I live-tweeted during part of the conference. I’ve pasted a few moments below, along with links to video of the presentations to which they relate. It was a rich stew of fonts, futurisms, tiny houses and nation branding.

Nicholson Baker, Wrapping Sentences Around Things
Nicholson Baker: “Everyone here has been to Crate & Barrel, right? There’s a big, beautiful stack of paper at the checkout…”

“We’re just wrapper-uppers at Crate & Barrel… We are talking about an object that lives in the eye… We are cheerleaders.”

“We are the excelsior they come bundled in when we write about them.” Nicholson Baker on writing about objects.

In 1966 Baker’s father commissioned Wendell Castle to make the family a table without legs. It was in the NYT.

The table dried out. They eventually had to remove it because the wood couldn’t do what Castle wanted. It self-destructed.

Anne Quito, Designing A Nation from Scratch
“I had many critical questions, like … Is that Times New Roman? Does the nation-branding flock of eagles need another member?”

Anna Marie Smith, Materializing Miniature Living
“The most impt aspect of micro-living is not the architecture but the inhabitants.”

Lynda Decker, Sex Wax on the Subway
“Each cover shows a young man on a large wave.” Lynda Decker on Surf, Surfer, Surfing and their “dudes in the tube”

And final thought from Peter Lunenfeld:
“One button says Buy Now, the other button says Buy Later.” On the future of interaction design.

1986 was when I first discovered Memphis, in Milan. My family lived there during a seven-month sabbatical and those totemic shapes, those brilliant patterns, turned up everywhere. They remain wrapped up in my mind with the OTT cherubs on sale at Fiorucci, tucked into the historic Galleria, and the more measured prints at Naj-Oleari, where the laminated bookbags featured tiny cars rather than Du Pasquier’s squibs and squiggles. In a bid for most sophisticated high school junior in North Carolina, I wrote a paper on Memphis (I can still visualize the hand-cut cobalt cover), drawing heavily on Barbara Radice’s book.

My favorite Memphis piece, then as now, was leader Ettore Sottsass’s iconic Carlton shelf Its crisp outlines work against the sweetly pastel laminates in a way that is obviously knowing. It walks right up to the edge of tacky and turns up its nose. It is a shelf that, like its right-angle modernist predecessors by Prouve and Perriand, needs to hold nothing.

Why now? Pungent artificiality. Patterns that aren’t supposed to look like anything. Colors not found in nature. The return of Memphis feels like a rebellion against the neo-handicraft era, the fetishization of the hand, the wood surface, the stitch. When even your iPhone cover is meant to look hand-painted, you know the time is ripe for rebellion. Back to plastic! Back to pattern, already creeping (like a fungus, like a vine, like a relief) over architectural facades, basic Gap sweatshirts, sneakers. It’s an admission and exploitation of what is simply a surface. Formica moved from being a tougher imitation of life into an original, often richly referential canvas in the 1950s, Memphis pushed that idea further in the 1980s. Brighter colors, crisper printing, exploitation of the revealing black edge. Memphis, in its own way, was true to its materials. We need a break from our own good taste; Memphis provides an out with intellectual credentials.

Throw off your Breton striped shirts! Embrace the squiggle.