A few weeks ago I attended what I had hoped would be a very informative and very enjoyable event called “The Dinner Party” that was thrown by the New York branch of AIGA.  The speakers scheduled were the principals of AvroKO (designers and owners of my favorite restaurant Public and a large reason that I decided to attend), chef Dan Barber (of Blue Hill), pastry chef and molecular gastronomist Will Goldfarb, and designer Matteo Bologna (of Mucca Design).

By all rights, it sounded like it should have been a lively discussion, especially considering that the moderator was Christine Muhlke, a deputy editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, who (at least on paper) seemed like she should’ve been an ideal person to get these disparate voices conversing with each other about the extremely multifaceted topic of “food and design.”

I am extremely sad to report that the event was less than a success.

From the venue I posted on my Twitter feed how I was feeling at the time–that the organization of the event was practically nonexistant and that it almost seemed like no one had a real handle on what was going on.  The event, which was supposed to start at 7 PM, didn’t actually begin until much closer to 7:30 PM; for whatever reason, we were kept waiting in one line to retrieve our tickets (which were not checked) and then in another line to enter the auditorium (which was completely empty prior to our event).

Muhlke spent a good ten minutes talking about God-knows-what before introducing AvroKO, who came out and talked for a good half-hour about their restaurants.  It was a bittersweet experience for me–as much as I love Public and as much as I want to visit both Double Crown (and Social House while I am in Las Vegas over New Year’s), I couldn’t help but feel offended by their use of what even they labeled as “offensive” social mores.  For example, they spoke of being inspired by the Hong Kong slum city of Kowloon when designing their opulent Vegas restaurant Social House, which struck me as both insensitive and off-key.  They made several similar incongruous revelations about a couple of their other projects as well; in any case, as stated on Eat Me Daily, they simply “failed to connnect the dots” and ended up sounding like a bunch of overprivileged brats.  It’s one thing to take inspiration from something like the slum of Kowloon, which in a way was admittedly beautiful, but to mock it with gilt candlesticks and mirrors and a high-dollar menu is just distasteful.

I will admit that, even as something of a foodie, I had no idea what Goldfarb was talking about (apparently his modus operandi is to come up with bad puns and then work backwards from there to create a dessert that has something to do with it), and Barber’s overly lengthy lecture on “natural” foie gras struck me as almost wholly irrelevant to design.  To make matters even worse, Bologna’s jaw was wired shut and he was difficult to understand, though his slide show of restaurants that his agency has designed was interesting though a bit repetitive after a while.

In any case, the various speakers all exceeded their allotted times and ran twenty minutes over, so there was no time for any sort of discussion; instead, the several hundred of us who had come to this event were dismissed simultaneously to the exceedingly narrow antechamber directly behind the auditorium for “dinner.”  (Translation: Each of us was given two tickets, each of which was redeemable for a paltry sample from one of six food and/or drink carts located in said hallway.  We were told that if we wanted more, we’d have to buy more tickets, regardless of the fact that the event was $40 for the general public and $20 to AIGA members.)

All of that serves as a lengthy preamble to the real reason that I entitled this post “taking design for granted.”  Clearly no one at AIGA New York gave more than an iota of thought to the arrangement of the food tables outside of the auditorium.  At almost the exact same time, several hundred ravenous individuals all stampeded out into a hallway that was no more than twenty feet wide to collect food samples from six tiny tables.  There was no traffic direction, no organic flow to the crowd… and only one exit at the far end of the hallway that couldn’t even be reached without shoving through a food- and drink-wielding crowd.

Did no one–NO ONE–consider, at least for a fraction of a second, that hundreds of bodies carrying bags and wearing bulky winter coats who would be carrying plates of food and cups of drinks would not have enough space to maneuver through such a packed crowd?  Did NO ONE have enough common sense to look at his or her watch and do some simple arithmetic on a piece of scratch paper to know when the various speakers would need to be cut off in order to at least initiate some semblance of discussion and to allow for at least a minor Q&A session?  And did NO ONE realize that Cooper Union’s “Great Hall” is a horridly designed theatre in which there isn’t a single seat whose view isn’t obstructed by columns?

Clearly there was a lack of foresight on the part of the planners, which breaks my heart.  Designers have absolutely no excuse not to throw stellar events that blow everyone out of the water.  We’re supposed to be experts on things like time management, traffic flow and portion control.  Have we really declined so far as a collective group that all we can do is make things look pretty?  Do we have no other abilities anymore?

I really hope that this was just an exceedingly good example of “how not to plan an event.”  I understand that mistakes are made and that sometimes things can go cross-eyed, but to have nearly every single aspect of the evening go wrong is just plain sad.