What is Gel?
Short for "Good Experience Live", Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms -- in business, technology, art, society, and life.
Instead of focusing on just one thing (design, technology, user experience, business, etc.) like many conferences, Gel touches on many things. This challenges attendees to find, and learn from, the patterns that underlie good experience, even in disciplines vastly different from their own.
In attendees' words...
We asked attendees to fill in the blank: "Gel is..." and they wrote 84 responses.
Read all "Gel is..." answers. To get a sense of who these attendees are, check out the Gel 2007 attendee list, which shows the organizations and titles (including 30 CEOs, presidents, and founders).
Video clips
The Gel Videos page contains clips of past conferences. This is probably the best way to understand the range of speakers... however, many first-time attendees have said that the videos don't do justice to the actual in-person Gel experience.
Gel history and structure
Gel was founded by Mark Hurst, who ran the first Gel in 2003 in New York City. Since then Gel has run every year in New York in late April or early May. (2006 was an especially busy year, as we ran a second event - euroGel 2006, in Copenhagen, Denmark - that September.)
Gel is a two-day event, taking place on a Thursday and Friday:
• Thursday, also known as "Day 1," is full of direct experiences - tours, seminars, workshops - all across New York City. There are two sessions: a morning "icebreaker" for attendees to meet each other at one of two or three concurrent events, and then an afternoon session where attendees are assigned to attend one of a dozen or more possible choices. (Several weeks before Gel, attendees are asked to rank their afternoon choices; assignments are made in the order that tickets were bought, so that early purchasers have the best chance of getting their first choice of afternoon event.) For example, see the Gel 2007 Day 1 experiences.
• Friday is the "theater day," when all 400-or-so attendees convene in the theater to hear over a dozen speakers present on-stage. (The standard presentation is between 15 and 20 minutes long.) Friday is completely catered, including breakfast, two coffee breaks, lunch, and cocktails at the end of the day.
You can see the speaker lists from all past events on the Past Gels page, and video clips of all speakers since 2005 on the Gel Videos page.
Our next event is Gel 2008, coming up in April 2008 in New York City.
