Dave Gray, founder and CEO of Xplane, will be in Geneva to host a workshop on “Making the Complex Clear” on March 18 at Arvetica (full workshops schedule here).

Dave and his company have brought visual techniques to major companies like Credit Suisse, Nokia, Apple, IBM, Bank of America and many more, to help them with topics such as improving strategic thinking strategy development and communication, streamlining change management or clarifying their communications with clients.

In this podcast Dave explains the value of visual techniques for businesses and private banks and outlines what we will be doing during the workshop in March. He particularly stresses that mediocre communications lead to misalignment in management and hence result in poor implementation. Dave invites entire management and project teams to participate in the workshop so that they can directly work on concrete business problems. That’s quite an opportunity to be able to benefit from individual coaching by one of the leading thinkers in visual business communications.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop download the flyer (pdf) and send us the registration form.

We offer a 10% discount on the workshop fee (normal price is 1650CHF) to the members of Lift community (you simply mention LIFT when you register)

It’s a bit over a week since the workshop on Forgetful Interfaces. I proposed the workshop because I had a feeling that simply storing the data we collect about ourselves may not be such a good idea. To my joy and surprise, all proposed workshops happened, including mine! However, because my thoughts on Forgetful Interfaces were still uncrystallized, I decided to turn the workshop into a discussion. And what a discussion it was. Thanks to all of you who took part, it was truly amazing.

Now, originally I had approached the subject from the perspective of privacy, which turned out to be perhaps the least interesting aspect of forgetful interfaces. We’ve arrived at three different aspects, and there is a fourth one which was introduced to me, outside of the workshop, by Irwin Oostindie. These aspects are privacy, filtering, user experience and security (the latter proposed by Irwin). But, first of all, what is a forgetful interface? In my view, a forgetful interface hides artifacts from view. Here I’ve used the term artifacts rather than data, because forgetful interfaces are about data in a social context. I’m specifically not talking about deleting the artifacts. They’re still there, just harder to get at. Just like how you may forget things yourself, but given enough clues your brain can bring them back.

So, with that out of the way, let’s look at the aspects of forgetful interfaces.

So what was LIFT08 like? For me: fantastic!
The Creativity Utopia Workshop went beyond my expectations. Now the kind of third-loop-learning workshops that I do are usually a bit rough on the participants, you are asked to think, think critically, and to think from a place deep within yourself. I am however fair enough to also give the participants the chance to put me on the spot and make me think then and there. I was on the spot a few times. It is all about authenticity and self-expression, and that is exactly what the workshop was about. Remember that I never claimed to know what creativity is, and I still do not know. Shani Lee did take fantastic notes and I had very valuable feedback from Yann Mauchamp with whom I spent the wee hours after the closing party roaming the streets and clubs of Geneva. Rough is a bit of the nature of my being and there is a certain kindness to that roughness that Yann offered a term for: amour vache.

Le Lift est riche, dense, et nous présente des acteurs engagés et contemporains de l'ethnologie, la sociologie, de la blogisphère, des porteurs de projets et quelques entrepreneurs issus du monde académique, associatif, appartenant a des entreprises, ou des StartUp..

Il manque peut-être quelques créateurs, concepteurs, artistes, et expression du Design thinking et des porteurs de technologie pour parfaire le subtil équilibre de construction d'un futur désirable...

La conférence de Bruce Sterling est décevante. Le show, le spectacle prennent le pas sur le message. Oui le futur est une histoire, une narration. Mais la métaphore de Nicolas S et Carla S facile. Le comique de répétition est un art qui doit se travailler. Cela me rappelle le spectacle de John Maeda, encore une déception, aux entretiens du Nouveau Monde industriel. La forme n'est pas toujours l'expression du fond.

Younghee Jung de Nokia Design nous montre un projet de description des usages par des enfants dans différents pays émergeant (comme on dit).
L'acteur global pense local. Je suis toujours étonné du caractère littéral de certaines de ces expériences. Une forme d'absence de distance face à ces méthodes chargées de décrypter l'inconnu et les besoins...
Nokia ne doit pas oublier la Seine-Saint-Denis, Staten Island, les hauts de seine dans et Cupertino dans ses recherches ;=)))).....

I missed what seemed to have been a really good workshop. Can someone summarize / share what was said ?

Attached is a link to the slideshare presentation of the deck we developed collaboratively at the Open and The Future of Wireless workshop on Wednesday of Lift08. Enjoy!

http://www.slideshare.net/thomas.purves/open-and-the-future-of-wireless2

It is my third LIFT conference and I feel like a little kid! All the people, all the ideas, unfortunately also the bloody fondue! Now back to life...

The Creativity Utopia Workshop is something that has me all excited at this late hour. However due to my own inaccessibility - not answering phone, out of skype or ignoring IM - for the past couple of weeks and Henriette's quite exciting OpenStage talk, she will let me do the whole thing by myself. I will miss her bubbles and enthusiasm in the workshop, and am looking forward to exploding tabus, exploring utopia and getting real about finding access to that wonderful chimera of one's butterfly's dream.

Transhumanism and Calvin did not make it as a program discussion, and that in itself is interesting to me. I was cryptic about what I was trying to get at... but then there will be Kevin Warwick as a live cyborg, and we are in Geneva anyhow and ready to give Calvin's heresy a good go.

Anticipation is a wonderful elixir, and when it comes to this conference, it is part of the crack that makes the whole so damn exciting. I could never predict how these things go, but then I could not ever predict much.

There are many ideas floating around and I am writing and reading a lot. There are the central issues of identity, public and private, evolving media, and humanity's relationship to both technology and psychology... and all of this I am writing about.

For those coming to the workshops on Wednesday, I’m organizing a workshop on forgetful interfaces. What’s that, you may ask? Basically an interface that forgets… imagine Flickr where photos simply disappear from the public view after a month. Is this good, or bad? Why would we need forgetful interfaces and what would they look like? We’ll put it all together, together, in the workshop.

Forgetful Interfaces Workshop, Wednesday, 9:00.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for some time now, and I’m happy to kick it off at LIFT: provide a crash-course in blogging for non-bloggers.

I know many people attending LIFT are already seasoned bloggers like myself. Most people reading this post probably are. I wanted to offer something to those who are not so immersed in the web as us.

So, basically, this is a three-hour workshop to open a blog (from scratch, I plan to use Wordpress.com), twiddle the basic settings, learn how to publish, and talk about blogging. I’m always amazed that though the media now sing “blog, blog, blog” in every publication, many people haven’t really had a chance to get near one and see how technically easy publication is.

So, if you know anybody who is going to LIFT and isn’t (yet) a blogger… send them to my workshop ;-)

Quoting from the workshop description, here’s the stuff it’ll cover:

First, on the “blogging technique” side:

• opening your blog
• discovering the various options and settings offered by the blogging tool
• how to publish a post or a page
• linking to blog posts or websites
• organizing one’s content with tags and categories
• managing comments
• choosing a design for your blog and managing sidebar content

Second, on the “blogging culture” side, we might talk about:

• blogs vs. “normal websites”
• different uses of blogs (personal, corporate…)
• dealing with openness and conversation in a public space (negative comments…)
• blogging etiquette and ethics
• reading other people and how to promote one’s blog
• other “Web 2.0” tools to use in relation with your blog