Core77

If you're in or near Portland, Oregon this weekend, a couple of things to keep in mind:

First, the China Design Now exhibition is on, and it's a thing of beauty. One of only two American museums to host it, the Portland Art Museum has done a great job of taking viewers on a crash course of China's rise from global factory to independent creative voice, through surveys of the design scenes in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing. We blogged it last month, but it's re-post worthy.

Second, as part of the exhibition's broader program, visionary and multi-talented designer Freeman Lau will be flying in from Hong Kong to present his work on Saturday, and to discuss the current state of Chinese design from his perspective, right there on the ground floor. Lau's involvement in the development of a modern Hong Kong and Chinese design aesthetic is hard to overstate, both with his studio Kan and Lau, and through his personal work. See one of the hundreds of manifestations of his Chair Play series, above, for an idea of how his work brings industrial design, graphic design, art, and social context into simultaneous play.

Coroflot Editorial Director (and occasional Core77 contributor) Carl Alviani will be doing the interviewing, and designers of all stripes are warmly invited.

>>Details of the event here.

Designism 4.0 is the fourth edition of the annual Art Directors Club Forum that explores "the responsibility and experiences of designers and creatives to drive social and political change." This year the discussion will focus on business models that provide careers and incomes while also driving social change.

The panel features Blake Mycoskie, Chief Shoe Giver, TOMS Shoes; Bill Drenttel, Partner, Winterhouse Studio and Design Observer; Paula Scher, Partner, Pentagram; and Mark Randall, Principal, Worldstudio.

The discussion will be moderated by Business Week Innovation and Design editor Helen Walters. There will also be an online auction benefit for Art Directors Club Scholarships. Designer-created "Walk the Walk" TOMS Shoes (John Maeda, anyone?) for bidding. More info here.

Designism 4.0
Art Directors Club
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
6:30 - 9:00 PM
@ADC Gallery
106 West 29th Street, NYC

Just a quick reminder that Bits 'N Pieces, an exhibition about the conception and consumption of 'post-digital' design, opens tonight at Material ConneXion in NYC.

Descriptions of the participants and their projects can be found at our blog post earlier this month.

Bits 'N Pieces
Material ConneXion, New York City
November 4 - December 4, 2009
Opening: 6pm, November 4th, RSVP by October 30th to rsvp at materialconnexion dot com

What's more fun than sitting in a dim room with fellow designers and watching slide after slide after slide? Well, maybe getting outside, mixing it up with other designers, architects, planners, and engineers and taking it to the streets to learn about effective transportation reforms by riding bikes, learning about shiny new streetcars, and watching rain drops gather into bioswales.

Starting tomorrow, a great group of designers, planners, and engineers nationwide will all be heading to Portland, Oregon for the 2009 Transportation Summit, hosted by the Cascadia Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism. This multidisciplinary team of experts will meet to discuss the latest in cutting edge transportation reforms to promote connected, multi-modal street networks, which can help solve many transportation, safety, land use and urban design problems that plague our cities.

Successful design solutions also help to reduce carbon emissions, increase pedestrian safety, reduce emergency response times, and create economically viable cities, towns, and main streets.

Check out http://www.cnu.org/transportation2009 for all the details.

Congrats to Manuel Dreesmann who received the first prize at this year's VisionWorks Award - Cargopacks 2020! His future concept GREEN envisions a more sustainable future through vertical gardens that add a green and sustainable skin to future buildings.

The jury says: "The winning concept Green by Manuel Dreesmann stood out for three reasons. It uses no packaging, solves transportation and distribution problems through on-site production, and uses the concept of vertical farming in office buildings as the basis for a future-focused vision that can have a positive impact on the climate and atmosphere at the workplace."

URBAN MOLE by Philipp Hermes was awarded with the 2nd prize, BACS by Mareike Frensemeier and WATER AHEAD by Mathias Rauch both received the 3rd prize.

