After a refreshing lunch graciously hosted by Steelcase, Serious Play reconvened just as the sun broke over the cloudy skies of Pasadena.

Hockenberry opened by explaining the obsessive dichotomy of documentary film making: the obsession of the subject of the documentary, and the obsession of the filmmaker. We were treated to a ‘behind the obsession’ insight from Helen Hood Scheer, who made her directorial debut in the documentary Jump. Unlike the traditional competitive sports documentary, Jump tells the tale of young people across the world striving to make jump rope an Olympic sport, by collaborating, negotiating, standardizing the rules, judging standards and creating the competitive model for jumping rope.

The jumpers broke out to perform yet another, and even more, involved routine. When interviewed, they highlighted the importance of teamwork and their modular, dynamic roles that rotated throughout the routine. They also shed light on the highly competitive and intense world of professional rope jumpers, and their - er - relationships with their neighbors downstairs.

To conclude John asked cheekily, “have you ever thought about incorporating wheelchairs into your routine?” “Sure,” said one of the jumpers, “in fact I can tech you a few moves!” Training starts after the Conference.

After a humorous video from the Marx brothers, John introduced Irene Au, Director of User Experience at Google, responsible for the design and user research for Google’s software products worldwide. Fact is, the simple and clean user interface of Google’s homepage is one of the most celebrated and valuable destinations (not to mention property) on the web. A lesser known, yet important, fact, “a worker should never be more than 150 feet away from food” at Google.

Irene showed us some very nifty eye-tracking systems that Google employs to test usability and visual heat maps that display where their attention focuses. By combining this information with hugely detailed analytics (when and what people click), they turn decision making into a very scientific artform.

With 70% of its traffic coming from outside the US, Google’s international growth is massive and demands a measured response. The range of Google users across languages and cultures poses a real challenge for designers. “It’s easy to design for ourselves because we understand ourselves, but we don’t really understand other cultures and other markets as well.” This leads to a large amount of playful brainstorming, both locally in front of white boards covered with Post-It notes to distant and, often surprisingly rugged, research missions in the field.

Talk about another culture. Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Labs, after converting his childhood bedroom door to a garage door, he yearned to build a virtual world where we could realize the out of this world ideas that are so difficult to execute in the real world. So when the internet came along, he seized the opportunity to “create the laws of physics.” What was born out that imagination - Second Life - is now a $30 million virtual world success that is ten times size of San Francisco, but as densely built up. “You have no idea what you’re going to find, it’s going to be so different than Earth - where anything is possible. . . . Virtual worlds allow us to recreate ourselves,” nearly a localized version of space exploration, Rosedale observed.

On the future of the web, Rosedale thinks it’s “almost certainly true that anything this evolves into is going to be bigger than the web itself.” These virtual worlds are going to be the most common ways that we use use the internet to be together and share information, Rosedale foresees. Second Life forgoes the utopian vision, “you need that level of freedom, [and] those top-down schemes [like utopias] are alienating. What’s more, grand schemes [of control] don’t scale well beyond the Mall of America.”

But Rosedale calls our attention that while Second Life is expansive, it’s young and we must be a little forgiving of its growing pains. “It’s closer to the Wild West than to Rome,” and its culture and identity is evolving. But progress is happening fast, like “really fast, we’ve estimated things are evolving at ten times the rate of what’s possible in the real world.” Fasten your seatbelts, he welcomingly cautions, change is coming.

Hockenberry observed that we’re on a threshold of changing our notions of what communication is. Slight of hand extraordinaire Jamy Ian Swiss enveloped the audience, astonishing our sense of time, place and communication. “The best surprises are brought about when there’s a little consideration on the part of the audience.” You don’t just reveal the trick too quickly, instead, challenge, engage, confuse and - finally - deeply satisfy your subject. Jamy concluded with a final trick - pulling the attendee’s folded card from inside his pocket watch, how did it get there!? “Nobody thought we’d work this hard to fool you - now that’s a method.”