Richard Saul Wurman's Dinner Party
I am jet lagged and back on Rhode Island terra firma having returned from eg 2006, Richard Saul Wurman’s incredible three-day dinner party. (The dinner party he always wanted to have and swears is his last gig). Schlepping to LA for a three-day smorgasbord of incessant twenty minute teases was the least I could do after RSW co-hosted our successful BIF-1 Collaborative Innovation Summit last October. Honestly, you could not have kept me away from this mind-exploding experience.
It was as Richard always reminds me, up to the audience to make the connections. He brings together storytellers that interest him and the rest is up to you. It is exhausting. Just peek at the list of presenters and you will know what I mean.
Here are a few impressions from the conference while they are still fresh in my mind:
Yo Yo Ma might be the most unpretentious superstar I have ever met. It is hard to imagine being the best in the world at something. We are fortunate to have his Silk Road Project and collaboration with RISD headquartered in Rhode Island. We all know his music is mesmerizing but the way he engaged us in a conversation about the patterns and connections that provide the context for his music was incredible. Listening to him bring Bach alive wasn’t too bad either!
I am truly a dinosaur when it comes to gaming. This exploding phenomena is a “must understand” if you have any hope of keeping up in our shiny new networked world. I had never heard of Will Wright but when I called home and spoke with my sixteen year old daughter and told her I had met the inventor of Sim City she said “ Dad you are so out of it….you mean Will Wright….Did he tell you about his new game Spore?”. How easy it is to fall behind. My daughter is right. I am out of it. Will Wright shared a demo of Spore at the conference. These new games are not the shoot em up, blood spurting, mindless activities that all of us dinosaurs think are taking too much of our children’s time. They are about individual creativity and expression, collaboration, and innovative problem solving. Silly me, but these seem like the skills required by the 21st century economy, and unless I am missing something, the skills that our schools seem unable or unwilling to teach. I will be paying attention to what Will Wright is doing from now on.
The conference took place at the Skirball Cultural Center in LA which was designed by Moshe Safdie. I am always in awe of great architects. The environment that Moshe designed played a significant role in my experience at this conference. Moshe is a great architect. He humbly claimed that the staying power of an architect’s work can not compare to the staying power of a great musical performance like the one we heard from Yo Yo Ma. I disagree. When Moshe shared his personal story and design of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem I was moved in a way that compares to the emotion I feel when Yo Yo plays a Bach cello composition.
One of the best presentations of the entire gig was by Peter Hirshberg from Technorati. Just adding to my dinosaur status I have not been following the exploding blogosphere. I will not make that mistake going forward. Peter painted a very entertaining but clear picture of the new world of viral ideas. Traditional media channels are way too slow. Ideas (good and bad) now spread like viruses via the web through the blogosphere. If you ignore this trend it is at your peril.
There was more, so much more, but you get the idea. I am inspired to recombine the ideas in ways that advance the Business Innovation Factory’s mission of enabling collaborative innovation. I apologize to everyone I met at the conference who had to put up with my incessant droning on about our innovation @ scale strategy to turn Rhode Island into an innovation test-bed. No one was spared.
Posted March 3, 2006 08:21 AM by Saul Kaplan | Permalink
