Day One: GEL added an additional day this year. Thursday afternoon comprised of a number of field trips throughout New York City. Sixteen of us were fortunate enough to be lead on an architectural tour of Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal by Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung from Gothamist. It all ended with a few pints and some blue points at the Oyster Bar.

Rodney Edwards, from our group, invited us to an after-party that Microsoft was throwing at the Hudson Hotel. Open bar and loud music: the rest was pretty much a blur -- with the notable exception that everyone from Microsoft's Customer Design Center seemed really, really nice and the girls from AARP can really throw down on the dance floor. [who knew that AARP's design staff was 80% female?]

Day Two: The house that built GEL. In 1992, when Mark Hurst's family moved out of a long time home, he left a note card in the attic with a few words on it about how much he'd loved the house and whomever found the note he wished they loved the house as much as he had. Skip forward a decade or so and he gets a call from a teacher who says that her classroom is doing a project on Primary Sources and a kid in her class found the note... was that in fact his card and could the kids write him?

Small, well-thought and often individual acts are a hallmark for this conference. The idea that one note left a long time ago could turn a school kid into a hometown hero and a class project could be built around a long forgotten act became a touchstone for this year's theme. Concerted acts are a core value for Good Experience.

Friday had an astonishing assortment of twenty-minute segments and enough comedy and entertainment to punctutate the breaks and bring your head out of the clouds. Everyone had something important to add to the discussion, however there were a number of highlights that bare reflection.

(I should also note that we'll be doing follow-up transcripts and interviews on a number of the talks. More on this as it develops.)

• What I knew about Wikipedia was very limited. My suspicions that it was some hippy open source project was confirmed but I had no idea how cool and progressive a hippy project could be. Their free and interactive encyclopedia had just surpassed the New York Times online in daily visits, and it's nearly one of the top fifty web sites. By word count, they are about twice the size of Britannica.

Jimmy Wales was the first morning speaker and his Wikipedia is not just an English resource. Presently, it represents twelve languages.

"The important thing to understand about Wikipedia is the free license. Free license means that other people are free to copy our work, redistribute it, modify it. You can redistribute modified versions. You can do all that commercially or non-commercially. So if you're familiar with the work of free-software, some people call it open source, it's the same idea only now we're applying it to culture instead of just software."

If giving everybody on the planet a free encyclopedia in their own language wasn't a big enough task then also consider that Wiki is a large diverse project that wants to also give you news, quotes, dictionary and even open source meet-ups. Wikipedia is an excellent example of community giving back to the community.

• Ron Pompei is the CEO of Pompei A.D. As an architect, he weighs his role heavily in the user's experience. What is it that makes a good experience? Pompei says, "We think in order to have a good experience, it has to be relevant, it has to be authentic and it has to be intimate."

"As a human being we have multiple intelligences. Usually in a university education we're taught logically and linguistically. In the arts, you're taught visually and spatially. A lot of other types of intelligence are overlooked in our cultural conditioning. Now things are changing. Now we hear things like emotional intelligence, and so forth... Let's think about that a little bit. Our education was created in the 19th century, to serve industrialization: which was a great thing. It gave everybody a lot of goods and gave everybody a lot of a particular kind of education; created a middle class -- nothing wrong, but we have to move on. In that period of time we limited our definition of ourselves because we had to fit in with the machines that we were creating."

He continues to go on about alternate manifestations of intelligence that continue to find a way to surface in our present culture. He is seeking a new paradigm for us to grow beyond solely seeking Cartesian solutions.

• Barry Schwartz is an author and professor at Swarthmore College. His career has skyrocketed with the recent publication of The Paradox of Choice. It's ostensibly a reinvestigation of Xeno's paradox, as applied to our current lifestyle. He illustrates his frustration of going to the GAP and trying to buy a pair of jeans. Rather than going in and simply finding a pair of jeans in his size he spent an hour trying on different cuts and walks out with the best pair of jeans he'd ever purchased. He did better, but felt worse.

"Too much" and "logjam" are constant reminders in our decadent culture. A graph goes up and displays what his super market has available: 285 brands of cookies, 230 soups, 175 salad dressings, 40 toothpastes, 275 cereals, etc.

In the world of consumer goods we have a lot of choice. Well, we used to have a lot of choice now we have "too much." Can we have it all? According to Schwartz: "No."

