It should come as no surprise that Vitsœ—a company that employs cycling enthusiasts on both sides of the Atlantic—were happy to host "Built to Last," an exhibition of beautiful bicycles by New York's own Kinfolk Studios. The short talk by Kinfolk co-founder Ryan Carney last Thursday was among the first events to mark the ICFF festivities in town this weekend, which run through tomorrow, May 22.
Carney started the Brooklyn- and Tokyo-based design studio with a few well-traveled buddies who all happened to be into skateboarding and, of course, Japanese track bicycles (also known as Keirin bikes, after the track cycling race). The latter has become their claim to fame, and while the Kinfolk Bicycle Co. remains their most successful enterprise to date, they've since expanded their practice into designing interiors, as well as a bit of client work on the side.
Ryan's Kinfolk hangs in the window; image courtesy of Vitsœ
Over the course of the talk and Q&A session, Carney—a math major who worked as an aerospace engineer prior to launching the brand—shared a brief history of the brand, which he founded in 2008 with John Buellens, Maceo Eagle and Salah Mason when they wanted to get ahold of some Keirin bicycles from Tokyo, where John and Maceo had been living. (It's an obsession that I can relate to: contemporary craft builders notwithstanding, the Japanese are rivaled only by the Italians when it comes to traditional steel track bikes.)
Maceo supplemented Ryan's gloss with a bit of insight into the enduring appeal of Keirin bikes: since spectators bet on the riders (as opposed to the bikes), each and every component is made to extremely strict standards and approved by the NJS, the regulatory organization responsible for ensuring that the only variable is in the competitors themselves.
Art Center students are the friendliest, most stressed out bunch I've ever met. The demanding curriculum requires a level of commitment and professionalism unheard of in most schools, and the students spend trimester after grueling trimester pulling regular all-nighters and working through weekends to get to this moment: Grad Show. Students in all disciplines create beautiful booths to show off their best work to professors, peers and potential employers.
As you walk the hallways and make your way through classrooms filled with student work, their tension is palpable. Even though their school work is over, no one seems truly relieved. After all, they've just dished out obscene amounts of money for an education that's famous for bridging art, design and creativity with professional practices and some business know-how—but they know the biggest hurdle still awaits: finding a job, or at least some freelance work.
But tonight I want to tell them to relax, unwind and help themselves to a free beer or two (or three or four) at one of the bars that lie around every corner of the winding maze of halls and passageways that is the Art Center campus. At this point, however, they're too used to working under constant pressure to just "unwind." Fortunately, their hard work hasn't been for nothing. Click through the gallery of the best projects from the Spring 2012 class.
It's your last chance to apply for the Summer Workshop of the new MFA Products of Design program. Held at the beautiful Domaine de Boisbuchet in Southwestern France, this year's workshop will run for 10 days, inviting participants to immerse themselves in the evolving field of product design.
The Products of Design Summer Program in France offers hands-on, collaborative experience and instruction in rapid sketching, materials investigation, prototyping, iteration, narrative creation and environmental stewardship. In addition to work completed during the days, participants will enjoy opportunities to sight see, socialize with designers from around the world, and attend lectures in the evenings.
The program invites applicants from various backgrounds: design professionals, students (in at least senior standing at an art & design college), or graduate students in any field. Faculty will be MFA Products of Design chair Allan Chochinov and faculty member Emilie Baltz.
Energy Strategy for the EcoFridge collaboration between UC Berkeley Engineering and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Design students
"I don't know about this whole sustainability thing, anymore," a student said to me recently. "No offense. It seemed cool for a while. But a lot of the stuff I see is weak."
These days I spend a lot of time with students and brand-new grads. They're fired up to make an impact, and are impatient with solutions that don't directly take on big issues like e-waste and energy scarcity. Many of them know what greenwashing is, even if they don't know what it's called. Young designers have been vaguely led to believe that designers hold the power. But when they set out to create green product solutions, they often fail—it's just not work that can be done alone.
Waste is money. Wasted materials, water or energy indicates a design failure on some level. Better solutions are both technical and creative: they're high-performance and beautiful, while guiding people to conserve. So even if your school never taught sustainable design, nothing's stopping you from taking this on yourself.
Make friends with engineers
Performance is an engineer's main priority, and is the key to their creativity. Meet your engineering partners halfway. Familiarize yourself with their language. Learn how to analyze product impacts. Get savvy about understanding energy and greener materials. More importantly, though, find a way to collaborate that inspires engineering to push the boundaries of performance.