Cargopacks 2020 is the title of this year's VisionWorks Award. The award challenged young design students from all over Europe to envision and design for future scenarios. The VisionWorks Award was initiated by Bayer MaterialScience in cooperation with Airbus, DHL and Hettich.

Watch more photos after the jump!

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The highly acclaimed Share Festival in Turin, Italy is opening tonight and two of the festival's key exhibitions are available online.

Market Forces
Curated by Simona Lodi
Can artists be an alternative source of information on the economy? In the Market Forces exhibition, artists were sought out who have produced works related to marketing, e-commerce, and commercial communication. Their tongue-in-cheek and at times paradoxical works often use the real or virtual supermarket as a favourite setting to be subverted and transformed into an artistic field of action, often of an activist bent. The artistic works selected make us cringe at the screech of over-used words such as global companies, credit crunch, new-economy, neo-capitalism, gift-economy, free-economy, and neo-liberalism.

Until the end of Cinema
Curated by Luca Barbeni
Until the end of Cinema is a screening featuring a series of audio-visual works that begin where cinema ceases to exist, taking us from the linear to the interactive, from the collective to an individual perspective.
The works each use, at various different levels, the global infrastructure of the Internet in its intrinsic qualities, representing an evolutionary step forward in expressive techniques for audiovisual narration.
The works presented in the screening are no longer cinema, but nor are they something else.

Design Concepts, a product design and innovation firm, is hosting a Designers Accord Town Hall Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin on November 12th, to "help amplify the dialogue on sustainability in the region."

The event will take place from 6-9 pm on November 12th at the Design Concepts office. The schedule is as follows:
6 -6:30 Networking with light, local appetizers and beverages
6:30 - 8 Showcase of area initiatives 3, 20 -minute presentations with time to share ideas
8-9 Share your first steps and discussion

If you plan on attending, please RSVP to Rachel DeSmidt at Rachel.desmidt[at]design-concepts[dot]com.

Designers Accord Madison Town Hall
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Design Concepts, 5301 Buttonwood Dr., Madison, WI 53718

Robert Jacobson is very active in Sweden these days, where he is Entrepreneur in Residence at MEDEA, Malmö University's new initiative for collaborative media.

He has developed a beautiful, short lecture series on innovation, media and transformation, entitled Media transformation - Malmö transformation. From November 3 to 17, you can listen to Mark Anderson (Strategic News Service), Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics), Adam Greenfield (Nokia), GK Van Patter (Humantific) and Robert Jacobson himself.

>> Download brochure

In June this year, WIRED organised its first ever business conference - Disruptive By Design, in New York City. This exclusive, invite-only event featured top industry leaders -- including Shai Agassi, Chris Anderson, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Immelt (yes, all males!) -- on how to think different about change, and how to use it to our advantage.

Now the conference papers are available online.

The second in I.D. Magazine's new series of webcast goes live today at 4:00 pm EST. Presenters Masuma Henry, and Martjin Van Tilburg from Artefact group will discuss the opportunities for and implications of "Designing Products for Emerging Markets."

Here's I.D.'s writeup:

As countries such as India and China continue to grow and become more accessible, they represent expanding opportunities for product development. How can product designers create unique and meaningful user experiences for people in these populations? Masuma Henry and Martijn Van Tilburg of the Seattle-based design consultancy Artefact will explain how to do just this, outlining an effective process for developing compelling products for customers in emerging markets.

Drawing from their experience designing technology experiences for these users, they will dispel common misconceptions and reveal practical insights and methods for undergoing this design process. Specifically, they will explain how to conduct the discovery phase, including the planning and execution of fieldwork, remote data collection, and concept generation in the field. They will also demonstrate how to make sense of fieldwork results and how to choose the most relevant concepts to pursue further. They'll highlight examples of successful and failed products, discuss the reasons for these outcomes, and show examples of their recent work in this exciting space.

The webcast is at 4:00 pm EST TODAY. Registration is $39.99—sign up here.

Call for submissions: California-based Nectar Design will be hosting"Ecotopia," an exhibition of green innovations in product design, in January, and they're looking for contributions.

