I am currently at the ICOGRADA conference in Seattle, Washington. The problem with reporting on conferences is that you don’t care. I mean, yeah, sure, I could report my little heart out about the various speeches I’ve seen and heard, experiences I’ve had and people I’ve met, which you would read the same as any report, yawn and move on with what you’re doing.

Ultimately conferences are experiential things. You have to be there, you have to have that immediate response followed by passionate or passionately irate conversation with those interesting individuals. This is what gets your brain working, gets the ideas flowing, and creates some change or action in your way of doing things, even if only for a moment.

So the best I can do for you is to act as a filter; as a kind of medium conjuring up the voices through my own voice, in an attempt to bring a little conference to your doorstep. This is a blog after all; a poor simulation of an interactive experience. I’m going to just throw some things out here from the day, and see what happens.

And the first thing I want to say is this. There is a familiar theme in this conference about the designer’s role in changing the world (yes, Armin, I can hear you all the way from Seattle), and upon arrival at the conference I had an equally familiar experience: the handing over of the goody bag. Another canvas bag filled with printed material. A quick survey determined that everyone does what I do in this situation, which is sit down immediately, remove 60–80% of that material and throw it out. Not 10 seconds into the conference, and the message has already been violated.

I thought this might be because of an obligatory contractual arrangement to do with the sponsors: that being one of their main avenues for advertising to the audience. But, you should know that the existence of the goody bag has been blamed on the attendees: that designers actually complain if they don’t get their bag of stuff. This seems like an assumption, though who am I to say.

Well, one of the things that really rankles me are talks that deal with issues of sustainability, with the usual rhetorical questions and angry anecdotes without practical, small scale solutions. So I’m going to do my sustainability bit right here and right now, in honour of the ICOGRADA conference, and say to conference organizers everywhere:

Get rid of the goody bag.

We have lots of shopping bags, we don’t need more; and you can’t afford a nice enough office bag to satisfy us. A small self-contained package containing the program information, directions, maps, a notebook and a pen will satisfy all our conference needs, lighten our trudgy load, and serve as a keepsake of the event.

If you really want to give conference goers some thing, put on those high-falutin’ designer brains of yours and think up something that they really need, want, and will use, like edible underwear and pain killers. Something interesting, y’know? Something that won’t go directly into the garbage or be left in the hotel room (uneaten).

If sponsors have some message they need to convey, like awards promotions, special deals on software, subscriptions, whatever, allow them a few minutes of advertising during the conference. It’s once, it’s painless, if we’re interested we’ll take them up on it, sponsors will save so much on manufacture and shipping of all that garbage, and maybe we’ll save some trees.

And the rest of the stuff we’re just dying to get our hands on: that groovy notebook, squishy pen, magazine or giant poster … we can pick it up, or not, at the sponsor booths.

Conference Attendees Unite! Next time you get a goody bag at a conference, either refuse to take it, or leave everything you don’t want at the sign-in table. This will make everyone very upset, and maybe next time they’ll learn that we’re not so shallow as all that, that we actually do recognize that we’re there to take away experiences, not paper samples.

Other posts on this conference concern: Rethinking the conference, as a concept, Some helpful advice, A vitriolic attack and More heaps of derision.