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photo: Megan Ann Rucker
What happens to all those hopes n' dreams? Carl Alviani's got a call to arms for designers over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds blog. Here's a sneak peek:
...talk to practically any student or recent graduate, and nearly all of them will attest that they want to improve the world, solve problems of waste and poverty through better design, make a positive impact, make a difference. Even kids who want to do nothing more than draw cars and shoes all day will light up when explaining the fuel cell technology that drives their roadster, or the compostable uppers on their high-tops. This was true when I was in school, five years ago, and if you ask someone who studied a creative profession 10 years ago, it was mostly true then.As far as I can tell, the change occurs in the first year or two out of school. The bravado nurtured by professors and studio-mates rapidly withers in the harsh conditions of the job market, leaving the junior no less able to devise green strategies, but deeply doubting his or her right to voice them.
What's the issue here?
...one of clout, or perceived clout, and it results in a double-sided silence: management doesn't ask for more conscientious solutions, and design doesn't tell...[A] degree of license enables discussions that would otherwise never occur. Imagine for a moment you went into every client or management meeting knowing your suggestions would be granted that kind of weight. What would you do with it? Judging by conversations I've had with professional colleagues, I'd suspect that issues of sustainability and social benefit would be broached far more frequently, even if they weren't always enacted.
>> read entire article <<
Glynn Kerr: World Famous Motorcycle Designer and MCN Columnist will speak at A&S BMW Motorcycles tomorrow May 15th, 6:30-8 p.m:
Although you may or may not recognize his name, if you've ridden a motorcycle in the past 25 years, you've ridden something that has been designed or influenced by Glynn.As the co-founder and President of the Motorcycle Design Association, Glynn has an exciting presentation for us about the development of motorcycle styling. He'll share photos and sketches of prototypes, as well as demonstrate the actual design process! This will be an informal presentation and your questions will be welcomed!
Find more great design events at the Core77 Calendar.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)This is from a few months back, but in response to our recent mention of the OLPC roll-out in Peru, we were recently reminded of an interesting alternative to/criticism of the laptop model of educational computing in the developing world.
Featured in the "Reply All" section of the Wall Street Journal last September, an email debate was hosted between Walter Bender, then president of the OLPC non-profit, and Stephen Dukker, CEO of NComputing and proponent of a thin-client model for bringing low-cost computers to global classrooms.
The exchange is a little long-winded and self-aggrandizing, but refreshing for its brass tacks discussion of such boring but crucial aspects of the project as economics, distribution and scalability. After all the aesthetically influenced talk about OLPCs potential for success, it's nice to see how it stands up under scrutiny more concrete than "but it looks like a toy!"
Read the article here.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)
Job-getting guru, RitaSue Siegel, has just published the revised version of 'Get A Design Job'. An authority in the industry, this manual offers insights into everything from Resume tips to Research. First conceived as a series of articles for Innovation magazine in 1993, the 2008 version has grown to include information on a variety of topics that influence not only the job-seeker, but the Design Industry as a whole.
A copy is available online for teachers, students, and designers to download. Dig in!
Traditionally the words "summer school" strike fear into the hearts of students. But the courses offered by the Scuola Polytecnica di Design in Milan are a bit more appealing than the typical faire. The school has organized four week-long workshops, each on a different theme and taught by leading designers including Ross Lovegrove, Marti Guixe and the Campana brothers. Forget home-schooling yourself, learn from the masters in a design capital this summer.
Posted by: StuCon | Comments (0)
The Western District is over, Art Institute of Portland is back to normal, and we haven't covered nearly half the useful and thought-provoking things that got said and done over the past weekend. In addition to the talks and student work already mentioned, a couple more highlights after the jump:
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2)
There were several strong contenders for this year's Western District Student Merit Award, but Gabriel Lam, of California College of the Arts in SF edged out some strong competition with a combination of research, social engagement, aesthetic sensitivity, and thoughtfulness you don't usually get in a student portfolio.
The standout from his Saturday presentation was Miranda, a device supplying "Security for Civil Rights." First impression of the project is a marriage of personal passion with elegant design sensibilities; the small unit is simply a cheap video recorder with some flash memory and a 3-axis accelerometer, ruggedized with a Santoprene boot and blessed with clean, utilitarian styling reminiscent of early Peter Saville. As a recorder and protector for political protesters, it's a solution whose appropriateness is immediately obvious.
