This week Minneapolis played host to Flash designers, developers, and everything in between at the Flashbelt 2007 conference, and some designers from ideapark were along for the ride. Going into this conference, I thought it was mostly going to be product demo’s, how to’s, and possibly an example here or there of some pretty cool work. Well, I was wrong. It turned out to be one of the most inspirational weeks I have had in a long time.

What can I say? Day one blew my mind. It started out with your standard keynote. Adobe advertised some products, talked a lot about CS3 and all of the cool new stuff you could do with said software. Eh, I could read all of that on their website. Luckily though, the next speaker was Craig Swann….wow. Here’s a guy who gets to play for a living. Without boring you with details, his lecture on thought process was amazing. It was like I was back in design school, being reminded how the concept process is the most important part of the design process, and the most fun aspect of design. I think sometimes as interactive designers we can get in the mode of just skinning IA and making it look good. Without giving you a play by play of the day, a couple of blurbs about the other two speakers.

Jeremy Thorp, his Pixel Economy experiment is amazing! It’s a literal visualization of an economy using pixels trading color values, beautiful and thought provoking.

Joshua Davis. You probably know who he is, and why he is amazing. The really great thing is that he is opening up all of this source files for people to learn how he does his amazing work. Very cool.

Day Two. Pretty cool as well. A little more technical, but still worth going to. Saw some great experiments with particles in flash (something I have always been fascinated with), more Adobe product demos, and some other experimental works. Another of my favorite lectures was at the end of day two by Calle & Pelle Sjoenell. Two ad execs from Fallon who talked about the nature of interactive of media and why traditional advertising is stagnating. They have an interesting take, as one of the brothers made the leap from traditional advertising to the interactive area .It was a really fascinating conversation about the importance of the idea, and more important than that, the importance of being first with that idea. The word of mouth for a groundbreaking idea can be more important for the client than what the idea is trying to promote. Even a new idea that could be potentially be offensive, is better than an idea that nobody cares about. I found this to be quite interesting, as this is an idea that we believe in strongly at ideapark.

Day Three. Very boring Flex and AIR demo to start. However, I think Adobe AIR (formerly known as Apollo) is going to change the way the people think about the line between online and offline applications, and it will allow us “web designers” to try our hand at UI design. So it was worth seeing. The final presentation I saw was also one of my favorites. It was given by David-Lowe- Rogstad and it was about redefining how the workflow process should work for interactive products. His whole premise is that we should break down the rigid process a lot of use now, and break it down into smaller chunks with more testing. More doing, less talking. Very fascinating, very thought provoking.

The name Flashbelt for this conference was a misnomer. While, it did center around flash. It was a conference about interactive media and everything that is involved in making it. Even if you were a designer, developer, or manager who wasn’t really interested in Flash, this conference left you feeling inspired. If you didn’t go this year for those reasons, trust me, go next year.