photo by scottru

We went to a new event called Ignite Seattle last night. They had a series of what they call “ask later” talks, where anyone can sign up to show 20 slides and talk for 5 minutes. The catch is that the speaker doesn’t get to control the slides. They each go up for 15 seconds, keeping everyone on time and making for some extra improv in speaking. Before that, they had a bridge building contest. You got half an hour, 1000 popsicle sticks, and a hot glue gun. Your bridge had to span 15 inches. If your bridge managed to hold up one of your team members, then you won a free issue of Make: magazine. As you can see above, our bridge was pretty haphazard, but it did manage to hold up our 45 lb team member!

There was a big crowd there and we met some very interesting people. The talks were mostly by local techies, some startups, some larger companies, some just for fun. There was a bar with ID and wifi. Gwen had a great time building the bridge, talking to people, and handing out defectivebydesign.org stickers. (thanks, Gregory!) We will definitely go back again!