TED for Design Wonks: CreativeMornings Offers Coffee and a Shot of Inspiration

In our TED-ified world, there is no shortage of confabs offering exclusive, scintillating insights on the world. But such gatherings likely require you to abandon your work for a few days, hop a plane to some dismal convention center, and shell out the equivalent of a mortgage payment for tickets.

Enter Tina Roth Eisenberg, the Brooklyn designer known for her sweetly minimalist blog Swissmiss. Eisenberg wanted to create a conference that was more compact — something that offered both inspirational speakers and serendipitous interactions without eating up an entire week.

"I realized that most of us attend conferences because we want to meet likeminded people," she says. "But the problem with conferences is that these communities are temporary and only happen once a year. What I was craving was an accessible event, that connects me with my local creative community, and that inspires me with one talk — before work."

The result was CreativeMornings http://www.creativemornings.com/ , which launched in 2008 with a series of "coffee-and-chat speakers" at various venues in New York. The local creative community responded enthusiastically, and Eisenberg was quickly nabbing big names like MoMA curator Paola Antonelli and Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere.

By Alissa Walker

Full Story: http://www.wired.com/design/2012/06/creativemornings-conferences/