Many of the best sustainable design student projects I see come from interdisciplinary teams. A colleague and I recently coached a team of students who were designing a new refrigerator. Half of the team was made up of UC Berkeley engineers, the other half product designers from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The engineers investigated technologies like thermal battery innovations, essential for creating a high-efficiency appliance. But they were developing a mass-market product, not simply a new technology. The designers focused on user behavior, cultural context, aesthetics and ease of use. To succeed in the Mexican market, any environmentally friendly technologies had to be affordable for everyone. The biggest waste in fridges, though, isn't necessarily solved by new technologies: it's in addressing the huge amount of cold air that pours out when the door is held open. The team's final design incorporated an insulated window and quick access tray that allows users to ponder, and then to pull out the food they use most, without opening the full door. All of this keeps the fridge closed longer, which saves energy by preventing the cold air from escaping.
Though not as comprehensive as CCA's student experience videos, RISD has released a series of video interviews of their summer program attendees. With this year's RISD Summer Series batch of courses starting in late June, prospective attendees may want to hear someone's firsthand experience of what to expect and what that attendee liked about the program. Here's one of the vids:
Though branded as Continuing Ed courses, RISD's Summer Series is also open to high school grads looking to get a leg up on next year's freshmen. Courses in the Art & Design category are spread over Apparel, Architecture, Digital & Media, Drawing & Illustration, Furniture, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Jewelry, Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture, and Textiles. Check out the full selection here.
"There is no way to understand making, other than going through the process of making," writes Anders Brix, Head of Studies for Architecture, Design and Industrial Form at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. To that end, a class of fourth-year students led by associate professor Nicolai de Gier were tasked with making chairs. Lots of them. Specifically, each student would have to physically make one chair every week, for the duration of the five-week course.
What we love about this is the gradual way the assignments were unfolded—for example Week 1 they could use only slats to build a chair, Week 2 they could use slats and plywood, Week 3 was only plywood, and so on—and the great variety produced within these gradual steps.
Writes de Gier,
There can be many approaches to designing a chair. Typically students start out by making sketches, drawings and models before making final full-scale prototypes. Usually the period of time spent on the small-scale explorations expand to leave only a limited and flustered period of time to develop full-scale pieces. Many of the limitations of the design are not actually encountered until the full-scale chair is constructed. In recognition of these concerns, we were very interested to explore possibilities to speed up and intensify the design and realization process. For us, it was extremely important to have some physical material at 1:1 scale to inform a series of ongoing discussions in the studio, to improve the skills in the workshops and to develop a synthesis between the material, the tectonics, and the form of the chair.
It's often tricky to extract design lessons from World War II. Documentaries on the subject can quickly veer into boys-and-their-toys adulations of how fast this plane was, how tough that tank was, how many bullets this machinegun could spit out. So we were happy to see the intelligent, balanced and edifying "Blueprints of War" episode of the BBC's excellent The Genius of Design program. Although the show kicks off with sensationalist quotes like "This is a program about death and product design" and "Here's what they don't teach at art school: When nations go to war, design is in the front line," the viewer is rewarded with a comprehensive look at the state of wartime design in America, the UK, Germany and Russia, and there's enough design history meat for even a pacifist to sink their teeth into.
At one hour in length the program is too long for you to sneak into a workday, but we highly urge you to at least queue it up and steal snippets of viewing time when you can. (I viewed it in four 15-minute sittings.) You'll be rewarded with an improved understanding of international design history. For example: Consider that today, German design and manufacturing is admired the world over, and they're one of the few wealthy nations with robust design and manufacturing industries. So it's difficult to comprehend that there was a time, over a century ago, when things designed and built in Germany were considered junk. The program explains, succinctly, the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) initiative that created that transition. The examination of early German industrial design history is always tough because historians must treat with the repellency of Nazi ideology to even get at the subject matter, but the BBC does an admirable job here.
You'll also learn lots of interesting design history tidbits, like how the fearsome Tiger tank was the result of a design competition that Ferdinand Porsche lost, and how a flatpack submachine gun was produced from a British toy factory. You'll see manufacturing innovations like pre-fabricated Liberty ships, and ultrafast British bombers that needed to be constructed out of bent plywood due to a materials shortage. (That latter plane, the world's first stealth bomber as its wooden body rendered it invisible to radar, is enthused to be "the finest piece of furniture this country's ever built" by one interview subject.) You'll see the influence of Henry Ford in overseas tank factories, and the Russians' "clash in design philosophy" with the Germans vis-à-vis tank models.
