How we meet and what we say.
Rands covered this, more or less, so this post is probably going to come off all “me-too” about the whole thing, but it’s important enough to bear repeating, at the very least. In the past four weeks, I went on some exhausting, masochistic marathon where I attended four conferences in three time zones:
- A barcamp-style one-day thing where I spoke about book design;
- A ridiculously intimate, single-track conference with forty attendees and a dozen speakers, which involved some of the kindest people I’ve ever met;
- Another ridiculously intimate, single-track conference with two hundred and fifty attendees - including, more or less, everybody that I respect and love on the internet - that focused on building relationships and making cool stuff;
- And a large conference in a hotel, with some inspirational and insightful talks among several tracks, where I spoke about dark patterns in user experience.
Each conference is a reflection of its organizers, of course, and the configuration of each conference speaks well to the kinds of relationships that were formed, and the kinds of conversations that were had. You can roughly guess how surface (or how deep) the conversation went at each of these, and having the opportunity to run that gamut has helped focus my opinions about the conferences that I want to attend in the future.
After one of them, on the flight home, I wrote in my notebook, buried in a list of priorities and resolutions: more hangouts with fewer people. I vastly prefer sitting down with somebody, one on one, than I do holding giant parties or social functions (despite all possible evidence to the contrary). Which is all to say, mapped onto this whole gradient of design circlejerkery that we’re putting forth here, that I would much rather hit up the smaller conferences, held in the middle of nowhere, with internet use frowned upon, than the larger ones.
Which isn’t to say that I refuse to speak at (or even attend) the larger ones, but rather that if you gave me a choice, I’d probably select shivering in a teepee with six other dudes over the comfy corporate-expensed hotel room; or (less drastically) the single track, self-selecting, relatively chill conference over the massive, downtown-hosing clusterfuck that has become so thoroughly overrun by the advertising and social media industries that the makers, those actually responsible for cool shit, avoided it near wholesale, with many of them not buying passes, and all of them huddling in bars on the fringe, in quiet places, waiting out the storm, and doing the best they can. For example. (Sometimes things don’t play out perfectly, of course, so let’s assume we’re trying to describe a more ideal state here.)
I imagine I’m not very special on this front: that i’m one data point in a broader trend, and people are seeking this kind of intimacy after what all has gone down in the past year. I reckon we’re much the better for it, though, and we’ll see this bear out in coming years. Here’s to more good things.
