An experiment in light expression

So we finally rounded off Dcamp - India’s first design unconference (where else but in Bangalore, despite all the bumps and grinds of its existence) this Sunday at the cheerful and inspiring Yahoo Bangalore office on Airport Road.

The unconference has been covered quite well by Saurabh Minni, Anand Bora, and Muthu. Thanks to everyone who took pictures of the event - now what we need is a mashup of the DCamp Flickr images!
In this post, i will cover some of my observations and takeaways from the event:

1. A bunch of folks with a simple motivation, the right technologies, and light structures can indeed put together something new - the coming together of the team for Dcamp (myself, Muthu, Navneet Shrikanta, Ruta, Abhishek…) showed the power of both strong and weak ties in social networks, the power of Wikis for light collaboration (we managed to keep our event management related phone calls to 3 and our emails to probably a dozen), and (in my mind is a small but good example of) the power of emergence. I probably saw more emergence in this event than in the ponderous paper on emergent e-governance i wrote years back. I almost learnt as much from this event as the World Usability Day event i organized last year!
2. There is little co-relation between age and inspiration, organizational role and inspiration, and subject and inspiration. One of the most interesting presentations i saw was on Schematic Mapping by Arun Ganesh. Arun started his presentation by saying “…was in London in 1998 when i was 10 years old and I saw the now-world-famous London tube map…”. Joe Arnold’s wonderfully visual presentation on innovation using the story of the Wright brothers and the first airplane was inspiring - so was Siddhi’s take on the re-design of programmer workspaces considering the social nature of programming activity. All very inspiring despite their different contexts (entrepreneurial/organizational or technical/social)
3. This might be contraversial but as Indians, we do tend to be unpredictably argumentative. Edward De Bono put this point across today in one of his Times of India interviews as well. Many of the presenters - including Siddhi and Arun - faced what i thought of as somewhat discouraging and trivial questions (who will buy it? what is your solution? i dont think..blah…). On the other hand, folks like Harish from OneBigWeb who had a very interesting model on the touchstones of Interaction Design (creating formulas for design is always a tricky affair) simply didn’t get too many questions! Perhaps i’m being biased here but i always have more interest in seeing the possibilities of somebody’s work than finding out nitpicky flaws.

4. …and finally, the Bangalore ecosystem of ‘interesting people’ continues to grow. Among others I met two interesting developer-entrepreneurs, an out of box thinking photographer, world class talent from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, design freelancers, Chennai students who just landed up for the event, and of course folks running their start-ups out of their bedrooms. Bangalore does little to attract and retain global creative talent, but interesting folks end up through the cracks and staying here (till whenever they do) nevertheless.

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