semi-permanent 2007
Yesterday I attended the 2007 Semi-Permanent event with a bunch of my workmates & design-y friends.
The thing I really enjoy about SP is being inspired by people who are working at the top of the industry - but who are also about sharing inspiration & thoughts about design / creativity in general. I think it’s important to show work so everyone can see how they translate their ideas into practice, though some people don’t seem to get across their philosophy that well & it turns more into “this is my portfolio”.
I was really disappointed by two things this year:
- No interactive / web presenters. Last year there was Tokyo Plastic, this year…only a few mentions of there being websites to support campaigns. No actual focus on either of these areas. I’d be really interested to know the reason for this because there are so many things that could be spoken about. Potentially they were concerned that websites are not that interesting to present in that forum (?) but I’d disagree with that. I would hope that they didn’t feel that there weren’t people who could have been asked to speak from New Zealand or from Australia/the UK (which are the two other countries they tend to draw from).
- Not enough discussion about working in industry/with clients/translating briefs, etc. A lot of the audience for SP are students - & who more needs an idea or overview of what it is going to be like working with clients, budgets, all sorts of things. A few of the speakers touched on it but this was less mentioned than last year . It’s all wonderful to see the amazing creations that people can create with time & care but the fact that a couple of them mentioned that they burnt on those projects is almost as important as the work itself in some ways - learning to be commercial as well as creating really quality work is a fine balance but one that people need to work towards if they want to eat when they start working. There are so many challenges in the types of briefs clients provide as well, & on discussing it with some of the designers, it’s something we’re quite interested in: what the brief was, how that developed & how it became the end product.
It’s always a full on day - they get as much packed in as they can - and there were 7 speakers. My favourites were:
- Alt - a New Zealand company, who have been doing a lot of work with NZTE & had some awesome ideas about creativity & design to share. I actually got the most personally out of this one - especially as he spoke about some more abstract creative ideas, referencing Spike Milligan & Greer Twiss (who is one of my favourite NZ sculptors).
- Glue Society -showed some great stuff & really seemed to have a great sense of humour around that they were trying to do as well. I love the idea of creative collectives - I don’t know if anyone remembers that idea I submitted a few years ago for funding around a creative collaboration space to be formed in Auckland??
- United Visual Artists - showed a lot of installation and concert work they have done with LED lights & computer systems. Amazing scale of production which all seemed to be very well done.
Overall, it’s a good day & you always take from these things what you’re after, in a lot of ways. I’m glad they mentioned that they are going to split it into two days next year, because it’s quite full on to see 7 x 1 hour sessions all in one day - especially as they dim the lights in the auditorium for the speakers presentations to show better.
