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An article today in an online offshoot of Fast Company talks about how the creator of the TED conference has a new idea in mind, with this headline: “The Creator Of TED Aims To Reinvent Conferences Once Again.” How many errors can you put in a single headline?
The article states that Richard Saul Wurman “reinvented the standard business conference model” when he created the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference in 1984. Not only is this incorrect hyperbole, it is an example of the worst kind of toadyism that is rampant in the specific part of the tech world focused on design.
Wurman’s “revolution” was to create an artificial sense of elitism within the design subsector of technology by making his conference an invitation-only event. What’s more, its presentations are not even close to the kind of expert panels or free-wheeling discussions one hopes to find at a typical conference. No, TED has “experts” stand on a stage solo and spout off about whatever random – and often not even closely related to tech or design – topic they want, while the Apple-toting elitist audience laps up each speech as though it was as mind-expanding as LSD.
Now, this “revolutionary” has this brilliant idea to turn the conference world on its head again: Two people on stage! Of course, still in front of an invitation-only audience. Oh, but that’s not all! Instead of after-the-fact videos posted on the TED site or YouTube, these “intellectual jazz” discussions will be disseminated (after the invitation-only audience has seen it live, of course) via an app! OMG, my chest is so swollen with excitement I can barely breathe through my black turtleneck!
To give the fastcodesign article author credit, he does cite some problems with the TED conference, one of which is that what Wurman apparently proposed as off-the-cuff talks have become slick presentations. It is Wurman’s hope that the two-person model will lead to more unrehearsed conversations. That would be great, but for two things. Making it invitation-only propagates a concept that is already endemic in design-heavy tech businesses like Apple Inc. – using a false sense of elitism as a marketing tool is OK. And calling a long-established “fireside chat” model of a conference presentation “revolutionary” is silly at best, and gross pandering to the creator of false elitism at worst.
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