A little report from the talk I gave in Zürich at the ED-Conference. The ED-Conference, part of the European Design Festival 2009 which also includes the ED-Awards. The festival started with lectures on Friday, May 15 and ended with the award ceremony on Sunday, May 17. My talk was the first on Sunday, at 10:30 AM, and I talked about two projects, Oslo Triennale 2007 and the brand new line of Ringnes beers that will be out very shortly. As far as I can tell, the talk was well received, and although I was preoccupied beforehand, it was actually great fun. After the talk I was interviewed on stage for 15 minutes by host Sandra Planeta. Overall a very nice experience.

As I was mostly concerned with preparing my own presentation, I didn’t get a chance to see all the other speakers, but I was told that most were very good. The ones I did see, confirmed this. I managed to see Alex Trochut, BVD, Koeweiden Postma, Niklaus Troxler, Synopsis and The Designers Republic, and they were all very inspirational.

At the award show, my friends Are Kleivan, Bleed and Halvor Bodin all collected awards, and I also met several interesting people. They filmed all the talks, so perhaps they will be put online eventually. Here’s my introduction page on the ED-Conference website.

Photos (mostly meaningless stuff) from the week end in Zürich can be found on my flickr page

Thursday October 9th I’m giving a talk at the Design+Music event initiated by Tank. Design+Music is a part of the Insomnia festival in Tromsø. Yokoland who, made the poster for the event, are also speaking.

Previous speakers are  Martin Kvamme, Halvor Bodin, Marius Watz, Grandpeople, Kjell Ekhorn (Non Format) and Håkon Kornstad. More info here

Diogo and I are in Stockholm for the ED-conference. The program looks promising and I’m really looking forward to it.

Day two was also great with Fred Deakin and Nat Hunter from Airside, Erik Kessels from KesselsKramer, Kjell Ekhorn from Non-Format and Adam Burke from Pixar. The animated movie Peter and the Wolf was shown in Roberto Bagatti’s slot, and while I would have preferred Roberto, the movie was a great piece of animation. All in all a great couple of days. I was asked to name a favourite from the lectures by someone, but I must say that it’s really hard as it was a really good program.

First day of Visuelt 08 is over. The lectures were great, as was the Visuelt Screening curated by Rune Spaans and Franck Aubry. The first lecture was by Jonathan Harris, giving some insight into his various projects. Next up was Arnt from Øyafestivalen. He talked about the festival’s focus on environment and how they’d always focused on design. I actually managed to come in late and miss the part where he talked about me and the era when I did the design for them, but I’ve been told he said nice things. Maira Kalman, who I’d already seen at the AIGA Next conference in Denver last October, was great once again. She has an incredible humour and wit, and such great work. Check out one of her speeches at Ted. Finally Rick Poynor offered some words of wisdom. I wish they’d put him on a little earlier when the energy level was higher though. Tomorrow looks great too, even though my friend and ex-colleague from MTV Roberto Bagatti had to cancel.