Creativity World Forum 2008

Last week I attended the Creativity World Forum 2008, organized by FlandersDC, in Antwerp, Belgium. It is a bit of a special event as it was not a real scientific nor technological conference, but it was very cool. Seeing presentations of for example Steve Wozniak (Apple) and Chris Anderson (Wired, "The Long Tail", "Free") in my hometown was quite amazing.

I also liked the presentations of Tom Kelly (general manager of IDEO) and Dan Heath ("Made to Stick") a lot. There were several short presentations which were really inspiring. I loved the talks of Alex Steffen from WorldChanging.com (bought his book), Theo Jansen (also bought his book), and Johnny Chung Lee from Carnegie Mellon University.

I already knew Theo Jansen's work for quite some time and have even hand-made paper versions of his incredibly nice designed "strandbeest" animals. You should definitely take a look at Theo Jansen's TED presentation to get a feeling of what its about.

Johnny Chung Lee is a YouTube hero who hacked the Nintendo Wii controller to turn this 30 euro device into a full-fledged interactive whiteboard (there is also a TED talk on this). I enjoyed to see his presentation in real life because we are using this extremely nice and cheap open-sourced technology at my Ghent University research group to track the location of autonomous mobile robots in complex environments.

The organization of the event was wonderful, I have been to many conferences already, but never was the food so good, the drinks so plentiful, and the speakers of such high standards. Small applause...