Gel Conference
The nice people at Creative Good invited me to their conference last week Good Experience Live (GEL). The theme was Primary Sources. On Thursday afternoon they offered some field research. I chose the option to visit the Dinosaur Halls at American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The tour was conducted by Doug Balder who designed the exhibit starting in 1995. Besides great dino skeletons flying all over the room, I appreciated the multiple forms of navigation which included designs on the floors, and branching by both period and type of vertibrates (really).
A lovely New York character, Ann Prewitt, then showed us the interactive experiences for kids in their Discovery Room. This room is awfully well designed with real hands-on activities where the visitors get to handle actual objects from digs and try out cultural artifacts from around the world. It's one of the best I've ever seen. Ann is truly inspired; after her years at the Chicago Museum of Natural History she was given this opportunity and you just know that this real estate would have never been carved out of the institution without her vision.
I went for the showiness of the Dinosaurs and got smitten by Ann's passion for exposing kids to learning. Now that's a good experience.
Below are a few highlights from the conference on Friday, which was considerably less interactive than the un-conferences I'm now accustomed to.
The nice people at Creative Good invited me to their conference last week Good Experience Live (GEL). The theme was Primary Sources. On Thursday afternoon they offered some field research. I chose the option to visit the Dinosaur Halls at American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The tour was conducted by Doug Balder who designed the exhibit starting in 1995. Besides great dino skeletons flying all over the room, I appreciated the multiple forms of navigation which included designs on the floors, and branching by both period and type of vertibrates (really).
A lovely New York character, Ann Prewitt, then showed us the interactive experiences for kids in their Discovery Room. This room is awfully well designed with real hands-on activities where the visitors get to handle actual objects from digs and try out cultural artifacts from around the world. It's one of the best I've ever seen. Ann is truly inspired; after her years at the Chicago Museum of Natural History she was given this opportunity and you just know that this real estate would have never been carved out of the institution without her vision.
I went for the showiness of the Dinosaurs and got smitten by Ann's passion for exposing kids to learning. Now that's a good experience.
Below are a few highlights from the conference on Friday, which was considerably less interactive than the un-conferences I'm now accustomed to.
- Barry Schwartz who is a Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore, gave a beautiful analysis of how paralized and depressed we are as a society by the abundance of choices. I'm going to give his book a try: The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less
- Laurie Rosenwald is an irreverent designer/illustrator who conducts seminars on making mistakes. She draws like crazy then picks the best, and integrates it with some nice found imagery which she scans, chops, and glues into wonderful collaged imagery, she also has a great appreciation for old fonts.
- Theo Jansen is a Dutch madman inventing new life forms on the beach with plastic tubes. You just have to see it to get it.
posted by Jeff at 12:27 PM
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