CUSP CONFERENCE 2011

September 7th, 2011 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

To celebrate my third year doing Cusp Conference, I’m giving away 2 tickets to this year’s BIG EVENT.

All you have to do is tweet with the three hashtags #DESIGNCHAT #CUSP11 and #WIN.

Its that simple! Tell everyone you know! 2 lucky winners will be selected TONIGHT, September 7th at 845pm CST during the live show. Both winners will be responsible for getting themselves to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago on September 28th and 29th. Each individual ticket is worth $1750.
To see some of the past speakers, check out their Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/CuspConference

I’ll be there interviewing some of the speakers and attendees, and doing a live broadcast for DesignChat. I can not wait – I look forward to this all year. For more details, go to http://cuspconference.com

What is Cusp?

It’s a conference about the design of everything.

What’s the Cusp experience?

In the words of one attendee, Cusp was “inspirational, funny, thought-provoking, eye-opening, informative, inspirational, fascinating, humbling, soothing, shocking, awesome, inspirational, unbelievable, wise, touching, smart, healthy, honest, confusing, inspirational, affirming, creative and just friggin’ amazing. Did I mention inspirational?”
The Cusp experience is different for every individual, but it’s essentially two full days of mind-expanding, soul-feeding getaway, powered by 26 presenters/special guests and 285 attendees.
Basically we get 300+ smart, energized, creative, inspiring, talented people into a room, get them talking to each other, then wait to see what happens. And usually a lot happens.

What’s the ROI on attending Cusp?

We love this question. What’s the ROI of putting on pants before you go to work? Cusp is about investing in yourself. The return on that investment is up to you.

What kind of people are going to be in the Cusp 2011 audience?

We get asked for demographics for the Cusp audience all the time, but since we don’t ask people who register how old they are or what their income level is we really have no idea.

We do know that the unifying traits of Cusp attendees seem to be:

Curiosity – our attended tend to be pretty broad thinkers
Design savvy – our attendees may not be designers themselves, but they tend to be very clued in to the power of design
Attractiveness – everyone who attends just seems to be incredibly good looking. Go figure.

WIN A FREE TICKET TO CUSP

September 15th, 2010 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. 3 Comments.

LIVE on tonights show we will pick a tweet at random and announce the winner! So you still have a chance! All you have to do is tweet this: @designchat I want to #WIN a ticket to #Cusp10.

UPDATE: THERE ARE TWO TICKETS TO GIVE AWAY TONIGHT!!! I REPEAT, TWO FRIGGIN’ TICKETS!!!!!!

NOTE: You must be able to get to Chicago for the conference on September 22nd-23rd. Upon arrival to the conference, you’ll have a ticket waiting for you. Go to cuspconference.com for more info.

Cusp is a conference about ‘the design of everything’, bringing together thinkers, innovators, performers, skeptics, believers, visionaries and explorers from the arts, sciences, technology, business and design. Cusp Conference is for anyone who believes that the best way to predict the future is to design it.

DC GUEST – ERIN LOECHNER

August 22nd, 2010 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. 2 Comments.

This week, Erin Loechner welcomes US to the conversation as she has been writing about design on blogs for longer than most. Erin is a freelance design writer/blogger whose work has been featured in Glamour, Dwell, Lucky and Nylon magazines. She muses daily on her award-winning website Design For Mankind, founded in 2007 in an attempt to bring light to today’s creative design culture.
If you don’t know her, friggin’ Google her already and get with it. Her musings on the world of design can currently be read at:

AND…

AND…

AND…

She and her husband are rehabbing their house and documenting the whole thing.

So join us at our usual time (8pmCST) this Wednesday Aug. 25th on DesignChat for a live video chat with Erin to hear about all of her projects. And remember you can ask questions during the chat so get ‘em ready. ALSO, if you’re brave enough and have a web cam, you can ask your question live on the show! See you there!

WELCOME ABDUZEEDOANS

March 22nd, 2010 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

To all of you who are coming from ABDUZEEDO.com, WELCOME!!! I’m extremely pleased that you’ve found your way here. We’re big fans of what Abduzeedo does, and we’ve had Fabio Sasso (one of the founders) on DesignChat twice!!! Watch it here!

STA TALK

February 16th, 2010 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

On Friday, February 26th I will be speaking at an event hosted by STA – The Society of Typographic Arts in downtown Chicago. Come join us at Critical Mass to hear about the show’s beginnings and the potential it brings to both the Chicago design community and the designers world-wide. I’ll be showing some of my favorite clips from the show and talking about what its like to broadcast live with design legends. I’m very excited to share my discoveries and take questions about this new way of interacting with our fellow creatives.
Register here soon as space is limited. There will be food and drinks and most likely more drinks afterwords!

MANAGING A CRISIS

February 12th, 2010 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Wednesday was one of the stranger days in my life. In the span of 24 hours I experienced an earthquake, was disrupted by a flat tire, and had a hacker try to take over a live video broadcast. I can’t remember another day when so many hurdles appeared in my path. My week’s activities have been shifted to focus on all the events of that day because of the possible ramifications of all of them going badly. Although, I was able to navigate through all of these experiences with minimal repercussions and still feel like I made the best of each situation. Using a few simple rules I made sure my house and family were safe, got my car back on the road, and made the best of a situation soured by a bad apple.

