{"id":1112,"date":"2009-09-18T06:32:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T10:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2009\/09\/18\/thursday-night-lucky\/"},"modified":"2009-09-18T06:32:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-18T10:32:00","slug":"thursday-night-lucky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2009\/09\/18\/thursday-night-lucky\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday night – lucky"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Man was I lucky to get invited to this CUSP conference. I said ‘yes’ to this just before I started saying ‘no’ to every thing . I am getting lots of invitations to give talks these days, but this one just sounded too cool to pass up.. and besides a friend asked me to do it.. I’m so glad I said Yes. <\/p>\n

This worked out pretty well. I worked nearly full days both yesterday and today in my hotel.. then headed over to the conference in the afternoons.. I missed some stuff.. but still had a great experience… <\/p>\n

The CUSP conference<\/a> is hard to describe.. it claims to be about ‘the design of everything’. Most of the 300 folks here were Designers of one form or another.. \u00a0The presenters were… man.. I can’t even categorize them.. we had retired priests, Islamic musical doctors, blind film writers, mountain psychotherapists, writer cartoonists, high school orchestra players, professors, futurists, improv playwrites, mdeia gurus, pilades instructures, scratch DJ’s, authors, singers.. and most of us gave really good\/funny\/interesting talks. <\/p>\n

What’s even cooler is that beyond the common theme of ‘design’ there was a bigger theme of taking what we all did for our ‘day jobs’ and putting it somehow in the service of the world. There was the woman, Sarah who quit here industrial design <\/p>\n

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What’s even cooler is that beyond the common theme of ‘design’ there<\/p>\n

was a bigger theme of taking what we all did for our ‘day jobs’ and<\/p>\n

putting it somehow in the service of the world. There was the woman,<\/p>\n

Emily who quit here industrial design\u00a0 job designing doorknobs to found<\/p>\n

‘Project H’\u00a0\u00a0 a comunity that puts industrial designers in service of<\/p>\n

people who need it.\u00a0 DOign things liek designing easier ways to carry<\/p>\n

water from a river to a village.\u00a0 Or Sarah who used her\u00a0 network of<\/p>\n

22,000 Facebook freinds to raise $150K for a local women’s crisis<\/p>\n

center in 3 days (!!!!) . Or.. Shakeela who retired from teaching<\/p>\n

medicine to promote interfaith understanding through sounds and music.<\/p>\n

It was really inspiring company<\/p>\n

My message was a hybrid . I started off with a short tesla coil demo<\/p>\n

then into my usual\u00a0 ‘Kids today Engineers talk… ” which looks at<\/p>\n

causes of\u00a0 decreasing number of engineers graduating in western<\/p>\n

countries.. ..\u00a0 I focused on the worldwide perceptions of engineering<\/p>\n

and how they differed from what we know most kids want. I then\u00a0 talked<\/p>\n

about the power that the worldwide focus on climate environment\u00a0 and<\/p>\n

energy has to bring new, more socially focused folks into engineering<\/p>\n

and technology. I then explained how living in a rat infested warehouse<\/p>\n

for 58 days on The Colony was the best thing I could think of to show<\/p>\n

kids that engineering was fun. relevant and could help the world..\u00a0 I<\/p>\n

talked about the colony experience and all the feedback I am getting<\/p>\n

from kids, parents and teachers about how it is resonating with kids<\/p>\n

interest in science and engineering. <\/p>\n

\u00a0I then quickly assembled a potato gun on stage, fired it and walked off the stage with 10 seconds to spare .\u00a0 I thought my talk was ok.. but I’m never really happy with any talk I’ve given immediately after.. I thought I’d left out so much.. As soon as I stopped, though I started gettign feedback from the crowd that it had gone better than I had\u00a0 thought. .\u00a0 More importantly,\u00a0 I got the sense that my message ‘worked’ and resonated.\u00a0 here.<\/p>\n

Here are some bad pics from the day.. Here’s Emily talking about a mathematical playground design that her Project H had built in Uganda, Dominican Republic and North Carolina.. .She’s just written a book called soemthing like .. 100 products\u00a0 that\u00a0 impower people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here’s Joe from the NeoFuturist improv playwrites group playing his song “Hey Joe, you suck at the guitar”<\/div>\n

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Here’s Ryan talking about the funny aspects of going blind… .. and why he likes his stick<\/div>\n

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Here’s Shakeela the doctor turned interfaith music person , with DBR the amazing electric 6 string violing, me and DJ Scientific<\/div>\n

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I wish I got pictures of some of the other cool folks.. I loved talking to Aaron about Twitter (finally.. someone understood my obsession).. and he introduced me to ‘foursquare’.. (Damn another hour lost per day).\u00a0\u00a0 I had great Lunch with two very cool\u00a0 Profs from Bradley University \u00a0 (Robert… thanks for taking the SamStone) .\u00a0\u00a0 And I really loved learning how poorly I draw with Lynda.. <\/p>\n

In short… I overcame the shyness I was feeling yesterday<\/div>\n

My talk wasn’t over until 8PM.. My cousin Peter had waited patiently for me .. As soon as we could get out, we sped out to Willmett and hung out with his family.. It was so good seeign them all. Here’s\u00a0 Alison, Emma, Pete and Charlotte.:.. Pretty scary.. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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We all started to doze off at 11.. Pete called me a cab and I headed out to the hotel airport..\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Here I sit. and it’s 2:15 AM.. Ugh.. how’d that happen again ? Damn Twitter\/Facebook\/Myspace<\/p>\n

OK.. better sleep.. Night all, Night Sam
-me<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Man was I lucky to get invited to this CUSP conference. I said ‘yes’ to this just before I started saying ‘no’ to every thing . I am getting lots of invitations to give talks these days, but this one just sounded too cool to pass up.. and besides a friend asked me to do … Continue reading Thursday night – lucky<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}