Last night’s Defuse Dublin (part of Design Week) was a resounding success. My objectivity is compromised (iQ was one of the sponsors), but you’ll just have to trust me: it was a fantastic production.

The Defuse Dublin scene

Dublin’s IxDA team know how to put on a good show: an ’80s soundtrack, free Bombay Sapphire (another sponsor), and the Sugar Club. But the crowd didn’t forget what they were there for. When the host stepped up at the start of the night and said “testing” into the microphone, someone shouted “User Testing!” There was an appropriately high nerd ratio: perfect for designers.

A mini design challenge

We were all handed cards and pens at the start of the evening and told to think of a bad design that really annoyed us and sketch the solution. At the break in the show, they projected some of the entries, which inadvertently revealed a major problem in Dublin. A good 25% of the sketches had to do with public transportation. And indeed, that was the winning design sketch, from our own Peter McKenna (his idea: one ticket for all the Dublin transport systems). When offered a choice between a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and Windows 7 as his prize, he went for the gin without hesitation.

The speakers

Let’s get to the good bit. The format for the night — 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide — brought out the best in (almost) everyone. The brevity of the presentations meant that the speakers, all presenting on design, something endlessly broad, remained concrete and specific. Here were some of the best in my humble opinion.

Fiachra Ó Marcaigh talked about the mostly bad, a smidgen of good, Dublin street design, like the seamless transition on O’Connell street from pedestrian walkway to heavily trafficked street, leading to death and injury. Somehow, he made this very funny.

Simon Roberts spent his 5 minutes making fun of Nordic Walking Poles, his point being the importance of stories in our relationship to products. He made the night’s second reference to Segways, proving that many designs fail because we don’t need them.

Simon Denehy, from Perch gave a fascinating talk about designing chairs and desks for primary school students. He found a way to improve students’ posture and therefore health through his design and proved that design iterations for furniture is much harder than ones for websites.

Des Traynor gave a hilarious talk about how design influences our behaviour, usually in ways that aren’t usable; and that we should be designing beyond that. His examples? Crowded bars and meandering supermarket aisles.

Our own Brian Donohue gave another hilarious talk about the Catch 22 of Design: we redesign things that already work fine, but we rely on standard designs that don’t work at all, like elevator buttons.

You can check out the speakers on YouTube. And check out the rest of the Design Week events. Hopefully they’ll be as good as this one.