Storytelling is a concept that we are all familiar with, regardless of our background. As designers, it is often utilized as a tool during the design process. In Ireland it has been part of their culture for centuries. During Interaction12, IxDA organizers did a great job of incorporating Irish culture into the conference through different activities and performances at the venue. In between talks, I found myself attending an interactive storytelling experience called "Storytelling a la carte" with professional bard Coilín "The" Oh-Aissiex and Claire "Ambiencellist" Fitch. The audience was able to choose from a menu of stories, which consisted of options such as Ancient Irish Tales, Contemporary Irish Tales, and International Folktales. Each category had descriptions as if the audience was ordering off a menu at a restaurant. For example, under the category Ancient Irish Tales, one of the "Flavour" descriptions consisted of pity and magic, while another consisted of outrage and triumph. Audience members were asked to choose a category and a corresponding flavour of their choice from the menu for a unique tale accompanied by improvisational music.
I had the opportunity to experience two stories before moving onto the next 45-minute block of talks. The Storytelling a la carte experience was a perfect segue into Tom O'Rahilly's talk titled "Identity and Imagination."
Tom O'Rahilly gave our readership some insight on storytelling from both a cultural and design perspective in our Interaction12 preview. O'Rahilly, Director of the Leprechaun Museum in Dublin, began his talk by sharing his experience as a product designer, realizing that people primarily wanted to experience their products. He then moved into a discussion on identity. People often think of identity as items that identify us in daily life, such as a social security card or driver's license. However, O'Rahilly addressed cultural identity. According to O'Rahilly, components of identity include location, perspective, play and people. In storytelling, key components are making sense of the unknown, engagement and experience. These components were taken into consideration during the design of the Leprechaun Museum.
The nice thing about design school projects is that most are meant to be conceived of and completed within the same semester. In the absence of manufacturing problems and political issues, you're presented with a problem and expected to solve it with design in a matter of months.
In the real world, of course, the process of going from problem presentation to design solution can seem interminably long. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, cities like New York and London began removing trash cans from certain public spaces. In 2005 London suffered their own terrorist attack on July 7th. By 2007 two entrepreneurs named Kaveh Memari and Brian James designed and began testing a bombproof trash can; we first wrote it up in 2008, and it was scheduled to land on London streets, featuring internet-connected LCD screens that could warn Londoners of local emergencies, in 2009. That release date was then pushed back to 2010, with a target of 100 cans on London streets, but the release date came and went.
If you counted design as one of the subjects you were taught at some point between kindergarten and your senior year of high school, consider yourself very lucky. Like most people, I didn't receive a design education until I got to college. But thanks to a generous sponsorship from Target, the Cooper-Hewitt is bringing hands-on design to NYC students in grades K-12.
The program gets kids to think about design as an active part of their daily lives, to understand that design is all around them, that their shoes, their binders and their Metro cards have all been designed. There are design challenges tailor-made for each grade level, so while kindergartners are trying to figure out how to transport apples up a hill, 8th grades are working on how to keep a premature baby warm and safe in a rural village without electricity. These challenges aim to teach students how the design process is a creative method of problem solving that can be applied in almost any situation - a factor teachers are hoping will help with standardized testing.
To celebrate Helsinki's selection as World Design Capital for 2012, the Mint of Finland has launched a commemorative 50-Euro coin made from both gold and silver, seen above. They're also releasing a 5-Euro version, below, made from less-expensive aluminum and bronze.
Of course, the face value of the coin doesn't correspond with what it costs; collectors and design geeks will need to pony up 430 Euros for the 50 and 75 Euros for the 5. That's kind of a disheartening metaphor for the affordability of good design.
Longtime Core77 readers may remember that we wrote an entry years ago showing you how bimetallic coins are produced. The Helsinki coins shown here, the 1-Euro coin and the NYC subway token of decades past were all produced the same way. Check it out here.
London-based Johnson Banks is an identity and branding company that delves into print and even 3D work on occasion. Their latest 3D experiment resulted in Arkitypo, a 3D alphabet that tells the history of typography. "Each letterform is different, each in turn interprets its own alphabet." For example, "A" is for Aksidenz Grotesk, a forerunner of Helvetica. It was "part of a family of early sans-serifs called 'grotesques'...for this design a condensed weight is 'fractalized,' turning a grotesque into a thing of beauty."
Each letter is methodically researched and many of the resulting forms are quite beautiful. Take the "B," an uppercase Bodoni B spiraling out of the form of a Baskerville B like a snail shell. "Baskerville and Bodoni are usually judged as two separate typefaces, but Giambattista Bodoni modeled his famous font on John Baskerville's...The key difference is that the thicks and thins are in turn thicker, and thinner."
Yesterday saw the opening of Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design, the Museum of Arts and Design's latest exhibition in their ongoing examination of materials and process. As its title suggests, all of the works are composed of materials that are overlooked or otherwise ignored, if not eliminated altogether—unsavory scourges of sanitation that accrue over time, infinitesimal residues man-made and otherwise—dirt, dust, soot, ash, smoke and sand.