"EcoTopia" [is] a juried group exhibition devoted to new ideas and potential breakthroughs in environmentally friendly product design. It will feature designs for new products from designers of all experience levels specifically aimed at fostering a healthy ecosystem and a more sustainable society.

Entries may range from initial concept ideas to finished designs. All media will be considered, including 2D presentations, video, prototypes, scale models, and mockups. There is no entry fee and students, professionals, and independent inventors of all ages are welcome to apply.

"'EcoTopia' is a call to action," said Nectar Senior Designer, Yutaka Kazamaki who is spearheading the event. "It's clear to us that product designers will be playing a key role in the fight for sustainability, and the more skilled and imaginative people who devote themselves to creating innovative product designs, the better our chances will be of developing effective solutions for issues like climate change and declining natural resources," Mr. Kazamaki said. "Our hope is that 'EcoTopia' will introduce promising new talents to the world of sustainable design. Considering the huge stakes on issues like climate change and declining natural resources, we're hoping to be overwhelmed with submissions."

The deadline for entries is November 20, 2009. For details and a complete list of rules, click here.

Prague Design Days 2009, or Designblok, is the 11th edition of Prague's major annual design event. The festival took place between the 6th and 11th of October and was anchored in the Holesovice area of Prague. "Spring," this year's theme, underlined a refreshing sense of revival, new beauty and new life. Join our tour along the main locations at the Designblok Superstudios Classic 7 and A7, the DOX Center for Contemporary Art and the Czech Centre Prague.

>> View Gallery

Night Jar Creative, an new, experimental ad agency, is hosting an open photo shoot in Brooklyn tomorrow. The event, entitled Sand County, aims to depict a "high-fashion, low-impact, sustainable future, with elements in social awareness and environment."

You are invited to come hang out on site at this all-day event (a DJ booth, snacks, games, and a lounge area will be provided) or even ask to get involved. More information at their site.

Sand County
9 am - 6pm, October 24th
3rd Ward Studios, Brooklyn

Bits 'N Pieces is an interactive traveling exhibition exploring the rapidly advancing technologies and materials transforming the world of both digital and analog design.

Curated by Jan Habraken, Lucas Maassen, Alissia Melka-Teichroew, and Unfold, the exhibition will include furniture, architecture, jewelry, graphic design and products that "examine how design is both conceived and consumed in the post-digital age."

Participants include: Doug Bucci, Willem Derks, Edhv, Jan Habraken, Ilona Huvenaars, Joris Laarman, Thomas Lommee, MakerBot, Lucas Maassen, Alissia Melka-Teichroew (byAMT), THEVERYMANY and Unfold.

Here's a sneak preview:

Debug by Edhv, 2009
Edhv has built an experimental machine that prints artwork with the help of insects. Edhv's machine will be translating these species' specific movements into graphics that will be printed as posters.

Jointed Pieces by Alissia Melka-Teichroew, 2008
The ball joined jewelry pieces are manufactured using modern technologies that are able to make shapes that were impossible to create using old techniques. Before, a ball joint could only be assembled after the individual parts had been manufactured. Today, using 3D Printing, it is possible to produce a ball joint connection in one form.

Mellitus by Doug Bucci, 2009
This project shows how biological processes can be transformed via digital technology to meaningful, personal, wearable art. Bucci takes his personal Continuous Glucose Monitoring redings and arrays them into 3d space, onto interpretations of red blood cells. The restulting forms are a personalized, visual represenation of Bucci's glucose control

Brainwave Sofa by UNFOLD & Luccas Maassen
The shape of the Brainwave Sofa (which we blogged about here) is entirely determined by recording Maassen's neural activity while he closed his eyes and thought of comfort.

See all these and more at the opening on November 4th at Material ConneXion's New York headquarters.

