When I described this entire thread to my brilliant significant other
- who just won an award for the redesign of a major society non-profit
(Mazel Tov! to her), and her take is that the legitimate arguments
tend to be:
1. Not everyone has/can/wants to spend $5k to go - and thats a fair
argument
2. Some people just don't like competition.
3. A belief that no competition can achieve any goals (nor should it)
4. Sour grapes derived from the previous 3; wherein #3 is a premise; &
#2 is mostly a function of #1
Now the price of "this" conference is only outrageous, if you limit
all conference expenditure comparisons to the average price for an
american within the continuous US to travel to a relatively close city
to take part in a relatively inexpensive conference. If, instead of
going to Vancouver for IxD09 (which average cost for average american
tended towards $2500 all said and done); and the relative cost for me
to go to a design conference in - say - Tokyo is $6,000, and the cost
to go to Davos is $50,000; it all comes down to marginal benefit,
cost, and opportunity cost including time.
Now for competition - some people like the idea of competing for a
good cause - good defined as something more than Yet Another (Insert
just about 99% of all projects IxDers are working on). Just like I
will never be able to compete in the olympics, yet don't begrudge them
that even though it seems a complete waste of time; some folks will
never be able to or want to compete in a design challenge, of which
their are hundreds every year yet non of those seem to be drawing the
ire of some on the list - which is interesting.
So is it the location - which for many is no more remote than going to
Australia or New Zealand from the East Coast of American. Is it okay
to go there for a non-design competition reason, but bad to travel
that far to compete? Should we tell third world countries they
shouldn't send athletes to the Olympics because they need to feed
their people first? Or because its too far?
Or lastly - is it because rich 1st world countries should not do
things to end conflict and strife in the world? Is it silly and stupid
to think thats a bad thing? Relative to spending that exact same
amount to take your family to Europe for a week? For those of you who
still drive cars and pay well more than $5k for the privilege/right to
do so - would you besmirch someone who chose a lifestyle that means 0
carbon footprint including 0 car, so that they could go to design
conferences like this?
So that is her argument.
~ will
"Where you innovate, how you innovate,
and what you innovate are design problems"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will Evans | User Experience Architect
tel: +1.617.281.1281 | w...@semanticfoundry.com
http://blog.semanticfoundry.com
aim: semanticwill
gtalk: semanticwill
twitter: semanticwill
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Feb 11, 2009, at 7:48 PM, Russ Unger wrote:
200 people
$5000
=========
$1,000,000
You could probably get a heckuva nice Senate seat in an
under-developed political state.
Better yet:
What world probably could you solve with $1MM?
Just a thought.
Or we could invest in DTDT across all of the disciplines. We might
need some more money, though.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38434
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