Just one more entry on our coverage, this time, from guest blogger Janet Galore:

Throughout the conference we had seen heroic figures dressed in silver vinyl jumpsuits, recruiting designers to save the world as we know it. The stamina required to withstand the steamy body heat in these suits had me impressed. And the yo-yo skillz.

Later that night, over 200 people gathered in the Grand Ballroom of the Fairmount Hotel to form teams to participate in the Defenders of Design game, sponsored by HP and created by The Go Game. The organizers were matching solo defenders with others to make teams of four, and I joined three design students I had never met. We grabbed our gear, a mobile phone and an HP iPAQ Travel Companion with dangling white earbuds, some basic instructions (don’t turn off the iPAQ!), and set out as others rushed around us. Instructions came via text messages on the mobile phone, while we tried to figure out the password for the iPAQ.

It was a mostly a scavenger hunt, as we were assigned missions to accomplish one by one, receiving info about our next destination only after completing the previous mission. We got our first clue and were off. It was handy to use the cell phone to call friends for help... (quick—where does Heineken come from?).

We finally got video on the iPAQ, and were given mission briefs delivered by Sam Lucente of HP and Bill Moggridge of IDEO, who looked more like Gandalf than Obi Wan Kenobi, despite the allusions to Star Wars throughout. See Sam and Bill being very silly below:

After the third clue or so, we were advised to hop a cab to the Lunar Design studios to seek out robots who would give us required information if we asked the correct way. We were eventually given a camera to document a new futuristic gadget we invented (we came up with a gadget to automatically switch out your shirt with your friend).

The whole thing was engaging, but chaos and time wore us down. Juggling all the devices, interfaces, earbuds falling out, and repeating instructions got a little old, and I was kind of disappointed that we didn’t make use of any GPS or mapping features on the iPAQ (did we just not see how to access it?). Ok, and the snacks and wine, and cool conversations with the designers at Lunar were a little distracting, too. We ended up running out of time, and we decided to catch a cab back to Nob Hill, where our intrepid team of defenders split up, venturing on to other bars and parties across the city. I never heard who won, and what the final missions were, but whoever won was seriously driven. We slackers just had fun.

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Janet Galore is a Senior Program Manager on the Strategic Prototyping team at Microsoft, where she tells credible stories about the future. She is also an artist, designer, and author. You can see more of her work at galorebot.com.