rgds,
Dan & Jo

When you immerse in a place and get an opportunity to know/speak to/learn from people, it provides an wonderful opportunity to see the world in new ways. It may even widen your lens to be able to look at your design problems & opportunities in ways you did not foresee or it may even challenge your assumptions. Also, we sometimes see how the learnings from a place can be lost when you get back home/work/head office as you translate/bridge insights into the design.

So how do you take what you learn about place/people/culture at the time you are observing it/listening to it and start to come up with design ideas up front (conceptual in nature) that can mature as you go forward. How can this help tell a story or point to rationale as part of your overall design direction? How does this help the team back at home/work/head office understand what you observed in your research?

I realize you’re representing UXA here, but my comments aren’t specifically directed at your event. Just so that’s clear.

I agree 100% about a conference (UXA or any other) being about speakers and attendees, but that doesn’t mean organizers don’t have some responsibility to help create the best event they can. And that means right down to the conference website’s content, which plays a critical role leading up to the event, as potential attendees will be reading it and making decisions first and foremost about whether or not to attend.

So editing might mean more than fixing typos. It might, for example, mean whittling down one person’s bio from four paragraphs to two if most other bios are only one. E.g, removing excessive detail about one’s educational background, which really doesn’t mean a lot against just having the right experience. That’s what I meant by editing/normalizing, and I never said “completely normalizing”, whatever that means.

Of course any editing of submitted content should only be done if the speaker understands in advance that might happen, and that’s par for the course; at least for events I’ve worked on.

Also, it’s my experience that speakers, even experienced speakers, are very open to working with organizers to shape their presentation descriptions so they do fit the aims of the conference. That’s not self-interested organizing, that’s collaboration between two key roles in putting on a professional event.

I think conferences are a lot like movies, actually: organizers/directors, speakers/actors, and attendees/attendees. When the directors and actors are in sync and the storyline is stellar, the ticket buyers get block busters and walk away happy.

But like movie directors, organizers come with different approaches to doing things, I suppose.

At any rate, your article’s original points about writing proposals are (still) excellent, and that’s really the focal point here.