Bits 'N Pieces
Material ConneXion, New York City
November 4 - December 4, 2009
Opening: 6pm, November 4th, RSVP by October 30th to rsvp at materialconnecion dot com

Good creative hiring is all about flexibility and relationships--this was the core of the message gleaned from Wednesday's long-anticipated Coroflot Creative Confab at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco.

The panel discussion at the heart of the 160-attendee event was easily the most boisterous and impassioned of the Confab's four-city tour so far, with panelists Emily Delmont (Google Creative Lab), Steve Johnson (LinkedIn), Kate Gilman (24 Seven) and John Foster (IDEO) bouncing around opinions on networking, creative skill sets, and employee engagement with dizzying speed. Kudos to Coroflot's Carl Alviani, who's deft moderating provided just the right amount of provocation, synthesis, and encouragement to the panel.

A few of the more memorable revelations:

• The timeframe for a creative hire can vary tremendously: John and Steve both recalled designers who took over two years to finally bring on board, while Kate regularly places freelancers the same day the position opens. The difference? Specificity: A designer who's defined entirely by their skills is easy to place, but easily replaced; a staff hire with growth potential depends more on collaborative and learning ability, and these take far longer to assess.


• Creative skills for the next three years: Once esoteric abilities like motion graphics, interaction design, and social media engagement are being integrated into almost every part of the creative world, and will soon be as common a part of the communication toolbox as email. At the strategic end, John has seen a recent swell in demand for designers who understand business processes, and can approach them with the same creative mindset they bring to other projects. Expect Design MBA programs to proliferate like mad.


• The high cost of a bad hire: It's astronomical, in wasted time, money and opportunity. A worry voiced across the panel was of wanting to fill a position so badly that a poor-fitting applicant with great skills gets the job. It always ends in tears.


• Post hire support: It's difficult, it's time-consuming, and it's absolutely necessary. Every panelist described a different strategy for connecting new hires to their colleagues, and keeping them supported, but they all had one. IDEO's in particular is deeply involved, with multiple follow-up interviews, presentations, and introductions with potential collaborators in house (read more at John's 3 Questions preview post)


• Biggest surprise--it's not about the job, it's about the person: "Should I apply for a job despite not meeting all the requirements?", asked one audience member. The panelists replied with a unanimous "Yes!" It turns out they keep tabs on dozens or even hundreds of potential hires (Emily's team at the Creative Lab maintains a Google Doc for just this purpose), and job postings are primarily tools for building that list. This is one reason they're often so vaguely written: while there are sometimes specific jobs that need instant filling (especially in freelance), recruiters are more interested in finding qualified creatives with good communication skills and learning abilities. Replying to a post is merely the first step in that relationship. So apply, apply, apply.

more pics, notes and links after the jump

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The Harley-Davidson Museum and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design are teaming up for the former's first feature exhibition, "The Helmet Project," which will involve the labor of over 100 art and design students:

The Helmet Project challenged students to deconstruct the conventional notion of a helmet and re-envision its function and meaning through art and design that push visual and conceptual boundaries. Students are also creating the show - from exhibit fabrication and installation to exhibition graphics and marketing.

"Harley-Davidson is renowned for its iconic motorcycle designs - both the industrial design of the motorcycle and the artistic design of distinct paint, graphics, parts and accessories," said Fricke. "The Helmet Project was expressly developed to create an ambitious college-wide project focusing on art and design - skills that are very important to Harley-Davidson. Our rewarding partnership with MIAD has resulted in an exhibition that is informative, bold and fun and will interest fans of art and design, history, motorcycling, and pop culture."

The exhibit opens Wednesday, October 28th. Click here for more info.

There's just a couple more weeks to register for the Opportunity Green Business Conference, taking place on November 7th and 8th in Los Angeles. The conference aims to inspire "a collaborative culture of new thinking" and "facilitate the movement to transform business for good" by providing "unprecedented approaches to sustainability that are bankable and exciting."

Sounds pretty good, right?

Even better is the unbelievable speaker list, including Michael Hopkins, the editor-in-chief of the MIT Sloan Management Review; Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject; Adam Lowry, founder of Method; and Helen Walters, editor of Innovation & Design at Business Week.

