It must be some kind of record: 70% of the speakers at the one-day AIGA NY conference Cause/Effect brought us to the brink of tears. But until the end, we really weren't sure why.

We even found ourselves pretty much speechless at one point. The presentation that went beyond words, meaning a blog post really couldn't do it justice, was Alan Jacobson's powerful work on a memorial in Rwanda as part of the Barefoot Artists program. Read up on the project on their site and don't miss a chance to catch Jacobson present in person.

Although we missed Steven Heller's propaganda parade, Seymour Chwast's poster-rama and Mark Randall discussing the Urban Forest Project (catch coverage over at Core77), we have more detailed reports about Carin Goldberg, Bobby Martin, Frank Baseman, Phil Patton, Nicholas Blechman, Marc Alt, Scott Stowell, and Chris Hacker, who were truly all great.

All the young designers were stars. Seth Labenz and Roy Rub presented the fascinating results of their experiment "Uniting." And the final panel of the day, a three-fer of social entrepreneurship had the always delightful Randy Hunt and his Amazing Project, and two extremely eloquent show-stoppers: Kristin Johnson's Practical Small Projects, bringing solar energy to Mali, and Lara McCormick's Stop and Start Over (another Sappi grant winner!), an addiction recovery site and community that's designed to appeal more to the young audience looking for help.

The only minor disappointment was the One Laptop Per Child presentation by Lisa Strausfeld. Cute as they may be, we got little, if any, insight into how the laptops really work, and we're still not sure why the beautiful interface is appropriate for kids who have never used a computer, especially since a CBS News story showed kids easily using regular laptops. Also puzzling was that they did no testing of the interface with African kids. They had just gotten their shipment of laptops that day, so maybe they need to play around with them some more before presenting again.

But overall, the day was expertly assembled and orchestrated by chairs Mike Essl (who doubled as an on-stage tech guy) and Emma Presler (wearing a tres snazzy scarf). We noticed a similar thread running through both Cause/Effect and Designism 2.0 (without the "banal-retentive," of course): The most striking projects were really not about design in the traditional sense, echoing Milton Glaser's sentiments at Designism about the dissemination being more important than the device. In fact, we thought, these people didn't really act like designers at all. More like MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipients, Nobel Prize winners, UN ambassadors. And that realization was simply overwhelming.