There are a lot more things covered in that hour, too many to list here. But perhaps most rewardingly, you'll see, as the episode winds up in an Eames house, how Charles and Ray's furniture that we all came to know was made possible by their necessary wartime contributions.
Hit the jump to watch it in full; if you can't get to it today, bookmark it for the weekend!
If you went to ID school in, say, the '70s or '80s, it would have been adequate to teach you how to draw, carve hair dryers out of foam or sculpt car fenders out of clay. And you probably would not have interacted much with students from other majors.
These days you'd expect a lot more from your program. With mere consumerism moving into industrial design education's rearview mirror and interdisciplinarianism (how's that for a word) coming into its own, design schools have an opportunity to address far bigger issues.
An encouraging example of this is the Healthy Food Project, a collaboration between RISD, Brown University and Design for America, an organization that uses human-centered design and multidisciplinary teams to solve problems. The Healthy Food Project seeks to tackle a very American problem—we eat like crap—and incorporated students from industrial design, graphic design, architecture, international relations, and urban studies.
While the project appears to be ongoing, there does not appear to be any website, beyond this video, where we can follow their progress. If you HFP guys are reading this, please let us know how we can keep abreast.
The Internet allows us to share information more freely than ever before. But along with that come two somewhat disturbing trends we've recently picked up on.
The first is that people are increasingly posting things linklessly. In other words, someone will assemble a Tumblr wall of photos of awesome things, but there is no link back to where those things came from, what they are or who made them. Merely showing a photo of a beautiful chair is apparently enough for the poster, with no opportunities to further your understanding of it. But I want to know who designed the chair and where I can learn more about it.
The second involves the rash of "How It's Made" videos that seems to increase every week. While we love seeing these, and feel funny complaining about something some shooter has obviously toiled to produce and has provided for free worldwide viewing, it bugs us that these videos increasingly lack any narrative that explains the processes we're seeing and therefore doesn't really deepen our comprehension of the subject. Given a choice between no-explanations-given videos and no videos at all, obviously we'd always choose the former (and would post them rather than you not seeing them at all), but we can't help but feel there's a real opportunity for learning here that is only being half-addressed.
As a good example of this, take a gander at this Encylopaedia Brittanica Films short from 1947 showing how books were made. We posted about it last year commenting on how many people the process involved. (Footage starts at 0:25.)
Now look at this short, currently making the blog rounds, commissioned by the UK's Daily Telegraph showing how handmade books are produced today:
Grad students at the Interactive Telecommunications Program—ITP for short—at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts have produced far more amazing projects than we could possibly cover in these pages, not least because many of the projects deal in pixels themselves. Alumni aside (full disclosure: one of them landed here in our very offices), we do the best we can to cover their student shows.
Just about a year ago, NYU announced the first extension program of the storied department with one of the inaugural programs at NYU Shanghai, the "first American university with independent legal status approved by the Ministry of Education."
ITP's Shanghai program will offer a unique opportunity for an incoming class of 32 graduate students to explore the imaginative uses of technology in one of the world's most exciting and quickly changing cities.
ITP's facilities will be located in downtown Shanghai. In addition to classrooms the site will feature a workshop for physical prototyping: a machine shop, firmware programming stations, electronics prototyping tools, and digital fabrication. An equipment room giving students access to digital photography, video, and audio equipment will also be on site.
ITP Shanghai has the same degree requirements as its 20+ year-old sister (or parent?) program, and courses will be taught in English.
Interested? Find out more at the Open House tomorrow night, Friday, March 30 at 7PM, at the original ITP, 721 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10003.
At some point the question crosses every designer and design student's mind: Should I move to New York? Whether you're in fashion, architecture, interior or industrial design, there are plenty of well-respected schools and firms here in Core77's hometown that draw from a global pool of talent.
