Thursday, October 27, 2011

Creative Mornings: Connecting the dots of design in Boston

By Anne Hjortshoj, product design director, Blue State Digital

Boston has a thriving design sector, even if it sometimes seems like our city has an issue with design visibility. It can be extremely challenging to explore the broader Boston design landscape: There just aren’t many events where designers from different specialties (industrial design, print, architecture, web design) are encouraged to connect.

Given the common concerns that designers have, and the relatively small size of our city, this lack of connection has never made much sense.

Perhaps this is why the Creative Mornings event on Oct. 19 was so wildly oversubscribed. The monthly event, which has been dubbed “TED for the rest of us,” is a breakfast lecture series that takes place all over the world. The event has been embraced by fifteen cities since Tina Roth Eisenberg, a designer and entrepreneur who goes by the twitter name “SwissMiss,” founded the event three years ago in New York. October 19 was its launch in Boston.

The waiting list for this edition of Creative Mornings was longer than the number of attendees, according to Sam Aquillano, director of the Design Museum and local organizer for Creative Mornings. Despite the blustery weather, the room at WorkBar in Boston was packed, and I heard several people say that it was great to finally have the opportunity to meet people from other design disciplines.

Creative Mornings typically runs from 8:30 to 10:00 am, with time for coffee and pastries (and networking) before a lecture kicks off at 9. Richard Watson, owner and co-founder of the industrial design firm Essential, was the inaugural speaker for the Boston event.

Watson described his own discovery of design as a vocation, including a story of his brief, oily sojourn in a “chip factory,” after which he decided that factory work wasn’t for him. He neatly related his personal narrative to the need for designers to be able to communicate their products’ stories to businesses, and encouraged attendees to work to “connect the dots” between the various branches of design. Watson emphasized that building relationships with an external network of designers is crucial, both for collaboration and for business development. His remarks on reaching out across disciplines were met with enthusiastic nods.

Luckily for the people on the waiting list, Creative Mornings records and posts video from most local events to its website. There’s an extensive archive of lectures on topics as diverse as illustration, creativity, journalism, and how to write contracts so that clients stay happy (and designers get paid). Look for the Boston event video to be posted in the next few weeks.

The next Creative Mornings Boston event will be Friday, Nov. 18 with Rafael Luna of PRAUD. For details, visit www.creativemornings.com.



 

Anne Hjortshoj is Product Design Director at Blue State Digital.