Designers at the ICA

We went to the ICA to see a design show/discussion, Joff's idea as he is doing a product design course. I was sort of interested and sort of dreading it. My dread was confirmed when we arrived for a 7 pm start only to sit for half an hour wathcing 2 (very young) blokes with deisgner head stubble, fiddling with their laptops. When one of them got out his phone and was playing with both at the same time I was ready to leave. Eventually they started and their communication skills matched my expectations, not good. However once they got round to showing their work it was a completely different story. The event is set up to showcase mainly digital designers and their pet projects, in other words the things they would like to be doing when they are not designing car ads. The presentations we saw ranged from a short film, an idea for a digital art display, an interactive table and a truly astounding car ad (yes I know, it was a car ad but it was amazing). All of the designers were men and all pretty much looked under 30 and all seemed to be running their own companies. Easy to knock, but the skill they displayed was really impressive, it involved hour upon hour of doing complicated things with computers which I inherently think of as dull and tedious, mainly becuase I don't have a hope in hell of understanding it, but the work they produced was very creative and changed my opinion of both computer geeks and designers.