For anyone currently grappling with the New York question, particularly students or educators, you'll want to read "Designing New York's Future." It's a findings and opinion report by the Center for an Urban Future, and through text and infographics the document examines:
- The rapid growth of NYC's design & architecture schools—"In terms of the sheer number of students who graduate with design and architecture degrees, the city surpasses every other U.S. city by a large margin"—and their effect on the local economy;
- How local design professionals interact with those design schools, as taken from a survey of 300-plus designers across a range of industries;
- An explanation of the impact of NYC design schools' global magnetism, for both students and professionals;
- The increasing incidences of NYC design school graduates starting their own ventures rather than working for others (including a Q&A with a handful of young design entreprenuers);
- The challenges currently faced by NYC design schools, highlighting what gaps there are in the collective curricula;
- What can be learned from innovative, multidisciplinary programs in other cities;
- What types of support the city itself should be offering to its design schools to further their own growth;
and lastly,
- Recommendations for future steps that ought be taken by design schools, government and local institutions in order to maximize design's punch on the local economy.
Thankfully, this exhaustively-researched and informative paper is available as a free PDF download. Cheers to the Center for an Urban Future.
There is still time to apply to the new MFA Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, which has just published renderings of the space currently under construction. It features dedicated student desks custom-made with "switchable surface tiles"--ranging from cutting mat and Masonite to Lego and paper pads--so people can build or study on whatever material they choose. Classrooms employ movable walls to double as student project rooms. And all of the architecture is based around a central lounge/kitchen/cafe, where food and food design play an important role in both the architecture and the pedagogy.
"We acknowledged from the start that people congregate around food, so we put a generous space for eating and hanging out right in the middle of the space," comments Chair Allan Chochinov. "Then we designed dedicated student desk areas, classrooms, computer stations and other amities around that core. It's a very social space, with lots of versatility in where to sketch, research, build prototypes and install work."
The Visible Futures Lab making space adjacent to the department features laser cutters, 3D printers, MakerBots, ShopBot, electronics lab, woodworking, Arduino, soldering and sewing stations, so students should be well equipped to create to their hearts' desire.
Check out the full blog post on the department site here, where you can see (and expand) more renderings and details.
What are the new pedagogical frameworks we will need to conceive of to enable new forms of thinking, perceiving and making? In this Q+A with Mariana Amatullo, Jury Captain for the 2012 Core77 Design Awards Educational Initiatives category and co-founder and Vice President of Designmatters at Art Center, we learn about Amatullo's lineup of team members and some thoughts on the critical crossroads facing design education.
Core77: Tell us a bit about your jury and why you chose these individuals.
Mariana Amatullo: It was important to me that we not only have diversity and multi-disciplinarity in our team, but that each team member be an individual who embodies a set of pluralistic skills and whose educational and professional trajectories demonstrate the power of straddling boundaries of knowledge and experience.
So if you take a close look at everyone's background, each of them has extraordinary expertise in their own areas, while the knack of constantly innovating and moving beyond strictly defined competencies.
Starting with my colleague Karen Hoffman who not only has a double appointment at Art Center, as our chair of Product Design and Director of the Color, Materials and Trends Exploratory Lab, but is also deeply immersed in driving some of our most innovative educational initiatives at the college, which are broadening how we teach, and whom we teach design education to. Karen is both a leader and an all "hands-on deck" passionate educator who has an innate ability to get her students to exude confidence and inspiration.
Johanna Blakely brings to the jury an amazing academic trajectory and rich insight into social media, entertainment, fashion, intellectual property and contemporary cultural trends that intersect closely with the decisions and choices designers are confronted with on a daily basis. Her research interests and the initiatives she oversees at the Norman Lear Center encompass such wide array of issues, which are of deep relevance to this category—I am thrilled she is participating.
Alexandre Hennen is someone whom I look forward to working together with in the context of this jury. His leadership at Continuum Los Angeles has puts him at the center of remarkable talent and projects; it will be very exciting to count with his voice in our team.
Why is it important to recognize this category in a design awards program?
I think it is essential that we celebrate all dedicated and innovative educators out there. They remain so invisible, so often.
It may seem incomprehensible to the latest generation, but we used to choose what art schools we'd apply to by looking at printed paper brochures that came in the mail. In an era before social media and the internet, a school's reputation wasn't easy to ascertain, particularly if you lived far away from it; your high school art teacher—who might've been anything from an out-of-work landscaper to a bored housewife—would tell you they heard RISD was good, for instance, and that was about the extent of it.
Technology being where it's at today, I'm frankly surprised we don't see more art schools pushing themselves with promotional videos. I hope more schools follow CCA's lead, as they recently released a blitz of videos showing students from various majors discussing what their experience is like at the school.
Below is the Industrial Design one featuring a student named Haley—who went from bike shop mechanic to ID student—talking about the program and how it led her to an internship at Nike.
