Views of the Manhattan bridge from Bubby's, the venue for the student award banquet. The southern comfort food was swell and the atmosphere lively, maybe because there weren't enough chairs.

I had a great talk with Angela Yeh, chair of the IDSA New York chapter, on developing a collaborative infrastructure through IDSA to build a closer-knit design community in New York. She pointed out the difficulty of organizing the amazingly diverse New York design community, but this year's conference provides ample proof of the rewards for making that effort.

Alice Ro, who did a great job getting sponsorships for the conference, and Rob Curedale, who led the "Leveraging China" workshop, chatted about introducing more rigorous thinking and design research into the design process, amongst many other topics fueled by Rob's incredibly deep and varied design experience.

I know you'd like to see pictures, but I will plead technical difficulties.