Dear AIGA-SF,
No disrespect – I’m trying to attend more of your events – no really, I am. And one day, I’ll even purchase a membership in your organization. But with membership in the Bay Area of 1,600 designers in “graphics, interaction, experience, motion, and affiliated fields in the Greater Bay Area”, if your events consistently sell out, can we find you larger venues so you can accommodate the members and general public? Conveniently enough, James Victore’s angry image conveyed the reaction I felt upon finding yet another event of yours sold out. I subconsciously start to hear Roy Schneider’s voice saying “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” when I see the phrase ‘sold out’ now – and having a movie about a shark evoked is not a good thing to have to deal with. As much as it’s the attendee’s responsibility to buy tickets ahead of time when events are posted, there’s also an opportunity to take responsibility from the organizational end of things to see how to address event registration problems. And to be fair, I’ve just purchased tickets to the next D Talk event you’re having, so lesson learned.
The problem is, Adobe has a good venue – centrally located, semi-large – but with so many designers, even if a tenth of them show up actively for events that’s at least 100 people. Is there another solution here? I love that there’s a Business Outreach Chair at AIGA-SF, because it’s important to evangelize the role of design to the larger business community. Perhaps one of those ways to evangelize can be to find larger venues within the physically larger San Francisco businesses, and have them host the AIGA events. This way businesses get to learn about design, the designers who attend the events get to learn about the businesses, and a dialogue can occur. Events get what they need to succeed – like a larger venues. Venues get what they need – exposure to new ideas and audiences. I have nothing against the traditional venues for conferences and events – the hotels, community centers, and other places we turn to because they’ve got the space for bodies in the room. But outreach to businesses – design and non-design – makes sense on so many levels.
Heck, if we’re thinking events and community here, perhaps even the SF Chamber of Commerce or other organizations can get that dialogue going on. I know from working on a few events for clients that the venue is by far the largest cost of the event – renting a space is a huge concern on so many levels. Yet perhaps there are larger offices in SF which are empty after 5pm, and those companies don’t know there’s a demand for the space. If cost is an issue for renting space, are there not businesses who might be willing to have the event if they knew there was a demand for event space? Let’s put issues of liability of event spaces aside. Take this list in the SF Chronicle of some of the larger Bay Area employers. While they’ve left some of the local municipal employers off, could some of the government offices or educational institutions provide space for events? What about larger venues in the community that could be used? Something like the SF Armory comes to mind – yes, we can giggle about having Kink.com be a venue for the next design event, but I know the IxDA SF local chapter’s used it in the past. Is there a reason why a venue that’s 200,000 square feet of space on some level couldn’t work, if they were open to it? There’s piles of more traditional event venues on Yelp (among other sites) as well as piles of other lists to use – here’s a list of companies headquartered in San Francisco. I’m not against other parts of the Bay Area being used either – indeed, some of the things that have impressed me about the larger firms down in the South Bay like Microsoft, Google and other larger companies have been their willingness to be used as a venue for community events. And design firms all over are great venues for events – Adaptive Path, Hot Studio and many other design related firms take part in their larger communities by having those events take place within their walls.
To me, design is matchmaking between the problems and the solution to solve those problems. Having a problem of ‘too many people who want to attend your events’ is a lucky – and positive – opportunity and problem to have. Let’s see if there’s a solution we can work out. Surely there’s a few Bigger Boats out there to use to get people to sail on together.
Love,
Rachel
P.S. Not that ‘shark in waters’ are how I think of events, organizations, or anything – it’s just a great scene, and watching Roy Schneider’s ‘snap forward’ motion upon seeing the sheer size of the shark and his stunned delivery of the classic line is a perfect visualization of what designers do – sizing up the problem, and finding the appropriate solution. current date time .
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