I'm not sure if it already sounds anachronistic to talk about 'shop class,' but I have vague memories of a wacky middle school Metals teacher and an altogether incongruous Printing elective at my high school. The equipment was invariably second- (or third-, fourth-, nth-)hand, long-patina'd with wheezy nostalgia—this was New England, after all—and the dubious tutelage at the calloused hands of gruff semi-retired tradesmen relegated this sort of education squarely to the bygone days of yore.
Which is precisely why a new project by a team of Stanford d.school students is so interesting: they're looking to introduce new generations of young minds—future designers and otherwise—to a new generation of young technologies. In short, "Sparklab is a big red truck filled with cutting-edge maker tools that goes from school to school, bringing the joy of building back to kids."
The Kickstarter project is the culmination of a yearlong thesis project for an enthusiastic crew of 20-something makers with the savoir-faire to realize the potential of 21st century fabrication tools not just for making things but for education as well. If the idea of a mobile shop class isn't appealing enough as it is, they have the blessing of IDEO Founder (and d.school prof) David Kelley.
A continuing issue in industrial design education is when to allow students to move from sketch work to 3D CAD modelling during studio practice—or whether to let them use CAD at all! I've heard of first year undergraduate modules where students are 'banned' from the use of CAD in an attempt to encourage sketchbook work and more explorative conceptual design practice. In my view this approach is somewhat draconian and does little to deal with the underlying reasons that attract less experienced designers to the comparative certainty of 3D CAD.
Instead of setting constraints or limitations to dictate where and under what circumstances design tools must be used, design education needs to provide opportunities for young designers to reflect upon the nature of their own design activity and how this informs their use of design tools. Design students should consider the bigger picture that constitutes the various requirements of a design process in order to think about how tool use locates within and is informed by a requirement to design. This awareness will then provide opportunities for students to make more informed decisions when working with design tools; to be more critical in their use of CAD tools and more confident in their own sketching abilities.
My own research has explored the increasing variety of tools the industrial designer has at their disposal to support the development and communication of design intentions. Findings indicate that sketching continues to underpin design activity. Professional experience also influences the use of sketching in support of design activity. Less experienced design students tend to lack confidence in their sketch ability and they find the dynamic, unconstrained medium at odds with an approach to design activity that errs towards fixation and attachment to concept.
Figure 1: Design sketches used to support explorative design activity. Courtesy of Michael DiTullo
As part of my research I visited practicing designers at their places of work and interviewed them about their use of design tools. Interestingly, the designers often juxtaposed the affordance of sketching against the limitations of 3D CAD tools. Like many in design education, practitioners stressed the explorative, divergent affordance of sketching over the more constrained convergent nature of CAD. Of course they understood the value of CAD, but spoke of a concern for the ways it may limit student creativity, 'a student's design being too influenced by the constraints of this or that software.'
Of course, when used to support design activity, both sketching and CAD tools have the ability to complement one another in a process that has at its heart the representation and communication of design intent. Rather than limiting the use of a given tool, design education must provide opportunities for students to consider the relationship between their use of a given tool, the tool's possible influence on their own design activity and how tool use is located within and informed by the wider requirements and responsibilities of the design process. Much criticism has been leveled at the inability of CAD to support the kinds of explorative design activity required for conceptualisation. There can be no doubt that the tool-in-hand has an influence on the character of the design representation. However, it is also true that a tool is only a tool insofar as it is used as such by the tool-user. In turn, the user is motivated by their own perception of the purpose of tool use. For students to make best use of the availability of an ever-increasing variety of conventional, digital and hybrid design tools, they require an understanding of tool use within a context of the dynamic requirements of the process of industrial design.
Figure 2: Like chess, CAD can be described as a process of 'moves', defined and constrained by the system. Courtesy of Michael DiTullo
Experienced designers know this and tend to take a process-first approach to the use of design tools. They think more about what is required in terms of the design process; stakeholder expectations; budget; communication of intent: from explorative, divergent conceptualisation to more constrained, convergent specification. In short, they draw upon a wealth of knowledge and past experience to guide their approach to design activity and tool use.
Design leader Robert Suarez and Sustainability Strategist Kathy Zarsky have been exploring this question through their studies in biomimicry with Biomimcry 3.8, the world-leading organization that harnesses nature's strategies to inspire new kinds of creative problem-solving. In this conversation with the Designers Accord, we learn from Robert and Kathy not just what they ask nature but why they ask nature, and how it makes them better designers.
