Interesting Vancouver

Interesting Vancouver was, yes, interesting. Held October 24 at the Vancouver Rowing Club, Interesting Vancouver was an evening of interesting people speaking about interesting things.

This multi-disciplinary conference originated in the UK, and Interesting Vancouver was the first time the event has been held in Canada. The evening’s format fluctuated between 3 and 20 minute presentations.

What made the evening cohesive were the connections that flowed through the presentations, in particular, the call for storytelling, community and collaboration.

The speakers from the first half of the evening highlighted the need for stories.

AdHack‘s James Sherrett spoke on collecting local food and how food feeds our bodies and stories feed our souls. Laptop Bedouin, Darren Barefoot, explained how work and travel around the world is possible and that every day you should do something that scares you. And James Chutter discussed compositional strategies for storytelling and how that plays out in music, art and culture.

The second half of the evening highlighted great storytellers who looked at community and collaboration.

Most entertaining was Tom Williams of GiveMeaning.com who challenged the audience to consider who they are without artiface and suggested that the true meaning of who we are can be found by following our passions. In that vein, the passions of the next speakers were clearly that of social change and the environment. Naomi Devine, James Glave and Joe Solomon did a bang up job of highlighting their various causes.

The evening ended with Dave Ng and David Young, who both brought us around to thinking about different perspectives of the world and why multi-disciplinary study is so important to community and culture.

Many thanks to Brett Macfarland, et al. for organizing Interesting Vancouver, and please have a look at the live blog from Miss604 for a recap of the full evening.