Highlights from Design Drip #9

Design Drip is a monthly Las Vegas creative meetup, held at  /usr/lib in the Emergency Arts building downtown.

Design Drip #9 featured Bryan McCormick and Pawel Szymczykowski, each giving presentations on their recent experiences at creative conferences they attended this summer.

Bryan made his second appearance, this time presenting a recap of his recent trip to EYEO. Held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, EYEO is a four-day festival focused on art, technology, and data visualization. It has the sort of energy that SXSW did five years ago, but is focused on design & interaction. The 500 attendees also participate in a day of pre-festival workshops like, “Signal Processing for Creative Technologists” and “Weaving Data into Sculpture & Music.”

There were impromptu sessions at local watering holes as well; attendees were so entranced by them that they stayed well after the establishments stopped serving booze. Interestingly, EYEO caps their capacity at 500 people. Tickets are actually reasonable (at $549) for such an intimate affair, and if you want to tack-on any pre-conference workshops, they’re $125 each. One thing that Bryan mentioned–the selection of lodging in Minneapolis isn’t at the bargain basement rates we’re used to in Las Vegas. Expect to pay upwards of $150 during the festival for something  just average.

For an idea of what EYEO has to offer, check out this presentation on “Chance Operations” by Casey Reas:

Pawel Szymczykowski gave us a rundown on his recent trip to Maker Faire in San Mateo, a suburb of San Francisco. Maker Faire is an event created by Make Magazine to “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the do-it-yourself mindset.” The festivals are frequent and take place in many cities worldwide, with another one upcoming in New York this September. Pawel loosely defined Maker Faire as “technologists, steampunks, and crafters,” all converging to make things and show them off.

Although traditionally Maker Faire was comprised of mostly individuals, there are companies that have recently attended as well. Zappos participated in the Bay Area event this summer, but they wanted to do something fun and interactive in the spirit of the festival. They came up with the concept of virtually “trying on” some of the clothes that Zappos sells on their website, using the Xbox Kinect as the interface. Attendees were able to see their clothes seletions superimposed on them via computer monitor.

Here’s a “highlight reel” from this year’s Maker Faire in San Mateo:

Join us at the next Design Drip, Saturday August 11th.

ArtsVegas: Covering Las Vegas Art and culture since 2009.