There’s nothing quite like a well-planned conference – you walk away feeling full of ideas and wholly invigorated. Some of us made our way over to the RGD’s annual Design Thinkers conference and walked away with a pretty potent dose of inspiration to carry over into our projects.
Part of the inspiration comes from the exposure to ideas, but a great deal of it has to do with storytelling – it was mostly anecdotes about our favourite design thinkers that made it into Show & Tell.
Behrouz had a similar sensation when he caught a lecture at OCAD U called The Practice of Planned Serendipity this past week. Thor Muller, CTO and Co-founder of Get Satisfaction talked about creating the perfect conditions for innovation, and explained that building your own breed of luck demands a combination of obsessive curiosity and the ability to observe an exception. He also pointed out that Fight and Flight involve the same chemical reactions – it’s just what you choose to do with it. We also laughed about the fact that Muller identifies these traits as the traits of a geek – really good news for the Jet Cooper team.
We all found it pretty hilarious that Chris, one of our designers, went to England last week for a couple of days. He had a pretty good reason – he was sent there for a personal project that he’s working on – but we nevertheless enjoyed poking fun at the idea of spending twenty hours of travel time for a couple of days with Big Ben. I think we’re mostly just jealous.
Satish also had an exciting announcement – Jet Cooper was nominated for a Digi Award as one of Canada’s Top Digital Design Teams! Satish laughed through his account of getting the news at the nomination dinner; no one on the team could make it and Jet Cooper flashed on the screen so quickly that he barely had a chance to react. He sat dumbfounded for a few minutes until it finally sunk in, and spent the next few minutes excitingly calling the team to pass on the great news!
On a more grim note, Arati got some news last week that her uncle had passed away. With a massive family spread across continents, mourning him became a question of logistics; sadly, not everyone could make the trip down to his funeral. And so the family took to Facebook, visiting his profile regularly to view pictures and his regular status updates. It brings up an interesting point about our virtual lives- who do you trust with your passwords if something happens? We already know that Facebook has a policy on ‘memorializing’ accounts - but it doesn’t stop there. Email, Twitter and the pile of apps we subscribe will keep on keeping when we’re gone. Do we need to preemptively strategize just in case?
In any case, it was nice to hear that the family created a space to swap memories, share photos and leave messages. We might not have any control over these moments, but we can turn them into something beautiful, something to draw encouragement from when the going gets particularly tough. Inspiration always comes down to these kinds of stories and and the chance to learn from the experiences of others. It’s the reason we gather at conferences and attend lectures – and I guess it’s why we have Show & Tell, too.
There’s no shortage of other great events in the coming weeks - Startup Weekend Toronto kicks off on the 18th, well as Pixel Hack Day on the 19th and 20th.