Soulellis Studio: January 2009 Archives

Salon time!

Wow, we're so excited about being in Washington DC on Monday. AND Tuesday. Our final line-up for The Inaugural Salon on January 19 has really come together in a beautiful kind of way. There's still room, so please bring your friends and colleagues. You can still register at www.salon2009.com, but walk-in registration ($100) will also be welcomed.

12:45pm-1:15pm
Arrival and check-in at the House of Sweden (Google map).

Paul Soulellis/Soulellis Studio
Carrie Heinonen/Art Institute of Chicago
Kristen Shepherd Denner/Whitney Museum of American Art
Kwanza Hall/Atlanta City Council District 2

3pm
Break: coffee, networking, food

Amale Andraos and Dan Wood/Work Architecture Company
Michelle Moore/U.S. Green Building Council
Randall Kempner/The Aspen Institute
Steve Clemons/The New America Foundation
Jean-Phillipe Touffut/Centre Cournot, Paris
Jeff Franco/City Year DC

6pm
Cocktails!

Oh, and I'll be posting my talk here in the near future. ("Telling Stories in an Age of Information Hysteria.") Look out for it.

Tags news The Inaugural Salon | Posted on January 16, 2009 10:58 AM | Permalink

The Washington Note

One of our speakers, Steve Clemons, made a really nice mention of The Inaugural Salon on his super-popular blog, The Washington Note.

Tags news The Inaugural Salon | Posted on January 18, 2009 9:34 AM | Permalink

NYC, Vancouver, Atlanta, Chicago, Brazil: coming soon.

The Inaugural Salon was a huge success. We raised $5,000 for City Year DC and enjoyed an afternoon of stimulating discussion, new and old friends and good food and wine. Chad Evans and I are moving forward and planning upcoming Salons in NYC, Vancouver, Atlanta, Chicago and Brazil. More about that soon.

I really loved giving my talk ("Telling stories in an age of information hysteria") and it generated a lot of conversation. I'll be posting it here this weekend.

Tags information hysteria news The Inaugural Salon | Posted on January 23, 2009 10:22 AM | Permalink

Telling stories in an age of information hysteria

A few years ago I gave a talk about information design, and I began with this idea: that in the 18th century, the amount of knowledge that one was expected to have learned in a lifetime was equivalent to the amount of information found today in a typical edition of the Sunday New York Times. It's a frightening thought, one that might be called information anxiety—"produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand. We read without comprehending, see without perceiving, hear without listening. It can be manifested as a chronic malaise, a pervasive fear that we are about to be overwhelmed by the very material we need to master in order to function in this world." That's a concept developed by Richard Saul Wurman in his book Information Anxiety—20 years ago.