Exploring creativity, enterprise, and progress - Dynamic Visions Conference - Brief Article

Reason, Dec, 1999

Where do new ideas come from? What environments encourage creativity and progress? And what, if anything, can we do to find, build, or nurture such environments? Come hear an exciting group of original thinkers - and pioneering doers - explore these questions from a wide range of perspectives.

This is no ordinary conference. It offers a "banquet of ideas," as one of last year's guests put it. You'll hear leading experts from biology, technology, management, ecology, media, public policy, education, and design - lots of intellectual heft, with minimal hype. You'll learn from them, and they'll learn from you. The emphasis will be on accessibility, cross-fertilization, and "serious play." You'll get insights you can use in your work, your home, your civic life, your future. You'll also have fun. At the Dynamic Visions Conference, the focus will be on stimulating your imagination, not selling you consulting services.

In her acclaimed and controversial book, The Future and Its Enemies, conference founder Virginia Postrel lays out a dynamic vision of human progress: a process of open-ended, trial-and-error evolution and competition. At the heart of that process are creative people who come up with new combinations - of things, ideas, and practices. Finding promising combinations is one of the greatest creative challenges, a task that requires serendipity and freedom as well as imagination.

An environment where different sorts of things, ideas, practices, or people frequently bump into each other can encourage that process. Such areas of encounter, where something meets something else, are "verges."

A verge can be a city, a cafe, a frontier, or a multidisciplinary problem. This year's Dynamic Visions Conference will explore these special literal and metaphorical places - past, present, and future. Our topics range from the encounter between news media and information technology to America's ethnic future, from business collaboration to the Martian frontier, from the verge between home and work to the verge between nature and civilization.

The Dynamic Visions Conference itself is a fertile verge, where people from different backgrounds can come together, spark one another's creativity, and provide new perspectives to each other. You will have the opportunity to meet other interesting and intelligent people at meals and receptions and to participate in open-mike discussions and informal breakout groups. The program and schedule are designed to enhance interaction, with frequent breaks to permit conversation, a single track of presentations, and a broad range of speakers and topics. During the breaks, we will have a special selection of books by the speakers and others available for browsing and purchase.

We look forward to seeing you Presidents' Day Weekend.

Confirmed Speakers:

* Jhane Barnes, designer, "Mathematics, Computers, and the Art of Textile Design"

* Gregory Benford, UC-Irvine astrophysicist, "Thinking Long in the Millennium"

* Daniel Botkin, UC-Santa Barbara ecologist, president, Center for the Study of the Environment, author of Discordant Harmonies, "The Future of Nature: How to Have Both Civilization and Nature in the 21st Century"

* Charles Paul Freund, senior editor, Reason, "Dark Verge? The Uneasy Case of Vienna 1900"

* Neil Gershenfeld, leader, physics and media group, MIT Media Lab, author, When Things Start to Think, "Things that Think"

* Nick Gillespie, executive editor, Reason, "Popular Culture on the Verge"

* Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, "Innovations in Education"

* Grant McCracken, Harvard Business School, author, Plenitude and Culture and Consumption, "Verge of Verges: Sir Francis Bacon at the Gates of Gilbraltar"

* Christena Nippert-Eng, sociologist, Illinois Institute of Technology, author, Home and Work, "Home and Work: Drawing the Boundaries"

* Daniel Pink, Fast Company contributor, "Free Agent Nation"

* Steven Postrel, UC-Irvine Graduate School of Management, "The Geek and the Dilettante: Sharing Knowledge Across Specialities"

* Virginia Postrel, editor, Reason, author, The Future and Its Enemies, "On the Verge: Exploring the Frontiers of Creative Encounter"

* Adam Clayton Powell III, vice president, technology and programs, The Freedom Forum, "Culture and Collision"

* Richard Rodriguez, author, Days of Obligation and Hunger of Memory, "Some Thoughts on the Burrito and the Browning of America"

* Lynn Scarlett, executive director, Reason Public Policy Institute, "Can Industry Save the Planet? The Rise of Industrial Ecology"

* Michael Schrage, columnist, Fortune, senior associate, MIT Media Lab, author, No More Teams! and Serious Play, "Serious Play"

* Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, "Mars Direct: Humans to the Red Planet Within a Decade"

To read descriptions of the talks, please visit our Web site at www.reason.com/dynamic/dynamic2000.html.