Last week, I attended the IDEA Conference, which was really fanstastic. The vision for the conference was to address:

. . .issues of design for an always-on, always-connected world. . . Where physical spaces are so complex that detailed wayfinding is necessary to navigate them. Where work processes have become so involved, and so digitized, that we need new processes to manage those processes.

Fortunately, all of the IDEA 2006 presentation audio and slides have been posted online.

Although I think all of the presentations were great, and are worth listening to again, I want to especially point out Linda Stone's opening keynote (mp3 audio) on how we focus our attention, and how we've collectively shifted our attention focus every 20 years, e.g.:

• focusing on developing ourselves as individuals, using multi-tasking to make more time for ourselves (1965 - 1985)
• focusing on developing our place within groups using continuous partial attention to scan for opportunities to interact with others (1985 - 2005)
• focusing on developing something new, using something new to do something new! (2005-2025?)

I won't give away Linda's conclusion, but she has very interesting observations of what is that "something new". Definitely give it a listen.