James Croak - The Persistence of Modernism
The smallest units of detritus have been gathered, organized and ultimately mastered in some two dozen artworks on display on the fifth floor of the museum. Chief Curator David McFadden noted that he'd initially expected to include works by a scant half dozen artists—sculptor James Croak and Zhang Huan, both of whom are in the show, came to mind—though the list eventually ballooned to 50 candidates, half of which are included in the exhibition. Indeed, the scope of the exhibition is more diverse than it is homogenous, featuring works in two dimensions and three, from representational (Vik Muniz) to abstract (Jim Denevan), with varying degrees of conceptual content behind the disparate approaches to visual execution.
Glithero - Burn Burn Burn
The ineluctable meaning of particulate matter—that from which we come and to which we will return, in so many words—was especially prominent in a few ephemeral works that are presented as photo or video documentation par excellence. Fuses burn with fearlessly self-destructive determination and tides rise with unsentimental predictability, leaving unmistakable scars (Glithero's Burn Burn Burn, above) or effacing the work entirely (Andy Goldsworthy's Bones/Sand/Ball/Tide, below)
Andy Goldsworthy - Bones/Sand/Ball/Tide
Cai Guo-Qiang - Black Ceremony
Nevertheless, the works in the exhibition are predominantly representational—even Cai Guo-Qiang's Black Ceremony culminates with (spoiler alert) a puff of rainbow—and, in a couple cases, the artist is literally using dirt (or dust, ash, etc.) as a medium, i.e. for drawing or sculpture.
Method, the international design and innovation consultancy, is currently looking for project managers to join our Client Services team in San Francisco. The Project Manager coordinates all activities and resources involved in the execution of a client engagement. He or she will be the day-to-day liaison between Method's various internal disciplines and the client. The Project Manager is instrumental in ensuring that a project is completed on time, on budget and meets client/agency objectives.
Yesterday's Apple-themed iPhone cases were clearly a hit, but it would be a bit of a stretch to say that they're a huge step forward in case design. As a counterpoint, I was intrigued to see Andrea Ponti's "Aqualife," a 'one-size-fits-all' waterproof case "designed for all top smartphone models."
Water-resistant up to one meter deep and equipped with a clip-lock system. Its polycarbonate, see-through bottom allows you to take pictures and make videos under water. The clear silicone display window is designed for you to use all the touch functions under water and thanks to a valve you can plug in the waterproof earbuds included in the pack through the case directly into the device.
If the design seems to suffer from the universal plight of universal cases—it's definitely on the big side at 25% taller than an iPhone and a full 40% wider—it's worth noting that the "Aqualife" also doubles as a wallet.
Robb Godshaw is an industrial design student at R.I.T., and he's come up with a strange and brilliant invention: The Cryoscope Haptic Weathervane, which is essentially a tactile temperature indicator. Touch it and you can feel what the temperature is outside.
The Cryoscope is equipped with a heat sink, a thermoelectric-cooling Peltier element, and a cooling fan, all combined and operated by an Arduino controller that receives forecast data from a Web-based app, all neatly enclosed in an aluminium cube ready to be touched.
At first I thought these were just a Photoshopped gag, but nope, these are real and for sale. A company called Schreer Delights is selling a line of iPhone cases that reference Apple's design history, printing visual elements from the original Mac, the original iMac and the original iPod directly onto the case. Each runs a little under 50 bucks.
It's kind of a weird commentary on what exactly is cool about retro styling; if you make your iPhone 4S look like a 3G, that's dumb; but make it look like the first iPod of ten years ago and that's cool.
The Future of Integrated Health Care
Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas
Design Miami 2011
Tokyo Design Week 2011
Born Digital: Exploring Digital Culture & Interactivity 
SHIFTBoston 2012 GLOW Competition 
Book Review: Where They Create, by Paul Barbera and Alexandra Onderwater
Book Review: Design by Nature, by Maggie Macnab
Teach Less, Integrate More 
Public Service Announcement 
Lego...for Girls?
Your First Car?
Core77 Design Awards 
SHIFTBoston 2012 Glow Competition 
Tour Guide at the Leprechaun Museum
James Croak - The Persistence of Modernism
Glithero - Burn Burn Burn
Andy Goldsworthy - Bones/Sand/Ball/Tide
Cai Guo-Qiang - Black Ceremony
Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas
The Messy Art of Saving the World
Big Idea, Little Printer
The Landscape of User Experience Design in Asia
DESIGN MIAMI 2011
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2011
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2011
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2011
Where They Create, by Paul Barbera and Alexandra Onderwater
Design by Nature, by Maggie Macnab
The Portfolio Handbook, by the Class of 2012, Industrial Design, DAAP, University of Cincinnati
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Making Promises at the End of Time
Space Migration and Designing Our Future Habitat
The Landscape of User Experience in Asia
The Path Less Followed (or, Why I Didn't Work at Circuit City)
Masters of the Cutaway
