Okay an update in regards to Cheltenham Design Festival. Went along yesterday and thought overall it was very good. Unfortunately I had a few jobs to tie up so only managed to go the the last 3 talks of the day, but was definitely worth a visit.
Starting off with the venue I thought it was good overall, the auditorium was not too big or small, but had no 3g signal; however not a biggie as I'm not a big fan of constant distractions from the illuminated screens of people tweeting throughout. The rest of the venue was a little small and not much else to look at/ space to hang out between talks. Though they did have a good little pop up book shop from Mr B's Emporium with a decent selection of design books, and a small exhibition from SuperDry; as they were established in Cheltenham.
The three talks I did manage to get to were Simon Waterfall, Nick Jankel and the 'Is there a future for design?' debate with Aidrian Shaughnessy, Marina Willer, Simon again and others.
Simon Waterfall (of Poke fame) was very entertaining, and quite random. Not a particular narrative to his talk as it covered everything from Sat Nav theft, the end of communication as we know it because of space debris, distribution of condoms in Africa and a fair few references as to how hung over he was. He's one of those speakers you'd like to hate but actually is very entertaining and informed on a number of issues.
Nick Jankels talk was all about releasing your creativity, and to be honest for me came across as too abstract and philosophical to have any real world application, but others found it inspiring.
The best by far was the Question Time style debate as it covered a variety of questions from the audience and others posted online. Was just shy of an hour and half but I think could easily have gone on for another hour or so without anyone minding. Aidrian Shaughnessy (who looks more like Patrick Stuart every time I see him) was very articulate and I kind of wish he'd had his own 'audience with' session like Sagmeister has going on today.
Two gripes and may not be representative of the overall event as I did only get to go to a small part. Would be really interesting for some of these design festivals to focus a bit more on the day to day running of a design business, walk throughs of some of the speakers favourite projects, and actually helping others learn from their experiences.
It does grate slightly the amount of mentions of 'Social Design'. Whilst I'm all in favour of designers doing their bit for 'the greater good' for the majority of working designers this is just not viable on any scale other than the occasional freebie for charity organisations. If you've got major paying clients like Google and Coca Cola maybe you can afford to devote a decent portion of you're working week to such ventures but it does smack to a degree of a conscience cleanser.
Final point I lost count of the number of mentions of London, like it was some miracle anyone would turn up to a design event outside of the M25. Hopefully if events like this and Offset in Dublin continue to be successful it will pull more design talks and events out of the big smoke and give greater exposure to the non London based creative communities.
