Pivoting in a Chair Made of Seatbelts
Walking to the opening session today really made me love Phoenix. There is a look to the town that is fun, and the weather is fantastic. Granted, this was at eight in the morning, and by the time we broke for lunch it became plain old hot. But that 8am in October weather? Wonderful.
We are brought in for a glimpse of what we will see in tonight's Command X. Arizona Tea packaging. Can the young professionals make great work in less than 24 hours of real time? Will any of them have had enough sleep to be able to still stand up on stage? This should be fun.
AIGA has a habit of getting very smart and academic sounding conference speakers. And the big change to the format I have seen so far to the breakout sessions (called affinity sessions this time around), is they appear to not be just one speaker, but two or three discussing a topic, followed by a decent amount of Q&A from the audience. I heard Valery Casey, Allan Chochinov and Ric Grefé speak of the value and role of design competitions. I do like the direction AIGA has done with moving from those printed 365 books to the online Design Archive, and it sounds like this is just the start of a larger agenda. It will be good to see this continue.
We were told that the conference center is LEED silver certified for environmental architecture design. The chairs are made of recycled plastic and seatbelts. Wouldn't buying used chairs be even more environmentally friendly? Probably not as aesthetic though.
My favorite design of the conference so far? The "blogging station." I had seen some tables in a quiet (relatively anyway) area with a lot of power cords readily available, so sure, I blogged there. Found out later it was set up just for that. I think Joe Sparano would call that great design.
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