This past Show & Tell, our family was fresh off hosting the Worldwide Instagram Meetup, Toronto - which was a success despite the rainy gloom that had settled on Toronto streets.
The community that grows around applications like Instagram is nothing short of fascinating – it brings together a group of people based on a piece of technology that facilitates collaboration across both work and play.
Taking and sharing photographs isn’t exactly a unique concept, but apps like Instagram that allow for quick capturing, editing and sharing of photos means that photography isn’t just for professional photographers. What’s more, seasoned photographers have adopted the app, using it simultaneously with their DSLRs. The Instagram meetup was a great excuse to geek out with that community and our famed cake even made it onto the Instagram Blog!
Satish and Verne shared their first passion project at Show & Tell this week too – a coffeeshop marathon that lead to a website called Can’t Wait For Christmas, where visitors share their Christmas wishes with a countdown to the big day. It was mostly an exercise in experimentation, but that to me is exactly how idea incubation works – a volly of thoughts with other strategists and design thinkers to develop niche concepts. We play a game in one of my Masters’ classes at OCAD, called How Might We, which literally starts with a design problem and is aimed at generating as many absolutely outrageous potential solutions as possible. The solutions are never very realistic – most of them aren’t even legal – but the whole backbone of innovation is that you are exploring for new ideas and that means getting a little messy in the process.
The team also shared some pretty hilarious stories about teaching the older generation, namely our parents and grandparents, how to use current technology. While we joked that some of our pupils are very trapped in their analog lives, some of the team have had really great experiences teaching our older counterparts the ropes. We live in a world polarized by the learning curve of new technology – toddlers are being raised with the motor skills to operate touchscreen technology and boomers are adapting to accomodate digitization of everyday tasks – a pretty neat thing to witness when you work and play in the realm of technology.
If the Instagram meetup taught us anything, it’s that technology binds sectors, generations and platforms. And with the tech landscape’s increasingly tangental personality, we really appreciate the chance to get out from behind our computers and bind our great loves!