To supplement the conference, Opportunity Green is running the OG|25 competition, which will highlight the best of innovative green startups. And, just added, is the Tour de OG, a 5 day bike ride directly preceding the event. The ride will raise awareness about green business, and all participants will receive organic meals, campsites and lodging, promotional bike accessories and discounted attendee registration for the conference.

More information and registration guidelines here.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is celebrating National Design Week by offering free admission for all museum visitors between October 18 through the 24th. In addition, they'll be hosting a series of public programs around the National Design Awards, presented by First Lady Michelle Obama this past July.

Here's the list of what's up for the rest of the week:

National Design Awards Winners' Panel
October 20, 6:30-8:30 pm
The Times Center

The 2009 National Design Award winners, including Laurene Boym, Andrew Blauvelt and Steve Duenes, participate in a panel discussion about their inspiration and drive as designers and the state of contemporary design in America. Register for the event here, or, if you can't make it, watch the live webcast from this website.

Objectified Film Screening
October 21st, 1:30 and 3:30 pm
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

If you missed Objectified when it made its round through the box office, now's your chance to catch this "feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them." Register for the 1:30 here or the 3:30 here.

National Design Awards Gala & After-Party
October 22nd

Cooper-Hewitt celebrates the 2009 National Design Awards with its annual Awards ceremony and dinner held at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City. Get tickets here.

If you aren't in New York but would like to attend some design-related events, check out Copper-Hewitt's "Design Around America" banner for national listings.

Wright Auction House continues to explore and support contemporary design by hosting the Boym Partners at their auction space in Chicago, IL from November 3rd through the 14th.

Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym, the recipients of a 2009 National Design Award, will be showing new works (unique to Wright auction house) alongside selections from Timeless Objects, their new collection of ordinary objects made "timeless" through the application of a special epoxy resin mixture, reminiscent of bronzing. The results are highly enigmatic, obscuring the origins of each object while emphasizing their form.

If you need any more convincing, check out Alice Rawsthorn's article on the Boyms, "Seeing Design as Intellectual Rather Than Just Practical," published a few days ago in the New York Times.

A few more shots of new additions to Timeless Objects after the jump.

Timeless Objects at Wright Auction House
4-14 November, 2009
Artist's Reception: 3 November 2009, 6 - 9pm (RSVP)

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To celebrate their 70th anniversary, Danish product company Vipp, which produced the original steel-cylinder trash can with rubber foot pedal, has asked a ton of designers of all stripes to devise trash can designs for a charity auction done in conjunction with Design Within Reach. Proceeds will benefit DIFFA: Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS.

The unusual line-up contains the likes of Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Yoko Ono, Yves Behar, and others. The public viewing of the resultant trash cans opens today in New York, and the designs will be auctioned off at the end of this month.

via metropolis

The one week that stands between now and the fourth installment of the Coroflot Creative Confab looks to be a busy one, if we extrapolate from recent trends.

The morning workshops, for one, have filled up with astonishing speed; encouraging, since this is the first time we've expanded the schedule beyond the afternoon-panel-plus-reception of Confabs past. On the other hand, it means that if you wanted to attend the "Creating an Online Presence Worth Hiring" workshop, you are outta luck: it's full. Sorry.

If you're looking to learn about the other end of the hiring see-saw though, there's still room in Terra Dehnert and Corey O'Brien's "Subtle Art of Creative Hiring" workshop, and it's an impressive one. The two Aquent account managers have conducted over a thousand interviews with designers between the two of them, and drawn on this experience to create an exceptional workshop. Expect some extremely actionable insights on how to go about your own creative hiring process, and plenty of real world examples and hands-on exercises. Especially recommended for small business and studio owners eager to get some innovators on their team, but not sure where to start.

The afternoon panel discussion lineup continues to be spectacular, with creative hiring experts Emily Delmont of Google Creative Lab, John Foster of IDEO, Kate Gilman of 24 Seven, and Steve Johnson of LinkedIn.

