When the Lights Went Out

Fingers raw from almost a year of madly banging on the keyboard to line up impressive speakers and organize the IDSA National Conference slated to take place in New York City in August 2003. The opening day was fast approaching like a hairpin turn on the autobahn.  

Leveraging the collective weight of Smart Design in New York City—a meaty innovation lab where we feverishly redesigned everyday things during design’s golden age in the ’90s and where I was then director of industrial design—I was fortunate for the support they gave me in my role as the 2003 IDSA National Conference Chair. I had the luxury of working on this conference in true 24/7 deep-dive mode, whirling it up into what was sure to be one of the best IDSA conferences on record.  

This was no small task. Back then, the IDC Conference Chair picked the theme (mine was “Cool”), rallied an advisory committee (mine was super world-class and included names like Arlene Hirst, Pilar Guzman, Bruce Nussbaum, H/IDSA, and other global influencers before we even knew what an influencer was), and designed the branding and all the collateral material for attendees. Making many trips to the venue and planning day-trip excursions to the Statue of Liberty, nautical expeditions on the Circle Line, and retreats to the Noguchi Museum—all of this squarely on my melamine plate.  

The hours and minutes ticked down until it was—as we say in New York with the authority few other cities can match—Show Time! I was as locked in as a 19th-century mortise joint.  

Day one rocketed us through mind-blowing presentations by Douglass Rushkoff, Paola Antonelli, Karim Rashid, Gijs Baaker, Eric Buell, and an in-person 97-year-old Eva Zeisel, who addressed the audience with the vigor of today’s 20-year-old Instagrammers. The raw excitement and culmination of our efforts were underway in palpable grand fashion—and then, poof!  

It almost sounded like a streetlamp exploding—the sudden engine seizure of the nation’s most power-thirsty metropolis grinding to a sudden, eerie, and apocalyptic stop. My Nokia brick phone, designed by our 2003 IDSA conference speaker Frank Nuovo, who was en route to the conference venue at that very moment, had no place to charge! Subway trains were frozen in their tunnels and in the middle of bridges, and I was staring down at the street from my darkened, silent, and increasingly stuffy Marriott Marquis perch in utter disbelief watching Eva’s white hair, visible in a sea of fleeing pedestrians, making its way up Broadway to her Upper West Side classic six apartment. 

Little did I know then that this power-grid failure stretched from Delaware to Toronto and looked like a giant ink stain from outer space. And that this epic blackout would prompt a spike in the gas-powered backup generator market for decades to come. What I did know is that I had a three-year-old at home and a babysitter who also had kids. So I had to traverse the six miles back to Brooklyn on foot, and I had to do it now. This trek was broken up, ironically, by a call from Frank as I was crossing the Manhattan Bridge with hundreds of thousands of others in the now pedestrian-only car lanes telling me he could not make it to NYC due to the sweeping flight cancellations that stymied travel for weeks to come. I listened to his call like a hypnotized zombie as I watched terrified subway goers being rescued from their frozen dystopian trains that were not only suspended precariously over the east river but suspended in time itself 

Low, the evening was, plucked from the party and staring into my Brooklyn garden. No music except the ghostly whine of sirens and the thump of helicopter rotors overhead. And yet I had it relatively easy. Gijs Baaker, the founding member of the design collective Droog who crossed the Atlantic from Holland expressly to deliver his speech, was sleeping on a Times Square side street using an empty Gatorade bottle as a pillow. The bathrooms at the Marriott Marquis, which apparently needed electrical power to function, overflowed with a stench so foul it became tattooed on the conferencegoers’ olfactory for months.  

As dawn broke and shock diminished, it was time to rally. Electricity is such a minor thing really—societies have existed for centuries without it, and so could we. It was time to muster strength. A call to arms. After all, in the spirit of the OXO potato peeler, some of the best designs in the world do not require electrical power. It was time to apply that logic to this quickly dissolving conference before it vaporized forever.  

Over the bridge again I rode on my bicycle—six miles as if it were one—to address the troops battalion-style. In the shadows of a darkened Times Square that resembled a Christmas tree in February, a parting of the clouds arrived like an effervescent beam of sunshine, lights miraculously sputtering back on like the spark-spitting combustion of a World War I prop plane.  

What was left of the unprecedentedly great line-up of speakers—those who could not easily leave and therefore remained—fired up their PowerPoints once again. The scene was like a muddy and soiled Yasgur’s Farm at the finale of Woodstock. And in much the same way, in the true spirit of resilience that industrial designers by nature seem to summon again and again, we were regaled by the speakers’ presentations, including our own Jimi Hendrix, who closed down the show—a wild and crazy Marcel Wanders, who delivered his closing remarks in the nude.   

—Scott Henderson, 2003 IDSA National Conference Chair