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Lots of stimulating conversation and new connections at the world’s first TrendCamp. TrendCamp arose out of a session at BarCamp Philly on emerging web trends led by Mark Magliocco. People enjoyed it so much that people banded together to do a mini unconference about the future. Thus TrendCamp, which took place last night in space donated by a law office in Center City.

The attendees: An eclectic bunch of technologists, educators, business people, marketers, publishers, media makers and many more.

Sessions:

I attended two sessions: “Augmented Reality” and “Retro Future Trends” and I led a session called “Visualizing the Future.”

Augmented Reality: This session was thought provoking. One possible application of AR—to augment the often challenging reality of having to assemble something—For example an AR layer could show you where to insert your screw driver and start tightening a screw. The thing that stuck with me the most were the implications for marketing to people and the related implications for privacy. AR provides yet another way for us to engage with marketing and yet another way to track that engagement. When you realize that by it’s very nature AR is location based, that gets into whole new realms of privacy and digital interaction away from our desktops.

Retro Future Trends: Mark Magliocco talked about past predictions of the future—what panned out and what did not. He showed a bit of a great clip produced for 1964 World’s Fair about a utopian, clean, stylish, future. What do our fantasies about the future show about our hopes, dreams, and values?

Visualizing the Future:

Sharing a vision of the future

Many visions of the future, arranged chronologically, from now to 100 years forward.

I led this mini-workshop where I gave a quick drawing tutorial and then had everyone draw a scene from the future. Then we shared our drawings with each other and arranged them along a timeline from the near future to 100 years from now. Among the predictions—

1) Bio tinkering for fashion (e.g. Mom? Why can’t I grow a tail? All the other kids are doing it!)
2) Faster travel—-suborbital flight that got people around the world in a couple of hours
3) Augmented reality—-a drawing of a person walking around with a bunch of floating logos in front of her
4) Custom real time pharmaceutical fabrication and delivery—picture a patient in a hospital whose medicines are being created in real time, customized to her genome and current needs, delivered in just the right dose as needed.
5) Rich real time distance interaction

I was very proud of the participants who dove into drawing their ideas even though most were not professional artists or designers. They got their ideas across clearly, which is what the session was all about.

Afterparty: Had some unusually deep conversations with people at the afterparty. Especially enjoyed chatting with people I had just met at TrendCamp, Laurence Tom, Manny Rechani, and Paul J. Mathison.

Thanks very much to the organizers (Tyler Baber, Mark Magliocco and Mike Jewsbury, and Gloria Bell) volunteers, sponsors, and participants for helping make this event a success! There were many sessions I wish I could have gotten to, which is the hallmark of a good happening.