The list of Sponsoring Employers and Recruiters isn't too bad either:

Registration is limited to 200, and well on its way to filling up.

Coroflot's Creative Employment Confab
Wednesday, October 21, 2pm - 6pm (workshops: 10am - noon)
The Autodesk Gallery
One Market Street, San Francisco, CA

We've written about Marti Guixé time and time again, so we're excited to announce that he will be in the area on November 14th, hosting a meal at Performa 09, the new visualt arts/perfomance biennial in NYC.

The interactive performance will take the form of a three-hour long "meal-in-motion," where "participants will be given ceramic glasses with 'edible microsnacks' adhered to their surface and instructions for eating them while performing small gestures that will require each person to interact with their fellow diners."

If you're a fan of his Gin and Tonic Fog party, Food Facility, or Meta-territorial Cuisine Cookbook, this is not to be missed.

More information about Performa 09's scheduled food performances (including a pasta sauna) at Eat Me Daily.

Mealing by Marti Guixé
Performa Hub
41 Cooper Square
Saturday, November 14 6:00pm
Tickets: $25

Thanks, Zach!

Market Forces is the theme of the fifth edition of Piemonte Share Festival, guest curated by Andy Cameron: which the relation between contemporary culture and market, how new media integrate the artistic languages and the economy, which the convergences between interactive art and advertising?

Piemonte Share Festival will be in Turin, Italy from the 3rd till the 8th of November 2009. Below is an overview of the exhibitions. Information on lectures, conferences and events, as well as a series of interviews, can be found online.

Share Prize Exhibition
Launched in 2007, the Share Prize is the pride and joy of the Festival. Designed to discover, promote and support the digital arts, artists from all around the world take part in the contest every year.
This year, the six finalists short-listed by the international panel of judges are: Ernesto Klar Convergenze parallele | Lia Proximity of needs | Andreas Muxel Connect | Francesco Meneghini-William Bottin Sciame 1 | Ralf Baecker Calculating Space | Random International / Chris O'Shea Audience
4th-8th November, 10 AM-7 PM, Regional Museum of Natural Sciences, Via Giolitti 36, Turin

Squatting Supermarkets
Artist Salvatore Iaconesi aka xDxD.vs.xDxD looks at how our everyday lives have evolved through shopping, piercing into the pulsating heart of Market Forces. Browsing products on shelves, choosing, paying, running up debt, being convinced and seduced, relating to places, messages and other people: shopping is an experience that fills our days, an experience constructed through images, suggestions and strategies that are all so complex that we, as final users, systematically fail to perceive them.
4th-8th November, 10 AM-7 PM, Regional Museum of Natural Sciences, Via Giolitti 36, Turin

Market Forces Exhibition
Taking as its starting point Salvatore Iaconesi's special project for Share Festival 2009, Squatting Supermarkets, which narrates how our everyday lives have evolved through "augmented" shopping, the statement made by the exhibition, curated by Simona Lodi, explores the issue of whether artists can be an alternative source of information on the economy.
4th-8th November, 10 AM-7 PM, Regional Museum of Natural Sciences, Via Giolitti 36, Turin

Until the End of Cinema
Curated by Luca Barbeni, this exhibition screens a series of audio-visual works that begin where the cinema ceases to exist, taking us from the linear to the interactive, from the collective to an individual perspective. The works can no longer be said to be cinema, but nor are they something else.
4th-8th November, 10 AM-7 PM, Regional Museum of Natural Sciences, Via Giolitti 36, Turin

Form Follows Nature - Erik Natzke Exhibition
Erik Natzke, artist, designer and programmer, creates and gives material substance to his ideas through immaterial computer code. His sensibility, combined with his stubborn resolve, has enabled him to push back the limits of his medium, beyond known methods and approaches. Natzke's work focuses on aesthetics and methodology, in which code and numbers generate beauty. When Natzke wants to draw something, he doesn't pick up a pencil. He opens his Flash software editor and starts programming.
7th-14th November - Allegretti Contemporanea Gallery, via San Francesco D'Assisi 14, Turin
Inauguration Saturday 7th November, 7 PM

Originally conceived by The Canadian Center for Architecture, Actions: What You Can Do With the City will open at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago from October 16th through March 13th, 2010.

