Gabriel Shirley

I spent the last 2 weeks at conferences on Cortes Island, about 200 miles north of Seattle as the crow flies. Cortes is the gateway to a vast wilderness that extends from British Columbia through the Northwest Territories to Alaska. It’s an ancient summer gathering place for native peoples in the area who came together to trade, tell stories, eat and swim together in some of the warmest summer waters the inland Pacific has to offer. Each summer, I endeavor to spend some time on Cortes, gathering with friends and colleagues from around the world, each of us bringing a unique perspective and experience to addressing some of the major issues of our time.

(Nancy Margulies painting from the Channel Rock gathering)

This year I was fortunate enough to attend 2 such gatherings, the first at an off-the-grid retreat center called Channel Rock that is stewarded by Gifford and Libba Pinchot. It serves as the remote campus for the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, which offers one of the first sustainable MBA degrees in the United States. The site is accessible only by boat or on foot… there are no roads that lead there. The conference was about the fundamental elements of change methodologies, and how to be effective in a time of extinction level issues (an extension of my work with The Change Handbook and Nexus for Change).

(Oyster BBQ on the beach at Hollyhock)

The second conference I attended was an invitational event at Hollyhock, a 25-year-old learning center with a mission that combines personal development with social action. It’s a rustic, beautiful place that is a fabulous setting for important conversations and action planning.

At both events I had my laptop and my iPhone. The laptop mostly stayed in its bag, while the iPhone came along in my pocket. I used it to take pictures of the groups, to capture contact information, to take notes, and to send quick email during breaks. Each evening, I connected the iPhone to my laptop to charge and synchronize it (I left the docking station at home, so I was using the computer to charge the phone via USB). By the last day of the event, I was able to email everyone a full contact roster that included head shots of each person, taken from the phone, as well as a group vCard for one-click importing into contact management software. I exported the full-sized photos from iPhoto to Flickr, and I created a wiki (using PBwiki) to post some of the conference artifacts.

I’ve attended quite a number of conferences and meetings over the last 17 years, and in the past I’ve often had good intentions about following up with contacts but waited long enough to do so that my memory of which person said what or which face went with what name had faded. The iPhone helps me in 2 ways to remedy this problem: It provides a non-obtrusive kinesthetic experience (taking photos, adding contact info, taking notes — all in one device) and it captures that information for future reference.

I experienced the iPhone as an extension of myself, of what I wanted to do. It enhanced my experience of being in nature with other people, capturing important details but not distracting me for too long, and it helped me deepen and extend human connections by formalizing my learning process and giving me the ability to act on networking opportunities immediately. Interestingly, it’s also the least amount of time I’ve spent staring at my laptop to “catch up” with email in quite a while.

From a design perspective, the iPhone is so seamless for me that I don’t think about it as “technology.” It’s just an extension of how I engage human relationships. If this is true for other people as well, it’s quite a design coup for Apple.