5D is delighted to present Keynote speakers Shekhar Kapur: film director, producer, adventurer and poet, and Jeff Kipnis: preeminent architectural critic, theorist and designer who will explode the conference with their discussion, "CHAOS and MISBEHAVIOR." Expect to see red-hot shrapnel and career-changing ideas.

In its purest form, play is the freely engaged imagination. New notions of play, facilitated by innovations in technology and emerging ideas about interactivity and collaboration in virtual space, offer intuitive connections between people, culture and the built world. How can and does PLAY seep into design and culture, and how does the new digital play-space change the way we work?

The interplay of science and design in narrative media will be the subject of "Bigger Bang: A Beautiful Collision," led by a pioneer in gestural interface. In the evolving landscape of the immersive experience, DESIGN and TECHNOLOGY are inextricably and fortuitously linked. With a distinguished panel of artists and scientists, the future of this fluid collaboration will be fully examined.

Data has emerged to be the most readily available and under-exploited raw material of the 21st Century. It is through the explorations and practices of immersive design that data can become explicitly valuable and immensely powerful.

Design empowers raw data with meaning through the collaborative processes of selection, organization, visualization and experience.

This panel explores how design can sculpt data to form new environments. These datascapes are driven by the immersive process of collaborative design and produce meaningful, functional and beautiful narrative spaces.

This panel starts where most transmedia panels end with a focus on the application of abstract ideas to specific design challenges emerging from the development of transmedia characters, stories, worlds, and interfaces. At what point do we move from thinking about successful applications in a particular medium to what transforms story by BUILDING WORLDS across multiple platforms? How is this new imperative reshaping the designer of the future?

The electronic page for the most part remains an object presented in a fixed form. There is no exchange with the author; it is all about a solitary experience. If we are to take advantage of the multiple opportunities present in the digisphere we must disengage from the metaphor of the page and dive into DIMENSIONALITY.

In considering the immersive possibilities in animation, gaming, television, film, architecture, and the new museum, this panel will address the reciprocal relationship between design and the organization of knowledge. What might an immersive learning habitat look like? What would it change?

The eighth rule of Fight Club is "You Have to Fight."

Removing the stage completely, all the 5D panelists will immerse themselves within the audience in an open, un-orchestrated and provocative conversation:

Today, immersive technologies stand at the threshold of an unimaginable power to represent and manipulate reality not only at the level of IMAGE, but more insidiously at the level of SENSATION. Robotics, CG and sound engineering now join with such esoteric sense-immersion technologies as scent arousal chemistry and designer psychopharmacology to make any act of imagination or desire feel utterly real for audiences. Such power inevitably guarantees unprecedented abuses. For example, suddenly the theater of political performance is stolen from public discourse and debate while those who understand and control the technology infantilize, addict or otherwise seduce large audiences into passivity. Does responsibility for the drafting of new cautionary tales adequate in proportion to the potential of this emerging power belong in any way to its design practitioners?