RULE 1 – PANIC = DEATH

If you’re crossing the street and your favorite shoelace has the audacity to untie itself, would you:
A) Stop walking and then weep over the tragedy
B) Scream bloody murder and curse out that no-good shoelace
C) Continue crossing the road carefully, then tie your shoe and move on
The last thing you should do when something goes wrong is get angry, vengeful or pity yourself. Clouding your mind with those thoughts will force you to make a bad decision and hurt yourself or others around you. You can set yourself back in achieving goals and damage your relationships with others.

RULE 2 – ASK FOR HELP

There are 6.6 BILLION PEOPLE on this planet. In any situation you’re dealing with, there’s an ample supply of support. All you have to do is ASK. If you choose to be a cowboy and ‘pull up your bootstraps,’ and then you fail, YOU ARE AT FAULT. Think of all the times when you helped someone because you sympathized with their situation. Its just good karma – help others and they will help you in return.
When I got in my car to go do my weekly video broadcast and realized I would never make it in time because of a flat tire, I had to ask for help. There was no way I was going to change the tire by myself and still make it on time. I am lucky to be married to an action-oriented genius. My wife, Ally was on the phone calling for tire prices lickety-split! What this solved for me was how I was going to commute to work in the morning.

RULE 3 – REDEFINE FAILURE

Where you able to jump a sweet ramp the first time you climbed on your BMX? No?! Then why would you think that your first handful of solutions should always work when dealing with a problem? Getting discouraged by failure puts an immediate end to your progress. To stop this from happening you have to change the way you look at a failure. It’s not a bad thing, because failure actually gives you an advantage. You’re one attempt further than anyone who is still thinking about doing what you’re doing. You are more educated on the subject because of your failure. Which means your next attempt will always be BETTER than your last.

POST TRAUMATIC MILTON DISORDER

January 20th, 2010 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Wow. I just video-chatted with THE Milton Glaser… I will repeat… I just video-chatted with THE Milton Glaser. I’m a little shocked right now for a couple of reasons. First, he told me this was his first ever video chat. It may sound a bit lame, but I think there’s sort of a responsibility that comes with that. But I guess there’s a responsibility any time you can get Milton Glaser on record. I was honored and a bit surprised that he accepted my invitation to appear on the show. Although his presence in our forum creates the interaction that I had always hoped for DesignChat. The idea ANYONE can have first-hand access to the greats. Three people from the chat room got to ask question of Milton tonight. This could have NEVER happened 5 years ago. There’s a big difference between reading an interview with Milton in a magazine or on a blog, and being there when it happened. And there’s no way to transcribe that for someone in a way that can compare to experiencing it in real time. Our audience is international, including participants from China to Brazil. I shiver with excitement when I think about the possibilities of interaction in this forum.
The second reason that I’m left a bit flustered is that I know I was out of my league. I feel no shame in admitting this because almost anyone who converses with Glaser would feel this way. He is the most intimidating communicator I have ever met. I’m both scared of him and enamored by him. I’m scared to look back of the video because I know I look like a mumbling moron in contrast to the swift charismatic dismantling of any question I could have proposed. DesignChat is really meant to be a conversation, but I feel I more or less failed at creating that environment this evening. Again, I’m not upset about it. I’m just glad it happened, mumbling mess and all.
Glaser’s parting words were, “Good luck guys, keep it going.” And that we will, Milton. I think this party’s just getting started.
-Ryan

2010 FOR DC

January 5th, 2010 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

I’ve spent my afternoon perusing the internets for all the flying cars that we’re supposed to have in 2010. The Ryan from 1988 fully expected them to be floating past his head by now. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll have to wait a wee bit longer until I can flip my glasses at someone and say, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”
In the mean time, we can still get together once a week with someone of profound ability and talk all things design. So I invite you to join us tomorrow to speak with Gong Szeto, a man of immeasurable knowledge and understanding of how to make capitalism speedy.

MUST READ

November 30th, 2009 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

I just finished this book last night – a must read for all those who call themselves creatives: http://bit.ly/4swCrm

Posted via email from HUPAJOOB CENTRAL

HOLIDAY EPISODE

November 25th, 2009 by Ryan McGovern. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Thinking ahead, we recorded TWO live episodes last week: Aaron Dignan AND Mirko Ilic. So the bad news is there is NO live DesignChat tonight, the good news is we are releasing Mirko’s show in it’s place. You can download it from iTunes or watch it on Mevio.

We’re back broadcasting live on Wednesday, December 2nd at 8pmCST in Mashable’s Mashchat Lounge with James White of Signalnoise.com. I can’t wait to catch up with him on all the crazy illustrations he does. He was one of our very first live video interviews back on episode 12 before we started to capture the chats. He’s extremely self motivated, so if you’re an artist that’s thinking about going out on your own, this is the guy you want to talk to! See you all then!