Cool Hunting in the Mirror World

by Dave

I'm making my way through one of my favorite book series, the so-called Bigend Trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History) by William Gibson, from start to finish for the second time since the publication of the third book. One of my favorite things about this adventure is getting to see many of the same things I come into contact with in my everyday world through different eyes--perceiving brands, wars, and art (among many other things) completely anew.

Happily, this is also the time of year when our Go9 team gets to do something very similar via SXSW Interactive. The five of us are on our own adventure of exploring many of our everyday work pursuits through the new perspectives provided at panels, workshops and readings and, yes, even parties. SXSWi is as much about meeting our peers and finding out how they do what they do (and, often, finding out how they think about what they do) as it is about learning from the industry giants who will be presenting.

Each of us has an industry hero(ine) participating in sessions we'll be doing our best to get into, from Grace Bonney, creator of Design*Sponge, to Jeffrey Zeldman, famous to almost every person who has ever worked in Web development. There'll be plenty of folks and products we'll hear about for the first time this year that will grow to become greats. Matt Mullenweg, the developer behind WordPress, and a little thing called Twitter are just two that come to mind from past years when Go9 has attended the event.

And that's the other thing that this group experience is all about for our team. Sure, we'll each bring back new discoveries to share with each other and to help our clients' websites and strategies kill, but we'll also have the experience of celebrating together about this work we love to do. We'll get to re-energize ourselves and each other, wonder at all the great stuff that's going on in the industry, and challenge our own status quo to grow.

So, if you see any of us peering strangely at our computers after this weekend, we've just come to see it, or our work, or your particular needs, anew.