Designers Accord: Biomimicry is the area of investigation that seeks to emulate nature, its models, systems, and processes in order to solve human problems. How did you first hear about it?
KZ: In 2005, I participated in a US Green Building Council meeting in Austin, discussing the various merits, permutations and structures of LEED and our mission with my fellow design colleagues. A guest named Chris Allen, who would soon become CEO of Biomimicry 3.8, was introduced to me after the meeting where he went on to describe a concept called "biomimicry" as one of the most fascinating and important ways to problem-solve that he had come across. Chris encouraged me to read Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, the unofficial bible of biomimcry by Janine Benyus. My interest was piqued and so my journey began...
It seems to be the case frequently that people are "converted" by someone whose eyes have been opened to biomimicry. Robert, as a current student in the Biomimicry Professional Certification Program, you'll soon be amongst those evangelists. How do you convey the essence of biomimicry to someone new to the concept? How do you describe the essence of biomimicry as a method for problem-solving?
RS: I'll be graduating from the program in January, but am already an active evangelist! When I'm speaking with people who might be unfamiliar with the concept, I usually start by presenting biomimicry as a new innovation methodology. Biomimicry introduces a new perspective or way of thinking about any given design challenge. Biomimicry asks us to find functions and strategies in nature and translate and apply them to our human design challenges. From that point, I introduce the environmental ethos of biomimicry and that its goal is to create conditions conducive to life.
What specific example do you give people about biomimicry when they ask for an illustration of nature's strategies?
RS: Most recently I've been using this very simple slide to show how biomimicry can be applied to design challenges. It illustrates the FORM-PROCESS-ECOSYSTEM framework for how nature's genius has been used in the recent past.
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.
How many times have you been all set to buy the latest Apple gadget only to be told by a friend to wait—an updated version is scheduled to come out soon and any day now the phone in your pocket will just be one generation closer to obsolescence, your top-of-the-line iPad sadly out of date? Maybe I'm just airing my personal grievances here, but for those reminiscing about a simpler time, there's an oasis of traditional, time-honored craftsmanship in a Charleston, SC jail built over two hundred years ago, back before Steve Jobs was even a glimmer in his great-great-great-great grandfather's eye.
It's The American College of Building Arts, the only school in the United States to combine a four-year liberal arts education with specialized training in pre-Industrial trades—and the only school to boast 100% job placement. Granted, the average class size is less than twenty, but I expect that to increase with the ever-growing resurgence of the hand-made.
Students can major in Architectural Stone, Carpentry, Forged Architectural Ironwork, Plaster Working, Preservation Masonry or Timber Framing. They receive hands-on training within the school itself, which ACBA's president, General Colby M. Broadwater III (how's that for distinguished?) calls a "living laboratory." The campus was originally a jail built in 1802 with the help of Robert Mills, whom many consider the first all-American trained architect, and who later went on to design the Washington Monument. The building doesn't look like it's been updated in a while, but it acts as a canvas, providing students with an immediate source through which to practice what they learn—right on the classroom walls.
If you want to receive a formal design education, the obvious choices are to enroll in a four-year undergrad program or a two- to three-year graduate program. But there is an alternative, at least for those of you living in the American Northeast: The Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, Vermont.
The nonprofit school teaches certificate courses, workshops, and tutorials in both design and construction ranging from one day to a full semester in length, with courses of multi-week lengths in between. In addition to traditional woodworking and furniture building, students can also pursue courses in sustainable building, energy efficiency and ecosystems. And Yestermorrow's backbone of design/build courses are hands-on, striving to "demystify the worlds of architecture and carpentry by putting sketching tools and hammers in hand."
That hands-on approach, and the clear marriage between design and craft, is built into the school's ethos:
Our curriculum is specifically designed to demystify the designing and building processes using hands-on, experiential learning to teach students the art and wisdom of good design and the skill and savvy of enduring craftsmanship as a single, integrated process.
"If there is a descendent of the Bauhaus today, it might be the Yestermorrow Design/Build School," Archinect writes, pointing out (see the link) two Yestermorrow professors with a direct educational lineage back to Walter Gropius. Weimar might be gone, but Warren carries on.
Applications are now open for the Summer Workshop of the new MFA Products of Design program. Held at the beautiful Domaine de Boisbuchet in Southwestern France, this year's workshop will run for 10 days, inviting participants to immerse themselves in the evolving field of product design.
