Refresh Philly March 09

Posted on 04. Mar, 2009 by Anthony in Events, Networking

Anthony and Carole of Samurai Virtual Tours visit the March 09 Refresh Philly Event.

Monday night we had the opportunity to attend the Refresh Philly Event held at the Comcast Center in Philadelphia. There have already been some great blog posts written about the Refresh Philly meeting held on March 2nd. You can get a great moment by moment breakdown of the event from Maria by reading her post “Muxtape Prototypebreaker: Refresh Philly Recap” and you can get Jim’s perspective of the night by reading his post “march refresh philly“.

An attendee learns anyone can draw using lines, circles, triangles and squares.

Lots of great things were discussed at the Refresh Philly meeting. We learned about about upcoming events from HealthCamp Philadephia, BarCamp NewsInnovation and HigherEd Camp Philadelphia. We heard from Luke Crawford about how Muxtape can bring us back to the days of creating meaningful mixed tapes for our friends and how it can help bands promote their music. We also heard about how the Muxtape website was built and about some of the ideas behind its design. We also learned about the rise, fall and recent rebirth of this platform. Later in the evening we heard from Todd Warfel who challenged the group that it is possible to actually do good, fast, cheap, design using his rapid design methods.

Some of my notes from Todd's talk on rapid design methods.

Hearing how Todd uses pen, paper, and some time constrained refinement processes to tap the creative juices out of groups was interesting, practical and even good but I’m not so convinced it is actually a fast or cheap method of design. Todd encouraged us that anyone can draw using simple shapes. Since much of Todd’s rapid design method requires sketching, it is important that the people engaged in the design know that even with elementary art skills one can convey ideas and concepts important to a design.

Overall we had a great time at Refresh Philly. It was great sitting in a room with so many of Philly’s creative designers and developers. I look forward to future events and seeing how Refresh Philly will impact the people and neighborhood of Philadelphia and work to make things better.

Click on the following link to experience the 360 degree image from Refresh Philly. And if you haven’t already visit our flickr page to see a simple montage of images we took that evening.

Tags: Comcast Center, Networking, Philadelphia, Refresh Philly, social