Our Story

The story of the Gel conference begins in the fall of 2002, when Mark Hurst got the idea to host an in-person gathering of people interested in experience design. A few years earlier Mark had founded Creative Good, his New York-based company advising teams on making online technology easier to use – but Mark sensed that there was a possibility to explore the idea of experience more broadly.

What makes an experience good? Or authentic? Or meaningful? These questions guided Mark in his conception of “Good Experience Live,” or Gel. In October 2002 he announced the event in his email newsletter (at that time called “Good Experience”) for a date in May 2003.

Early events

The first event, Gel 2003, took place on May 2, 2003 at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan. As host, Mark introduced speakers like Stewart Butterfield, who later went on to create Flickr and Slack; Marissa Mayer, who went on to become CEO of Yahoo; and the Trachtenberg Family Slide Show Players, who performed a live musical set.

Subsequent Gel events, from 2004 through 2016, featured hundreds of speakers and performers, many of whom spoke at Gel first , before breaking out to wider popularity. One notable example is Jimmy Wales, who give his first-ever talk about Wikipedia at Gel 2005. (Here’s the video.)

Mark also hosted two spinoff events along the way: euroGel in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006 and Gel Health in New York in 2009.

A hiatus

By 2016, the world had changed quite a bit from the early days of Gel. Technology companies were increasingly launching exploitative products and services, relying on toxic algorithms and deceptive interfaces to achieve growth at any cost. The idea of “creating good experiences” seemed more and more outdated.

Seeing this shift in the tech industry, and sensing that things were soon going to get worse, Mark put Gel on hiatus after the Gel 2016 conference. In 2017 he launched a radio show on WFMU, Techtonic with Mark Hurst, in order to continue spotlighting important voices – except this time, rather than highlighting the positive potential of tech, he raised an alarm about where tech was headed.

Warning about surveillance, manipulation, racist and radicalizing algorithms, and the threat of tech monopolies and oligarchs, Mark was an early and vocal critic of Big Tech – both on Techtonic and in his weekly email newsletter. For several years, it was difficult to imagine that Gel – an event highlighting positive possibilities – would ever return.

Rebirth: Gel 2026

The change came in the early 2020s, after the pandemic: there were signs, small but undeniable, that people were beginning to create good experiences again with tech. They were actively opposed to predatory Big Tech and its corporate platforms: neo-Luddites, nonprofits, artists and craftspeople, all dedicated to helping people survive the tech age, in spite of the threat from Silicon Valley. These “green shoots,” as Mark puts it, inspired him to bring about the rebirth of Gel, this fall, at Gel 2026.