iDesign, London's first big conference on digital design, provided the main digital focus for the London Design Festival, backed by the London Development Agency. The event brought together online, mobile, film, games and TV, aiming to discuss how these affect our collective digital future with a focus on design principles and practices for both economic and social benefit.

iDesign itself was organised by Dynamo London and New Media Knowledge, and hosted by Simon Waterfall, who established a company Poke, and is the current D&AD president. Cogapp's Design Director Colin Jenkinson and Production Director Jason Ryan were in attendance after Malcolm Garrett of Applied Information Group nominated Cogapp as a creative inspiration in the digital supplement for Design Week magazine. The panel of judges, including Malcolm Garrett, talked about their inspirations, with some quite experimental and 'out there' ideas.

The event show stealer was Martyn Ware, a founder member of The Human League and Heaven 17. Martyn’s current work with illustrious focuses on public space interactives that are very information driven. Martyn works in collaboration with Vince Clarke, from Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, and showcased some terrific soundscape material, focusing on 3D sound and interactive spaces. Other contributors included (Malcolm's fellow student) Peter Saville and Nick Knight's SHowstudio, and D-Fuse. Other speakers included Adam Gee, who presented on Channel 4 Big Art Mob – an arts-based cultural project housed by Channel 4 which uses mobile technology and user generated content to create what “the UK’s first comprehensive survey of Public Art”. Although not fully cross-platform yet, the response from users is already encouraging.

Interactive lighting artist Jason Bruges, showed his illuminated visions of architectural augmentation. He has a strong body of work, doing public space projects like wind-generated light sticks, with really beautiful design. Dazed Digital have a feature on Jason to watch here.The iDesign panel showed a great deal of pioneering and emotive projects, and the design discussions were very broad in topic. There was a really nice wide discussion about how these things need to start connecting with the important side of user experience, online and offline campaigns, and more; bringing a very intelligent and fun edge to what was a pure design conference. You can read a full report on the Dynamo London site here. Here is a video clip of Malcolm Garrett's talk at the conference we thought we'd share, with some rather familiar characters featured. Thanks to Youtube user Drumgold who has lots of other material from iDesign. [quicktime]http://blog.cogapp.com/wp-content/2007/10/malcolm-garrett-idesign.mp4[/quicktime]