• Aside from being fiery and funny, Bob Mankoff has been working on a research project with the University of Michigan psychology department to find out how people process humor. As the Cartoon Editor for The New Yorker magazine, Mankoff is in an unusually fortunate position to pursue this question. After all, he looks at a thousand cartoons a week.

"What's the purpose of humor? What's actually happening here? And jokes are this big thing, this big wind-up toy and you really see it. And you know when you actually look at what's happening, jokes are really about a certain type of aggression and dealing with a whole range of problems."

"Cartoons and humor are not for the good times. They are for all the bad frustrations, annoyances, and things bordering on the horrible that happen to us. And they're even for the horrible things that happen to other people."

As Mankoff describes it: "A certain little anesthesia of the heart." In order to deal with empathy we also need lack of empathy.

• Theo Jansen is an artist and mechanic who makes kinetic sculpture. His work is nearly impossible to describe as the motion and intricacy is beyond linguistics. His project is documented at Strandbeest

Working with common PVC tubing he has created machines that harness the wind in order to walk along the beaches of the Netherlands. Currently he's working on a system of "nerves and muscles" for his sculptures that will store the wind power so that there will be fuel to power the machines on windless days. The project is so improbable it seems unreal. And yet as technology progresses, the veil of godhood will need to be redefined.

• Laurie Rosenwald makes mistakes. As a designer and illustrator she's made a career of them.

"One thing I'm not is a professional. I mean, I don't even know how to sketch which is a basic thing that an illustrator does. Because I don't know what something's going to look like until I do it. But art directors really don't like this. they don't like surprises. So as a result I get most, or half, of my work killed. And I used to have stationery that said "Rosenworld" -- that's my "company" -- "Rosenworld the little house the kill fees built."

Rosenwald's philosophy of making mistakes has sustained her well. A monograph of her work can be found in New York Notebook. She walks away from "problem solving" and pursues a course of simply making things.

"My friend Yolanda, Yoland Cuomo - a very gifted designer - had a sign over her door that said "For love or money there is no inbetween." I thought that was very true. But I don't live by that. I'm not that smart. I had a sign over my door that said, "I can't afford to waste my time making money."

•"I've been a prankster all my life. It wasn't until when I moved to New York that I began to take it seriously... I was amazed at being in New York and the anonymity that I had." - Charlie Todd

I wish I could claim to have been on the Charlie Todd train since the beginning but was only introduced to his work a few months ago. Todd is a charlatan in the best sense of the word. The performance pieces that he orchestrates regularly in Manhattan invoke the best pranks from the heyday of Spy magazine and the droll perversions of National Lampoon.

Different from other pranksters, Todd and his crew try to do only positive works. Pictured above, from his recent performance "Look Up More" at a large retailer on 14th Street in New York. A group of volunteers danced in each window bay on every floor in synchronicity and choreographed solos. Typically Todd's work only lasts for a handful of minutes but the impact on a nearly impervious audience is always memorable. I can't recommend enough that you peruse some of the missions at Improv Everywhere.

• Dee Breger is a scientist who takes photographs. She works with an electron microscope to look into the infinitely small. Her history in medical illustration lead her ultimately to the machine that she now uses to make beautiful pictures.

She works out of Drexel University and takes images of diatoms, bugs, medical and botanical subjects. The work draws on a long history of scientific photography, for instance Karl Blossfeldt.

A woman sitting down and in front of us took a cell phone call during the afternoon break. It went something like this:"It's the best... It's amazing, but you know 'normal' and intelligent."

Normal and intelligent indeed. Congratulations on another successful year, Mr. Hurst. The afternoon ended quickly and with little ceremony. We had drinks in the lobby of the Equitable Building and then some of us had to get back to work.

We will follow up here on some of the ideas raised at the conference in the coming weeks, also providing transcripts of some of the talks above.

Information about next year's conference can be found at: GEL 2006.

....

Many Thanks to: Mark Hurst; Shannon Riley; everyone at Good Experience; Susan Aminoff; Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung of Gothamist; Everyone at Microsoft Customer Design Center: Rodney Edwards, Amir Bahadori, Melora Zaner-Godsey and Jonathan Wiedemann;Joshua Seiden;and particularly Lynn Romano and all the girls at AARP.