A few weeks ago I was lucky to take part in Intersections 2011 conference courtesy of the lovely people at Ecodesign Centre Wales.

To be honest, I wasn’t very clear on what exactly the conference was about to start with but gradually started to understand what the title was referring to - emerging connections in a multidisciplinary context of business, design practice and changes in our environment be it economy, nature or culture. If this sounds too academic or intellectual for you, you’ll be glad to hear there were many practical and inspiring examples to even things out.

Some overall emerging themes and highlights were:

This is not a new viewpoint but a poignant reminder - do you have a story to tell? Are you actually telling it to your audience? Branding can be simply seen as very good storytelling - and we humans have been doing it as long as we have been able to communicate. This way design can inspire employees and improve morale and efficiency in a workplace.

David McCandless, author of the blog Information is Beautiful, gave a playful presentation showing how you can have fun with data. Design can help reveal emerging patterns and make sense of huge amounts of data that flows past us on a daily basis.

• with customers – include them in designing and improving your product/service
• with staff – conversation makes a learning organisation that is more resilient and adaptable in the face of change
• online & offline - they can influence each other: KIVA, an online microfinancing for real life projects around the world, has 99% payback rates)
• enabling knowledge & skills exchange to improve efficiency or making a difference (Tom Hulme, openIDEO)

• that can contribute to the development of a product or a service (see points above)
• that can harness discontent into real pressure to change (The Egyptian protests or the infamous Gap rebrand that the company binned just after a week)
• really, we have had networked communities since day one – technological advances such as social networks are simply highlighting our natural instincts
• enabling people to collaborate, contribute, innovate, create (Nick Jankel, WeCreate)

(Alan Moore, SMLXL)

• our world is becoming non-linear as we can find multiple answers to one question all over the internet
• in today’s networked society the focus is shifting to creating relationships
• this means we need to pay attention even more to what we mean with words

Shelterbox Hotel

The conference was held over two days appropriately at the Eden Project, a centre that showcases sustainability and connections between man and nature. The ultimate highlight of the conference was the chance to sleep in one of biomes under a palm tree. The Shelterbox hotel was built in nine hours out of tent poles, lanterns, sheep skins and borrowed furniture by a group of volunteers, and the booking fees went straight to the international disaster relief charity. It was a one-off, exquisite experience, waking up to the dawn chorus and robins perching next to my head. Late into the night we had a private tour of the Mediterranean biome by one of the staff – it is always inspiring to listen to a person who is passionate about what they do.

This is what I woke up to

There was a sense of immediacy and a do-attitude present throughout the conference, and business case studies to show it is important and beneficial to try things out – in the words of Tom Henderson from Shelterbox:

For more photos, see our Flickr set on Intersections2011
Visit our website to see how we do things www.stills.co.uk
Find out more about Shelterbox at www.shelterbox.org

Laura is a designer at Stills and has an interest in social issues, service design and design thinking.