Last week I attended the Open Design Conference in Barcelona. The event presented an interesting mix of open design practices and talks about collaborative consumption, the maker movement, and Barcelona as a digital city, most of them with a strong political component. It was very well organized and in an amazing location, it definitely worth the trip.
From all the talks, I found the opening one- Ezio Manzini's presentation of the possibility of a shift to the scenario defined by him as SLOC (Slow, Local, Open and Connected)- the deepest and at the same time understandable for the general public, with a wide point of view to analyze social transformations beyond the field of design. Moreover, some of the participants of the round table Barcelona Digital City had a surprisingly interesting approach, in particular those connected to academia showed, in my opinion, a good balance between an idealistic and realistic position (Mayo Fuster and Javier Creus). As expected, not all the presentations shared these characteristics and there were also more simplistic and "trendy"approaches of the subject.
