Creative Company Conference
This June 2011 Gunter had the opportunity to speak at the Creative Company Conference 2011 in Haarlem/Amsterdam. General topic of the conference was connectivity with a focus on values in networked organization in the morning sessions and networks as business models in the afternoon sessions. His speech was encapsulated together with Maud de Vries (founder Fort Knox) and Laura Nino Caceres (founder Visonscapers) showing practical hands-on examples how we experience networked organisations in our projects and how we create value through our work.
“Its our job to expand the conversation and work with the diversity in values and needs”
“It was important for me to point out that in our practical work we should focus more on people and focussed change. To be different and seeing and reacting to a responsibility of being different we firstly need to embrace our own personal ambitions and common grounds as designers. Why do we do what we do? What do I want and why do I want this?”
Design starts and ends with yourself, its about a constant rewiring and understanding. In the end it doesn’t count to see values in networks, but in changed people. Sometimes its more useful to leave social media beside and concentrating on the people involved in your projects, using their local expertise to generate new insights and radical new solutions to unknown problems.
The gap between changing people and change on meta-level
Within the sessions and talks during the day, both listening to the other speakers and during networking breaks I found it remarkable, that there is an interesting gap between values on a personal level and the possibilities what design can do on a meta level. Like Banny Banerjee of Stanford University pointed to uncertain energy futures and high speed technological developments.
Within most talks I was missing this personal grip and grit to really change through design and critically questioning for what values we really work.Where lies the true value (next to cash flow) in crowd sourcing and rating systems? How does this help us to bridge over to new systems and infrastructures.
Maybe I´m too idealistic (but practical) but for next year Creative Company Conference 2012 I´d wish to have a better way to interact with the audience, to really feel what they expect for such a day and how we can harvest theirexpertise to form a second pool of knowledge. Nonetheless I very much enjoyed being a part of this conference, during the breaks I had very interesting talks with new contacts and felt that I´m not alone in being different and creating new values through new ways of working….
