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I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the Semi-Permanent event held at the Barbican. It was yesterday and today but I couldn’t make yesterday. I only managed to stay until lunch time because of a previous engagement but blimey I enjoyed what I saw. Well I say what I saw, I mean when I saw the guys from Lobo and especially Denis Kamioka aka CISMA. This guy’s work was mind blowing. He played his show reels and work that he had previously done for Diesel when he worked at Lobo. He was an ex Graffiti artists and you could still see that in his work. I highly recommend going to his website and checking out his stuff.

I managed to get to go to this event at short notice yesterday. I was initially interested because they had Neville Brody speaking, but as a result he was not as interesting as expected and some of the other speakers were much better. It was basically an event that had a selection of inspirational speakers in to talk about a broad range of subjects. Heres a quick rundown:

Brian Collins
Brian came across as very passionate, and also told a great story about branding and pirates.

Neville Brody
Neville seemed not that interested about being there from the start. His presentation was based on one he had done 2 years previous so I was unsure of the relevance. He did make some interesting points I thought though on city cloning and how everything is becoming a copy.

Lisa Strausfeld
Lisa comes from a information architecture viewpoint and although seemed completely dis-associated from what she was saying, showed some great visualisation work they had been doing.

Paul Mijksenaar
Paul was without a dowt my favourite. Paul’s company do wayfinding. He is responsible for the signage at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and various other airports around the world. He was very easy to listen to and what he said made a lot of sense to me who although has studied design is not a designer.

Marco Susani
Marco currently works for Motorola as the Director of advanced concepts. He had just flown in and had loads of information to tell us. It’s just a shame that he did not have enough time to tell it all.

Bill Drummond
What can I say. He was as abstract as I would have expected. The former money burner and KLF guru talked about some the 25 or so projects he is currently working on. He also handed out daffodils at the end and I was one of the lucky recipients.

Here are all the photos I took on the day.

First day at CeBIT today. After the traumatic journey from Braunschweig where the train was as full as a tube train in the rush hour, I finally changed trains and got to Hannover Messel Station where CeBIT was taking place. First thing that struck me, it’s massive. 27 Halls. I only really had to check out a few of them though as finance and business etc are stuff I have no interest in.

I just looked at phones really on the first day. There were many. I had been asked to look at DVB technologies, and a few manufactureres were showing this in use. Sumsung for example had loads of DVB-H phones working.

Second day I checked out mp3 players, of which there were hundreds, and other electronic gadgets really. There was actually more bits that make bits rather than consumer goods on show so it all got a bit dull after a while. I have a link below to all the photos I took. I will add more descriptions to these over time. All in all it was an interesting trip if not a bit tiring and maybe a bit too business and marketing specific for me who just wanted to play with cool things.

I’ve uploaded all my photos of the event on flickr for everyone to see.