Lam's real thoughtfulness comes out in subsequent slides though, in which some fairly convincing staged photos depict not just protesters protecting their rights with the unit, but police officers using them as well to stave off false charges of police brutality. It demonstrates a willingness to really delve into the complexities of a meaningful design problem that's all too rare. Beyond all of that, Lam's remaining portfolio (a bit of which is posted here) is broad and uniformly well-resolved -- we wish him the best at the upcoming National Conference.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (6)
In addition to some much needed acerbic wit at Saturday afternoon's panel discussion, Intel's Wendy March gave a refreshing and thoughtful 40 minute lecture on design research that opened a few eyes. Drawing on several years of investigation into the way people use technology in India, Brazil, China, and dozens of other disparate environments, she focused not on the exciting and cutting-edge, but on the ordinary.
It's a remarkable angle, and made for a compelling argument that the design that has the greatest impact is that which addresses the ordinary, boring activities that usually escape the notice of researchers and product developers.
One example supporting this: Interviewing a Japanese housewife about how she spends money, it turns out she takes a wad of cash with her every week and physically deposits it in three bank accounts in three different banks. Asked about online banking, she explained that it was too expensive, and too easy -- the walking and depositing was integral to the way she managed her money. "We keep trying to make things seamless and easy," observed March about this discovery, "but maybe people don't want it to be seamless and easy."
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1)
Wendy March, head of Intel's People and Practices research group (second from right in the photo above), gave a wonderful talk yesterday entitled "The Future Will Be Ordinary" -- a deeply thoughtful examination of how important the mundane aspects of daily life are in determing the future of technology, and how difficult learning about these aspects is for a researcher. More on this later.
Stand-out piece of advice from yesterday's panel, however, also came from Wendy, when asked what she likes to see in applicants' portfolios:
1. I don't think I ever want to see anything glowing ever again. No more glowing orbs. Thank you.Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)
2. I never again want to hear a project in a portfolio described with the words "It's kind of like a book."
3. Beautiful product photos are nice, but they don't really tell me anything. Please please please show your product in the real world, surrounded by real things.
Carson Lev is kind of like your wise, cool uncle who sits you down and gives you advice about The Ways of the World -- if your uncle had been doing game-changing medical and automotive design for the past 30 years.
The most passionate presentation of the conference so far, Carson's 40 minute talk was a whirlwind tour through a bizarre career, including several major medical device stints, a long collaboration with Chip Foose at Foose Design, and working on a treadmill for astronauts.
The advice, heavily directed at the large contingent of students in the crowd, revolved around the conference theme of symbiosis, noting that it comes in several flavors, from Mutual on down to Parasitic. Evaluating his many jobs in terms of which type of symbiosis each described, Lev drew special attention to the endless ways in which non-design skills and knowledge can advance a design career. It's been said before in many places, but this time hit especially hard. A few choice quotes:
"If I made pretty pictures they [project engineers] couldn't understand, they would dismiss me as an artist. So I work in multiple senses: I think in a design sense, but I communicate in a business sense."
"Everything you use will become useful at some point."
"If you don't understand something, it's going be used as a weapon against you at some point."
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)
The IDSA Western District Conference is happily located here in Portland this year, in a broad gray space above the Pearl District. Keynotes last night featured a pair of long-established designers: Max Burton (at left, below) from Nike Tech.Lab (and formerly Smart - he's responsible for about 30 of the Good Grips SKUs), and Howard Meehan (at right, below), a former Tektronix designer turned public installation artist.
photo: Kirill Shelayev
While both talks were essentially tours through the designers' personal portfolios, they held some serious attention: Max's for its sheer beauty and consistent theme of making technology into an experience accessible to the uninitiated consumer; Howard's for the rare opportunity to hear a cantankerous, opinionated old-school designer talk passionately about what makes a good life, not just good design.
Most striking moment of the evening: Howard relating the story of a personal radio he did for Panasonic in 1970. What started as a charming story of a young designer defying convention to come up with something unique and compelling (it was a sphere, and eventually sold four million units), transformed into something completely different when he spied one on a colleague's desk 15 years later, who was about to get rid of it. "Four million units sold" became "four million pieces of landfill," and started the longer story of Meehan's move away from consumer product and toward art for public spaces; a move he credits as responsible for his most fulfilling work.
The theme of sustainability is, as you might expect, strong and persistent this weekend, featuring a speaker from Nike's Considered initiative, a bike-oriented design charette on Sunday, nods toward sustainability from practically every student presenter so far, and recyclable everything in the conference venue.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)
Submissions for this years Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism are due June 2nd. Here's the gist:
The Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism seek to increase the understanding and appreciation of design, both within the profession and throughout American life. This awards program is part of a larger AIGA initiative to stimulate new levels of design awareness and critical thinking about design.There are two types of awards:
Writing award of $10,000
Open to writers, critics, scholars, historians, journalists and designers and given for a body of work.Education award of $1,000
Open to students (high school, undergraduate or graduate) whose use of writing, in the interest of making visual work or scholarship or cultural observation, demonstrates extraordinary originality and promise.
Find more great design events at the Core77 Calendar
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)