Exploring creativity, enterprise, and progress.

• Position: Dynamic Visions Conference - Brief Article

Where do new ideas come from? What environments encourage creativity and progress? And what, if anything, can we do to find, build, or nurture such environments? Come hear an exciting group of original thinkers - and pioneering doers - explore these questions from a wide range of perspectives.

This is no ordinary conference. It offers a "banquet of ideas," as one of last year's guests put it. You'll hear leading experts from biology, technology, management, ecology, media, public policy, education, and design - lots of intellectual heft, with minimal hype. You'll learn from them, and they'll learn from you. The emphasis will be on accessibility, cross-fertilization, and "serious play." You'll get insights you can use in your work, your home, your civic life, your future. You'll also have fun. At the Dynamic Visions Conference, the focus will be on stimulating your imagination, not selling you consulting services.

In her acclaimed and controversial book, The Future and Its Enemies, conference founder Virginia Postrel lays out a dynamic vision of human progress: a process of open-ended, trial-and-error evolution and competition. At the heart of that process are creative people who come up with new combinations - of things, ideas, and practices. Finding promising combinations is one of the greatest creative challenges, a task that requires serendipity and freedom as well as imagination.

An environment where different sorts of things, ideas, practices, or people frequently bump into each other can encourage that process. Such areas of encounter, where something meets something else, are "verges."

A verge can be a city, a cafe, a frontier, or a multidisciplinary problem. This year's Dynamic Visions Conference will explore these special literal and metaphorical places - past, present, and future. Our topics range from the encounter between news media and information technology to America's ethnic future, from business collaboration to the Martian frontier, from the verge between home and work to the verge between nature and civilization.

The Dynamic Visions Conference itself is a fertile verge, where people from different backgrounds can come together, spark one another's creativity, and provide new perspectives to each other. You will have the opportunity to meet other interesting and intelligent people at meals and receptions and to participate in open-mike discussions and informal breakout groups. The program and schedule are designed to...