David Sibbet

TED2008: The Big Questions

I'm down in Monterey at the TED conference about to plunge into a visualization challenge of expansive proportions. The agenda goes like this: Who are we?—What is our place in the universe?—What is life?—Is beauty truth?—Will evil prevail?—How can we change the world?—How do we create?—What's out there?—What will tomorrow bring?—What stirs us?—How dare we be optimistic? Fifty speakers will talk 18 minutes each about these subjects, in four courses of talks, with lots of networking and entertainment woven in between. Can you guess how much fun this is going to be!!!

The Grove's client Autodesk, is supporting this year's event with a BigViz project where two of us, Kevin Richards and myself, led by Tom Wujec, an Autodesk Fellow leading their visualization initiatives, will be documenting the ENTIRE conference.

We'll be doing this using the latest Wacom Cintiq tablets and beta versions of Autodesk's Alias Sketchbook Pro. Our drawings, some 5-15 for each speaker, will be saved and accessible on a huge portfolio wall using a prototype combination of Perceptive Pixel and multi-touch technologies If you've seen the movie Minority Report,or used an i-phone, it allows that kind of manipulation of imagery. You can pinch-reduce pictures, rotate them, sort them, move them around -- all by touch.

I don't know what we will produce, but it will be integrated into a book about this year's TED, focusing on the theme The Big Questions. We're calling ourselves "visual cartographers," and I'm focusing on making not only the big questions, but the patterns that connect these ideas visible.

If you want to follow the conference, it will be blogged and accessible at the TED.com web site. I probably won't be posting much during this period, but will inevitably reflect on our learning afterwards. Click on to see some of my practice warmups.

VizThink Was An Inspiring Experience for The Grove

I’m happy to report that the recent VizThink conference, an ambitious attempt to take the visualization field to a new level by inviting practitioners from across the visualization spectrum, succeeded wildly! Over 380 people traveled from all over the globe to the Westin in San Francisco, following the siren song of VizThink Tom Crawford’s web 2.0 marketing and XPlane’s sponsorship and promotion. We all showed up and had a complete blast. Here is The Grove’s little booth, organized and manned by Callie Bloom, our marketing assistant. She’s sitting in front of Tiffany Forner’s wonderful graphic showing how The Grove’s Graphic Guides® create a panoramic effect in a meeting room. We were surrounded by digital tool makers--Brain, Mindjet, Autodesk, Wacom and others and totally held our own. Of course having Second Life up on our display, and our cool new Visual Planning System Agenda Planning Cards didn’t hurt. The deep excitement for me was seeing how our Grove team pulled together in the two sessions we ran.