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I’m very pleased to have been asked by AGDA to speak at the first Design A Better World conference in Sydney with the tricky topic, “How Can Graphic Design Help Save The Planet?”

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what my position on that question is yet. I think it’s basically, “no”. But it depends on whether you emphasise the “help” part or “save the planet” part.

Graphic design alone can’t save the planet, but graphic (and other forms of design) can contribute to the process. Design can influence small behavioural shifts that amount to a big change when multiplied and that can be a powerful mechanism.

Most of the problems we have now are accumulations of many small behavioural changes – everything from packaging to energy usage. The standby light and mode on a TV is a design feature. It’s small and must have seemed like a great design decision at the time. Now we know it leeches small amounts of power in millions of homes and is a terrible waste of energy. So whilst it seems like designers only have the power to make minor changes, we’re in a position to influence behaviours (a highly debated topic at present) that magnify into big change.

Design can, however, make a big difference to individual people’s lives and that has a knock-on effect that is perhaps under-estimated. I plan to talk about some of those ideas and examples.

I hope that will be something different – it’s pretty scary being lined up against the excellent range of other speakers, many of whom are real graphic designers. As an interaction and service designer I think I might have different views, so it will be interesting to see how that conversation turns out.

In any case, it’s not really about saving the planet but our own species. This rock we’re spinning around on will be orbiting the sun long after we’re gone.

How Can Graphic Design Help Save The Planet? is going to be held at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney on the 3rd August and all the details are on the Design A Better World site.

I’m going to be giving a talk over at Interaction Forum ’09 at the Design School in Hildesheim next week (Tuesday 26th). If anyone is in that neck of the woods, come and say hello – maybe send me a tweet and we can catch up.

I’m going to be talking about play as guiding principles to interactivity, but I’m much more looking forward to listening to the other two speakers, Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio and Mark Hauenstein from AllOfUs.

I am thrilled to have been asked to present again at Flash on The Beach again this year. The info about my talk isn’t up yet (and fortunately that highly unattractive picture of me in the sidebar has been covered up with the text). I’ll be speaking about a deeper understanding of play based on my research over the past few years.

Play and playfulness has been a feature of quite a few designer’s talks in the past few years and has gained a lot of currency.This is all good, but much of it doesn’t really explore play in much detail and depth. An understanding of what constitutes play and how we know we are playing or are in a play space can be put to use in interaction and experience design across a much broader spectrum that the usual approaches.

Hope to see you there. For all the latest info, follow FOTB on Twitter.

I just returned from a fantastic time speaking at Flash on the Beach ’07. I’ve been to quite a few conferences over the years and this was by far the best I’ve ever been part of. John Davey really looked after everyone well and got together a brilliant line-up of speakers. My thanks to him and all the speakers for a great time.

I’m going to be writing a round-up piece for Creative Review, but briefly some of the highlights for me were Robert Hodgin’s incredible work using Processing, Brendan Dawes on how to break things and also Hillman Curtis and Neville Brody who both spoke much more about creative approaches than the tools.

For my part I gave a talk called Playful Revolutions, which took a look back over a whole load of work – a lot of it from the Antirom days (which was fun) – and looking at the importance of play in the creative and interactive process. It seemed to be a running theme in a lot of the talks actually. Flash has become a powerful and complex tool, but the danger with it is that it puts off people wanting to noodle about with it. I think it’s essential to break down those barriers so that more experimental work gets made because interactivity is still very young and there’s a lot left to discover.

The revolution in the title was also about how I’m seeing a lot of experiments and ideas that we played around with 14 years or ago or so coming round again. I think since flash has been able to manipulate bitmaps so much better coders and designers have broken free of the vector finally. In some respects its re-inventing the wheel, but it was clear that there is a whole younger generation of Flash people that don’t even remember tellTarget let alone Director and bitmaps – so it’s good to see this exploration. Either way, it just goes to show how much the tools influence the output.

I recorded almost all of the talks with my nice new Zoom H4 so the quality is pretty good. I also did a fireside chat with Brendan Dawes for a podcast.

I’ll put all those up as podcasts/downloads over the coming few days/weeks. UPDATE: I’ve been a bit slack on this because I’ve been so busy, but egotistically I’ve uploaded my presentation if you would like to hear it. You can download the MP3 of Playful Revolutions here or listen to it in the player below.

[tags]FOTB07, presentation, speaking, conference, flash, processing[/tags]