The Products of Design Summer Program in France offers hands-on, collaborative experience and instruction in rapid sketching, materials investigation, prototyping, iteration, narrative creation and environmental stewardship. In addition to work completed during the days, participants will enjoy opportunities to sight see, socialize with designers from around the world, and attend lectures in the evenings.
The program invites applicants from various backgrounds: design professionals, students (in at least senior standing at an art & design college), or graduate students in any field. Faculty will be MFA Products of Design chair Allan Chochinov and faculty Emilie Baltz.
Products of Design Summer Program in France
June 17-27, 2012
Domaine de Boisbuchet, Southwestern France
Tuition: $2,500 (includes room & board)
Applications due: February 10, 2012
(I know this is a lot of text, folks, but there's also a must-see video down at the bottom.)
Apple's press presentation this morning, held at the Guggenheim in New York City, began by revealing some depressing statistics about American education: On average only 70% of U.S. high school students graduate, down to 60% in urban areas. (That's not much higher than one out of two, for chrissakes.) Compared with other countries, in rankings of math, reading and science, the U.S. is a lot closer to being at the bottom of the list than the top. And in a video presentation following these slides, schoolteachers across America rattled off a litany of things hobbling their efforts: Overcrowded classrooms. Crumbling facilities. Disinterested students. "We need to find out what's wrong," concluded one on-screen teacher, "and fix it."
"We want to help," concluded Phil Schiller, Apple's Marketing SVP, from the stage. While Apple obviously can't do anything about overcrowded classrooms or poor-quality facilities, the area they've chosen to focus on is student engagement, getting kids interested in the subject matter.
Schiller went on to explain that the iPad is the number one item on your average teen's wish list. And the device is a perfect replacement—a superior replacement—for the textbooks every student currently totes around (as if, it was pointed out, we were still living in the 1950s).
Enter iBooks 2, Apple's new app that ports textbooks onto the popular tablet. From a simple physical standpoint, it's an obvious improvement: A single 1.3-pound device versus 10 or 20 pounds of books. But from an interactive standpoint, as demonstrated at the presentation, it is leagues better than a static textbook printed on dead trees. In addition to containing all of your textbooks in one place, it offers a degree of interactivity invaluable in a field like education. Text, images, video, sound, and 3D models that you can rotate in space suddenly present biology or history in a way you could not perceive before. The material, as displayed in the demo, appears alive. You touch the iPad's screen and things respond. You manipulate, zoom in and out, investigate.
But aside from the fancy multimedia capabilities, the textbooks still contain those boring old blocks of text and raw data. Apple has monkeyed with this too by applying some clever tricks, some familiar, some not. If you don't know a word, touch it and the definition pops up. When you highlight words or passages with your finger, you can choose to annotate the passage with a note you type in. The software then compiles these passages into a list and even automatically converts them into flashcards—designed to look like index cards, naturally—that you can flip through in preparation for a test. (There's even a shuffle feature.)
I have to point out here that all of these are things I simply witnessed on-screen, and I am essentially parroting facts that were provided to me and relaying what you would have seen if you were at the presentation a few hours ago. But Apple has provided Core77 with a test iPad loaded up with the textbook software, and after I've played around with it for a while, I'll be able to write a more in-depth review detailing how the actual usage goes but you can see the video after the jump.
One Laptop Per Child and manufacturing partner Marvell have announced their new XO-3, a ruggedized tablet meant to withstand the rigors of both vigorous children and the developing nations in which they'll be used. I'm digging both the integrated rubber border and the peelable elastomer screen cover, which flips around to cling to the back of the machine when it's in use.
Chief designer Yves Behar has released a design statement on the project:
After 6 years of design development with Nicholas Negroponte and the non-profit organization he founded, One Laptop Per Child, I am incredibly excited to share the next generation XO-3 tablet. More than 2.4 million children in 25 countries received the original XO Laptop, and these kids have been our inspiration to create the next generation of this educational tool.
One Laptop Per Child is a technology story about how to provide low-cost educational tools to millions of children. For those children, and for us, it is also a creative story about how to design specifically for young students. Every decision made by the OLPC engineering team and the design team at fuseproject has been about adapting technology to children's needs at a cost that makes the tablet affordable for developing countries.
The first impression of the XO-3 is its extreme simplicity. The focus is on the screen, while the surrounding green rubber border provides a safe tactile grip for children's hands. The back surface has a bumpy texture and integrates a rear-facing camera. The connectors, power switch and speakers are arranged on the bottom edge, facing the user.