Actions: What You Can Do With the City features seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening that are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city and challenge fellow residents to participate. It highlights distinct actions including projects related to the production of food and urban agriculture; the planning and creation of public spaces to strengthen community interactions; the recycling of abandoned buildings for new purposes; the appropriation of urban sites into terrain for play, such as soccer, climbing, skateboarding, or parkour; the alternate use of roads for walking or rail lines as park space; the design of clothing to circumvent urban barriers against loitering or resting on benches; and many others.

The exhibition is presented the same year that the city celebrates the centennial of Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan for Chicago. Though Burnham urged cities to "make no little plans," this exhibition underlines the contemporary notion that small, simple actions can (and do) have large impacts on the urban fabric.

Featured above are Action #79, Paint Grows Soccer Field, by Maider López and soccer fans in the United Arab Emirates, and Action #67, Wood Makes People Big as Cars by Hermann Knoflacher.

See the exhibition preview here, or, if you're in Chicago, check The Graham Foundation for visiting hours and associated talks.

More actions after the jump.

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Photos by Tara Mullaney (top) and Junyoung Yang (bottom)

Guest post by Tara Mullaney

Robert Fabricant, Vice President of Creative at Frog Design, opened IIT's two-day Design Research Conference in Chicago this past week with a slide diagramming the peak and collapse of the housing market. At the click of a button, he swiftly compared this slide to one diagramming the recent rise in demand for design researchers. The two were almost identical, with one exception; the market for Design Researchers hasn't crashed, yet. Fabricant goes on to describe this phenomenon as "an ethnography bubble," and he posed this question to the audience; "Where did we go wrong?"

Despite the recent corporate inflation of the need for ethnographic research, Fabricant reminded us that designing based on observations of humans isn't a new way of working. He used Henry Dreyfuss's Designing for People, written in the 1950s, to illustrate his point. Fabricant argued that design research is really just "common sense," and he emphasized that you don't need special training to do it. Indeed, many of the Design Research professionals I talked with at the conference come from diverse backgrounds. They were once mechanical engineers, AIDS researchers, journalists, and actors, not trained ethnographers. What brought them to the field was a strong interest in human behavior and "being good at listening and talking to people." Fabricant explained in simple terms how the "bubble" we are currently experiencing stems directly from the treatment of design research as a commodity instead of an integrated part of the design system. He postulated that as researchers, we are "selling the wrong thing." The user insights we currently find at the end result of design research projects, "have no inherent value, and must be translated into meaningful ideas." Fabricant's call for a "drive to results and outcomes" is one method for revaluing research's role in the design process as well as the market.

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China Design Now is a broadly ambitious overview of the massive wave of creativity currently rising in Chinese cities, first conceived in 2008 at the V&A in London. It's in the US now, hitting Cincinnati last year, and opening this past weekend at the Portland Art Museum, to much local anticipation and glee.

The reason we're mentioning it now? The location, for one: an easy stroll for Core77's Portland-based west coast contributors. Second is the involvement of several local design houses, notably Ziba, who worked on the show's online presence and exhibition staging, and ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, whose creative director John Jay helped bring it to town.

The other reason is self-serving: Coroflot's own Carl Alviani will be interviewing graphic designer Freeman Lau on November 7 as part of the exhibition, and is guest editing the China Design Now Portland blog, spotlighting new work by Chinese designers on Coroflot.

Readers in or visiting Portland: it's a unique and fascinating show, and the last chance to see it in the US -- go now. Everyone else: the blog includes content from an array of contributors in business, media and academia, including Chinese design & manufacturing expert Rob Curedale, and is an excellent place to get up to speed on the world's fastest-growing design economy.