Overall this was one of the best IDSA district conferences that I have attended over the years. Certainly Vancouver is a beatiful city in which to spend a couple of days thinking about design. What made this conference distinctive is the focus and passion surrounding the topic, Enduring Design.

The Pacific Northwest loves "sustainability" (about as much as coffee and cheap sushi) and this conviction was evident in the list of presenters that it put to the podium. Usually at these things the speakers try and stick the conference theme somewhere in the title of their talk or work it in to their introduction. Rarely is it the backbone of their presentation.

At the IDSA-West this year we did not witness the tired parade of presenters who merely talk about their own or their studio's work. While these are occasionally interesting, or interesting in moderation, such "portfolio presentations" usually have the icky feel of a lightly veiled studio infomercial. The presenter often comes off as a design braggadocio with the an inflated sense of global importance (let's keep that you "revolutionized" the field of kitchen mops in perspective).

Conference organizer and Wesstern District VP, Dedre Toker was able to organize many leaders in the design sustainability field for this one-and-a-half-day gathering. Evidence of this was in the unusually high number of educators who spoke; yet, certainly the voice of enlightened practitioners was quite welcome. Indeed they have a more difficult task of meeting the seemingly irreconcilable demands of sustainability with corporate appetites, which nearly demand un-enduring design to produce enticing quarterly profits reports.

Thanks to the speakers, conference organizers, Emily Carr Institute, and passionate attendees for their efforts and attention to this topic. Let's hope that the spirit of the debate and the importance of the big picture endure.

Leslie Speer, professor at California College of the Arts, was on hand to support their student merit award winner, Adam Reineck.

Arunus Oslapas, professor at Western Washington University, was on hand to support his merit award winner, Olen Ronning.

Another fashionable conference goer.

The Western conference had the good fortune of attracting Ron Kemnitzer, newly elected IDSA President and Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Ron was on the chicken-and-egg debate panel of whether design education should lead or follow design practice. As both a long time practitioner and educator, he had the final word in stating that a adversarial relationship does neither much good. Instead we all must actively work to forge relationships that will have long-term benefits for our discipline.

Prasad Boradkar, professor at Arizona State, reflecting on the conference.

Prasad often speaks at the IDSA National Education Conferences and if you get a chance you should check out his papers at www.idsa.org (look under "resources" ; "for students and educators").

His work is intelligent, insightful and draws from western social theory and criticism.

This is one that he presented about the iPod.

core77 blogsquadder Stephanie Munson doin' her thang for design enthusiasts worldwide.

Barry Wylant, professor at University of Calgary, gave an insightful look not into enduring design as objects, but instead enduring design theory. His talk focused on the early 20th century work of Italian Futurism.

He focused on the "ruthless wonderment" of the futurists' fascination and intimate connection with technology. He compared Marinetti's (father of Futurism) seminal encounter with an automobile crash to Ballard's 1973 novel and subsequent 1990's movie "Crash" with James Spader. In the movie the erotic potential of technology and the failure of that technology -- car crashes -- demonstrate this techno-lust.

He suggests that this "almost religious" relationship with technology is still prevalent today. Along the way he also introduced the continuum between wonderment and banality (from Heidegger), suggesting that the continual quest for wonderment is a manic endeavor. This leads to the question for all designers regarding "the appropriateness of wonderment" in relation to technology.

Katherine Bennett, IDSA VP of Education and Art Center faculty member, began her provocative talk with a photo of a toilet brush with disposable heads. She reminded us of the fact that this is the majority of the industrial design that is being done. And she suggests that this is not a bad thing. Indeed it is meeting some need of many, as it is a huge seller.

She questioned whether designers have a quiet contempt for low-end, mainstream products: "Do we know what these users want -- do we even want to design for them?"

She then focused on the magnificent body of work by Eva Zeisel and told stories of her visits with the 93-year-old designer. Bennett focused on Zeisel's words: "Design is a benevolent gift of love" from the designer to the user.

By designers taking an elitist stance and giving short shrift to the unglamorous design assignments, they are not truly giving these "benevolent gifts of love."

The gist of the talk was that the world depends on design to create objects that respect their banal, mainstream needs and desires. As designers we need to "get over ourselves, stop designing to impress our friends, and focus on what matters."