Eight Design Indaba Conference 2014 Talks — Sketchnotes by Roy Blumenthal

At the end of February, I was privileged to attend the Design Indaba Conference 2014 in Cape Town. I was there courtesy of social media agency, CEREBRA, for ABSA.

I was located in the satellite venue, where I sat at the back of the room, along with the audio technician. This made it easy for me to plug my tablet pc into a power supply.

Here are the eight talks I covered. The slide show is loaded at a web-friendly resolution of 1200 x 900. Click on ‘Show Picture List”, then on any pic to see it full size. Right click on a pic to save it And if you want it at higher resolution, just drop me an email, and I’ll hook you up with the original file. (All of these pics are released under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license. So you can use them as you see fit, as long as my name is attached as the originator.)

Here is a list of the speakers whose talks I captured: Chris Gotz, Clive Wilkinson, Dean Poole, DJ Stout, Experimental Jetset, Issa Diabate, Marcello Serpa, and Naoto Fukusawa.

When CEREBRA first discussed my doing “graphic harvesting” at the Indaba, we had some absolutely amazing plans. Turns out that technology isn’t up to the task yet, so we had to downscale what we had in mind. What we were going to do was have my computer live-streaming what I was drawing, using a Google Hangout and YouTube. The test worked well in Joburg. But when we got to the venue, with zillions of people all taxing the available bandwidth, we found that I couldn’t stream anything at all.

It would’ve been a real coup to crack that. Cos it would’ve meant people in the audience could see my interpretations on their mobile devices as the talks were happening. And people not able to be there would have had a sort of proxy-presence.

Here’s hoping bandwidth grows exponentially in South Africa. Live streaming is one of the things we need to embrace in events. I’m keen to try the live streaming option with other clients. I reckon that a venue that has a fast ADSL line, and a contained audience, would be an ideal candidate. Probably a multi-national corporation, where part of the team are at a conference, and others can’t make it in person, would be the right mix.