Summary: Dan Klyn talks about the work of Richard Saul Wurman at the GIANT conference.

Inventing a conference is hard.

Getting a team together to make it happen is hard.

Cultivating a slate of speakers is hard.

And then the time comes, and hundreds of strange (and often-marvelous) people with funny glasses fly in from all over the place, and the thing takes off: it takes on a life of its own.

It was a delight to have the opportunity to watch Christian Manzella, Anthony Sanders, and Joel Kilby build the first-ever GIANT conference, an event whose purpose they described as:

…bringing together world-class speakers and talented professionals to talk about creating rad experiences and how to make those experiences even radder.

That’s exactly what happened last week as more than 400 participants convened in historic music and theater venues in the heart of historic Charleston, South Carolina. It was a delight to be asked to speak, and I used the opportunity to re-tool the presentation of my research project, which is titled DUMB. I made a recording of the talk from my computer as I gave the presentation:

After the talk people said flattering things about how I did. The yardstick I’m trying to use for evaluating myself in these contexts is not kindly-worded Tweets (although of course I live for those), but rather the degree to which I enjoyed bringing the material I prepared for the audience. Invariably, the more delight I experience in delivering this stuff, the more meaningful it seems to be to the attendees.