By Carolyn Slater

Digital Dialogue welcomes guest blogger David Fleck, the creative genius behind the “Innovation Revolution” T-shirt design with which he won the Threadless Loves Innovation design contest. Part of David’s prize was a trip to the 2010 International CES in Las Vegas. David is an architecture student and hails from Edinburgh, on the east coast of Scotland. You can see more of his designs on Threadless.com.

 

 

   By David Fleck

As I forced myself out of bed at 3.30 a.m. on January 6^th and looked out of the window to see the streets outside even deeper in snow, I questioned what I had let myself in for. Just a month earlier, I had been up late working on a piece of imminent coursework when I checked my emails and one popped up from Threadless the subject bar reading “Congratulations, your…”.

My mind flicked around what it could possibly be referring to as the email loaded (it’s not that my brain is unbelievably fast, our internet is painfully slow at times) and just as it opened I remembered the design that I had submitted to the innovation competition –just 5 minutes before the deadline – and then resigned to the vaults of relegated illustrations.

It took me a good day or so to take it in, my t-shirt design had ended up winning me an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas, courtesy of the lovely people at the Innovation Movement at CEA. And there I was waiting in the snow waiting for my taxi to come skidding along the road to take me to the airport and away to sunny Las Vegas. I decided to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride, which I ended up doing very successfully.

Never having been to America before, I was told by most folk at not to judge it against what I saw in Vegas, although I admit I loved the gawdiness and noise in a short four-day dose. I stayed in what is probably the nicest hotel I will ever stay in, and spent many wondrous hours roaming around the hotel, the streets, casinos, and of course the CES show floor. It is almost fitting that all these unbelievable technologies be exhibited in such an unreal city.

I have to admit that since I’m not part of the consumer electronics industry a lot of what was going on at CES was way over my head, but as an (shamefully) avid consumer of electronics my head was on a swivel trying to take it all in! I’m sure there were many more impressive things to the knowing eye, but I gawked at the 3D TVs and the 6.9mm thick TV in particular. It’s so exciting to see we are still pushing boundaries.

Stretching technology and materials to their limit is amazing and experimenting and discovering new things is exhilarating. I was also impressed by innovations in eco-friendly technology and that is why for me some of the most exciting things at CES were the interlocking recycled plastic bottles that can form load bearing walls, or the super thin insulation from Panasonic. Having better cameras or thinner TVs is cool, but innovations in green technology can change potentially billions of lives for the better.

My smorgasbord of experiences was incredible, from seeing the bright lights of Vegas to the innovations of tomorrow. Many thanks to CEA for such a great time.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 5:10 pm and is filed under CES, Guest Bloggers, Innovation Movement. Reply to this post, or trackback from your own site. Follow responses to this entry through the comments RSS feed.