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For Inspiration Only

Good Experience Live 2008 On April 24 and April 25, 2008, Ianus and Anneke Keller visited New York City for the Good Experience Live conference. We thoroughly enjoyed the good experiences brought to us on the first day and the high-paced set of presentations and performances on the second day.

Ever since we stopped visiting the Doors of Perception conferences in 2002, Anneke and I were looking for a good design conference with a broader scope. Furthermore, I had been following the writings of Mark Hurst. Getting a chance to meet Mark Hurst was one of the reasons to attend the ReBoot conference in 2005 and after receiving a complimentary Gel 2005 DVD, I added going to the GEL Conference to my Life List.

This year, with Anneke having an interesting new job and my company making good progress, we treated ourselves to a design conference broad enough to be interesting to the both of us. The conference was organized as a two-day event, starting with a day of elective experiences in smaller groups and a second day of talks and performances in TheTimesCenter. This post is a personal reflection on the whole experience; more can be found on the GEL 2008 Recap page.

Day 1: Experiences

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The day of experiences started by running around the Met, for a couple of hours, great fun and very good to walk off jet lag.

In the afternoon we were treated to what turned out to be the highlight of the whole conference: the Experience Retail Tour organized by Rachel Shechtman. We chose this tour as a preparation for the shopping spree that every European in New York goes on given the current exchange rate.

Luckily, the retail tour didn’t include the standard Fifth Avenue Shopping Tour with visits to the big flagship stores, but showed us around some very creative, ambitious, stylish and personal retail concepts. At each location Rachel explained the overall concept and the owner or manager did a short presentation on the background.

Best of all, Rachel continued to make connections with all the participants of the tour and was a genuine host during the remainder of the conference, including during the Google sponsored party.

Day 2: Talks and performances at the TimesCenter

The heart of the conference were the talks given at the TheTimesCenter. This day was completely packed with talks and performances in four sessions with about four speakers each. Similar to the TED conferences, all the presentations were well prepared, high-paced, without laptop-switching or other technical disturbances.

The most interesting presentations for me happened before lunch. Seasoned speakers, such as Clay Shirky and Bob Mankoff, gave interesting talks, but I enjoyed the presentation by the Cleveland Clinic Chief Experience Officer Bridget Duffy the most. She happened to be my most anticipated speaker for personal and professional reasons. I liked the way she tries to create a context for empathy with patients and illustrated this by the redesign of the original patient gown into both a more useful and a more respectful garment.

Other things that really stuck with me during the talks were Kelly Dobson and her Omo project, George Vaillant on the evolutionary role of positive emotions and Garrett Oliver on slow food. This doesn’t mean I was not amused, entertained or touched by the other talks, but with over 16 speakers, there’s only so much that can stick.

Day 3: The rest of New York

Aside from the conference, this trip also gave us the chance to visit New York, where I could finally touch a Microsoft Surface with its UI details. Though I applaud Microsoft’s willingness to put this technology out in the open, I can’t help but think the interaction itself, especially the accuracy and responsiveness, is really many steps backwards.

Apart from the regular shopping that New York is so well-known for, we also stumbled upon an intriguingly thin and high quality display and a nice art installation at The New York Times headquarters.

All in all, a very nice trip and we are hoping to return to New York in the near future.