The XO-3 tablet uses similar ruggedizing strategies as the original XO laptop: rubber protection, anti-scratch grip textures, and robust construction. The XO-3 goes takes this protection further by creating an elastomer removable cover, which is flipped from screen cover to back cover. The cover's arced front surface allows access to ports and buttons, and shields them during transportation to further preserve the hardware. Additionally, the solar cover option can house a solar panel combined with internal batteries for outdoor or indoor charging.
Our approach has been to minimize complexity, while delivering a high quality, and a heightened touch feel. There is playfulness in the way one can adapt the cover to different needs, while each design detail and material is chosen to deliver maximum value.
-Yves Behar, fuseproject founder and OLPC Chief Designer
By the bye, this does not mean OLPC will be abandoning their titular product; this March they'll begin shipping their XO 1.75 laptop to places like Uruguay and Nicaragua, with 75,000 units already ordered.
PENSOLE Footwear Design Academy is pleased to introduce: Saturday School. Register today for your chance to win a Core77 scholarship!
PENSOLE Saturday School (PS2) is an innovative 11-week footwear design class that teaches students the knowledge needed to become a professional footwear designer.
At PS2, students will experience our rigorous "learn by doing" curriculum, where students are assigned projects to develop from idea, to final concept while working in a team environment.
2012 Winter PS2 class theme is the SOLE of Oregon. During this class, each student will be assigned a different Oregon footwear brand to design a new concept for, with the goal of showcasing why you are the future of footwear.
Usually when it comes to talking about graffiti art, it's a moral discussion about property rights or freedom of expression. In the case of the Little Lotus Project, it's definitely a moral cause, but of a different nature entirely: bringing creativity to impoverished children a world away. The Project sends street artists to paint murals on schools in the Thai/Burma border region where Burmese refugee and migrant families have made a new life.
In 2010, four artists from New Zealand traveled to the region to paint murals. Through SpinningTop, a charity that "gives balance to vulnerable children," seven international street artists traveled to the region this month to continue the artistic endeavor and to engage the children in fun and educational art projects. Read more about the most recent project and trip here.
For those of you thinking about applying, the new MFA Products of Design priority application deadline is coming up on January 15th. The progressive new program, launched at SVA and chaired by Core77's Allan Chochinov, is casting a wide net:
We are looking for all kinds of applicants for the MFA program: the highly-skilled, seeking more meaningful applications; the deeply-knowledgeable, looking for greater scale and impact; the passionate, looking for more rigor and process; and of course the iconoclastic, looking for a home.
A: We've had great interest from working designers, a few years out of school and looking for more meaning in what they do with their acquired skills. Designers at this stage are often disillusioned by pumping out toxic garbage, but they haven't given up on their belief in the power of design. These kinds of people are precious, because they've got the skills in place, and they've got the passion to put them to more meaningful use. They just need a nurturing, challenging place to discover new opportunities in the world of design, and to really dig deep into what they uniquely have to contribute. Here I'd say, "We want you back."
We are also looking for extraordinarily creative individuals who actually should be in design. The skill sets and vocabularies required of a design person are rapidly changing, and there are now many many places for creative people to contribute to the enterprise of design. We are looking for people with deep, comprehensive skills in a couple particular areas, and who hunger for ways to integrate those skills into something bigger. That's the thing--we're in the business of training people to become great designers--sure. But we're also in the business of empowering creative, strategic, and fearless people to do great things in the world of design. Designers crave influence from the edges, so we welcome people with excellent chops in something vital, who are intensely curious about making a difference and who are enamored of the fact that design deals in scale; that a single action can multiply out to great effect.
(Some nice special effects: The Design Research class will be taught at IDEO; the Material Futures class at Material ConneXion; total pro faculty with deep industry connections; heart of NYC.) Apply Page is here.
FRIEZE ART FAIR NEW YORK 2012
MILAN 2012: SALONE INTERNAZIONALE DEL MOBILE
MILAN 2012: SATELLITE EXHIBITIONS
MILAN 2012: BRERA DESIGN DISTRICT
Ryan's Kinfolk hangs in the window; image courtesy of Vitsœ
Co-founder John Buellens
Energy Strategy for the EcoFridge collaboration between UC Berkeley Engineering and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Design students
Image Courtesy of 
Figure 1: Design sketches used to support explorative design activity. Courtesy of 
Figure 2: Like chess, CAD can be described as a process of 'moves', defined and constrained by the system. Courtesy of 
