Sigh. I’m glad to be back home again, but the HOW Design Conference in Boston was an experience I won’t soon forget.
Two of our local GDC Chapter Execs, myself and our Web Communications Chair, Steve Mynett, attended this year’s conference in Boston keen to discover the latest trends in the design industry, network with like-minded designers from across North America, participate in workshops of all kinds and learn from the best and brightest—not to mention represent GDC and Canadian designers!
The conference was incredibly well organized, which is no small feat considering there were over 4,000 people filling Boston’s Hynes Convention Centre—the largest conference in its 18 year history. And Boston was friendly and fun, with warm sunny weather and lots of hot spots to fill the gaps between official HOW functions.
As volunteers involved in producing design events back home in Vancouver, we made great industry contacts, found a few possible speakers, wooed a couple potential sponsors and generally observed how to organize and run a convention of that size.
The speakers list this year included familiar names such as Joe Duffy, Modern Dog, Russel Brown, Shel Perkins, Stefan Bucher, David C. Baker, Charles S. Anderson, Petrula Vrontikis, Debbie Millman, Michael Bierut, Katherine McCoy, Von Glitchka and many more—even BC was represented with GDC’s own Eric Karjaluoto. But instead of listing out a long recap of all the various workshops and sessions we attended and various lessons learned, I’ll list a few short thoughts and point you toward some reviews of the conference for you to read if you’re interested.
First of all, you get out of HOW what you put in. We both found that some of the best times were when we introduced ourselves and initiated conversations with other attendees. If you go to a conference like this with high expectations but hang back, becoming one of those shy people leaning against the wall in the huge corridors, you’re not likely to have much fun. But if you make an effort and engage, you’re likely to have far more fun, like we did with our new friends we met at the conference.
There were numerous presentations of all kinds, some were terrific, some not-so-good. We found some talks downright boring and irrelevant. This led us to one idea we took home that if we (GDC) should ever host a similar conference in Vancouver any time soon (hint hint), we should take the time to ask the invited speakers to rate their presentations in terms of practicality versus inspiration as well as the experience level of the audience they’re gearing their materials toward. And then communicate this to those attended the presentations. I expanded on this a bit further in my letter to design conference organizers.
Did we come home with books and bags filled with big ideas we can apply in our volunteer contributions to GDC and the BC design community? Perhaps not. Would I recommend the HOW Conference to friends and colleagues? Absolutely, yes. It’s a great place to lose yourself in a crowd of like-minded strangers and realize what a thriving, passionate and interesting community designers are. It’s almost enough to go for no other reason other than reboot and come back envigorated, but I can almost guarantee you’ll go home with notes, slides, goodies and a bunch of ideas you can apply in your own design practice. I know I have already.
For a longer, more comprehensive, review of our experiences in Boston, check out Steve Mynett’s account of the HOW Design Conference on our studio blog or check out the links to various reviews on the official HOW Conference Blog. For copious photos of the conference, check out the official HOW Flickr page which include a bunch of us being rather silly with new friends we met in Boston.
