homegrown team and extended contributors who made all this happen.

The slides are available here.

Come and say hi.

This way please. The slides are there.

It’s well worth 17 minutes of your precious time.

I attended Mobile Persuasion 2007 last week at Stanford, and once again I came out with mix feelings. It was the first edition, it went quite smoothly, and all in all people saw it as a success.

The good
The speakers were relatively switched on, and generally the topics were interesting. A few presentations raised my interest -imagine that! In no particular order:
- Rachel Hinman (Adaptive Path) and Mirjana Spasojevic (Nokia Research Center) presented a study on mobile web they did while working at Yahoo!. The take home findings are 1) Think uniquely mobile, not mini PC; 2) Think always with you, not just on the go; 3) Think building and reinforcing common ground and identity; 4) Think access to what’s essential, not browsing.
- Josh Ulm from Adobe showed a lovely Flash ambiance home screen implementation on a Samsung.
- Jordy Mont-Renault from Digital Chocolate demoed AvaPeeps – a mobile dating game with ghetto language and graphics. I am not sure if the game is any good, but at least the presentation was highly entertaining.
- Ian Bogost (Persuasive Games) gave probably the most interesting talk of day. He argued that games influence players to take action through gameplay. Games not only deliver messages, but also simulate experiences. While often thought to be just a leisure activity, games can also become rhetorical tools.
- When Deb Levine (Internet Sexuality Information Service) started Sextext.org -an outreach sexual education program for young people in San Francisco, one of her challenge was to figure out the most effective technology to reach the kids. The answer was quickly found after a couple of days on the streets doing ad-hoc interviews: pull SMS. It’s personal, cheap, on-request, convenient, always accessible, time critical, easily consumable and deletable.
- Ame Elliott (PARC) presented “Tokyo youth at Leisure”. The study and findings were not very interesting; what was interesting was the description of her [pre-]study expectations/pre-conceptions/fantasies and the lack of action on the results. If the results are not delivered in the right format (a PowerPoint does not count nor work) to designers/marketers/business folks for interpretation, these studies are a pricey waste. Ame presentation was a sad example of this.
- Gabriel White (ex-Motorola, currently at Frog Design, blogging at Small Surfaces) briefly discussed the challenges of designing the MotoFone, a product for the last 1 billion.

The bad
BJ Fogg tried to take us on a journey, and crammed 20+ speakers in just 8 hours. Each speaker had 7 to 10 minutes to present, and the floor had just enough time to ask a couple of questions to each panels. Not so good. This curse happened to be our salvation when we had to suffer, every so often, the poorly disguised marketing pitch for yet another stupid mobile service.

And the ugly
Nothing was really ugly, except maybe the closing panel of so-called experts, which was 30 minutes of 30 seconds me, me, me, self-promotion. At the end of the day, let me tell you, it is torture. Pretty please, let’s have an inspiring speaker next time.

To conclude, it was interesting to see and hear, I have learnt a little, caught-up and met new people, so I guess, for $150, it was good value for money.