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Coming soon to the MoMa: Safe: Design Takes on Risk “presents more than 300 contemporary products and prototypes designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances, respond to emergencies, ensure clarity of information, and provide a sense of comfort and security”.
Update: Business Week has a preview of the exhibition as well as a slideshow of some of the objects in the exhibit.
A couple of guys calculated the average color of the universe to be turquiose. Then it turned out they had made an error and the actual color of the universe is beige.
As part of my ongoing series of thoughts about conference badge and program design (Poptech 2004, Web 2.0 2004, PopTech 2003), here’s a quick review of the AIGA conference badges and programs. The badges are pretty good. Both first and last names are printed in large type for easy glancing and the schedule fits in the badge holder.
The badge lanyards are not the usual string/cloth, but a simple length of thin hollow plastic tube that’s looped together with a small piece of plastic that fits inside the tube like so:
If the lanyard is too long (as they often are at these things) and your badge is hanging down to your belt buckle, just grab a scissors, cut a bit off one end of the tube, and stick it back together. The program is a small thick book which I’ve left in my hotel room the entire time, preferring to rely on the Web site for event descriptions and the smaller schedule that fits in the badge holder for times, room numbers, etc. The schedule is actually not a booklet, but a series of folding pieces, one for each day of the conference, so when Friday is over, you can take the Friday schedule out of your badge holder and leave it behind, which is kind of handy.
Music video for Breathe Me by Sia, that song at the end of the last episode of Six Feet Under.
Nicholas Negroponte spoke this morning about the MIT Media Lab’s $100 laptop initiative. “One does not think of community pencils—kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful.” More info at BBC News and Technology Review.
I must be living in a cave because I hadn’t really heard of the Daily Show’s America the Book (more here) before today’s presentation by Paula Scher and Ben Karlin.
Designboom interview with designer/citizen Milton Glaser. Glaser is responsible for one of my favorite sayings: just enough is more.
Going all city is graffiti slang for putting your graffiti on trains in all five boroughs of NYC.
“I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by ‘picking up’ and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside.”
Some miscellaneous bits I haven’t had a chance to post yet about the conference:
More tomorrow, already the last full day of the conference.
OPENSTUDIO was announced at the conference today by John Maeda. Keith sez about the project: “described as an experiment in creativity, collaboration, and capitalism, Open Studio is designed to simplify tools for the creative process and provide a pseudo-currency model for tool use and sharing.” Gotta go check this one out in the Media Lab space here.
Something to look forward to: podcasts from the AIGA Design Conference. I’ve been told they’ll be up in a week or two and that they will include many of the presentations as well as a lot of interviews with speakers. I’ll point to them when they’re available.
The Designing for User eXperience conference “[gathers] together researchers and practitioners of all the design disciplines and related fields to share their stories and experiences on how the needs and goals of both users and businesses are met through design”. Looks like the blog has yet to get going.
Are you at the AIGA conference? Are you taking notes? Are those notes on a computer or posted to a blog? There are several sessions going on at a time now and I’m trying to get to as many as I can without, you know, going insane. If you’ve got notes (especially from sessions I didn’t get to) and you don’t mind sharing them, send them along and I’ll put them up on the site. If you’re blogging, send your links or post them in the comments below. Thanks!
ps. Did anyone go to the yoga at 6:30am this morning? What percentage of the participants were hung over? Was everyone in black?
The Design Encyclopedia is a wiki that aims to be filled with definitions and descriptions of design terms, people, concepts, companies, etc. This could become a great resource. (thx armin)
UnBeige blogged the blog panel that I participated on with Michael Bierut, Jen Bekman, Armin Vit, and Steven Heller. More here and here.
New vocabulary word (to me): gangsta nerd.
Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky) has a new book out about remix culture called Rhythm Science. More on the book at MIT Press and it’s available at Amazon.
Ellen Lupton is up on stage now talking about dumb quotes, weird scaling, and pseudo italics.
Design for Democracy is utilizing the skillset of designers to improve the election process in America, including ballot redesigns and polling place signage.
In preparing for the conference, I read up on the last conference (held in Vancouver in 2003) on the Speak Up design blog: 1, 2, 3, 4.
As part of the conference within a conference for students, Michael Bierut listed 20 courses he did not take in design school (I think I got all of them):
Semiotics
Contemporary Performance Art
Traffic Engineering
The Changing Global Financial Marketplace
Urban planning
Sex Education
Early Childhood Development
Economics of Commerical Aviation
Biography as History
Introduction to Horticulture
Sports Marketing in Modern Media
Modern Architecture
The 1960s: Culture and Conflict
20th Century American Theater
Philanthropy and Social Progress
Fashion Merchandising
Studies in Popular Culture
Building Systems Engineering
Geopolitics, Military Conflict, and the Cultural Divide
Political Science: Electoral Politics and the Crisis of Democracy
His point was that design is just one part of the job. In order to do great work, you need to know what your client does. How do you design for new moms if you don’t know anything about raising children? Not very well, that’s how. When I was a designer, my approach was to treat the client’s knowledge of their business as my biggest asset…the more I could get them to tell me about what their product or service did and the people it served (and then talk to those people, etc.), the better it was for the finished product. Clients who didn’t have time to talk, weren’t genuinely engaged in their company’s business, or who I couldn’t get to open up usually didn’t get my best work.
Bierut’s other main point is, wow, look at all this cool stuff you get to learn about as a designer. If you’re a curious person, you could do worse than to choose design as a profession.
A list of twenty-eight design aphorisms to consider before attending the AIGA conference.
I’m sitting in a huge room filled with ~2,000 people at the opening remarks of the AIGA Design Conference and there’s no single other person on Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) in iChat:
I may be the only person in the entire room with his laptop open. Instead, everyone is listening to the speakers. Like Jeff, I’m torn: is this lack of a back channel a good thing or does the presence of an online component of a conference make the experience more rewarding?
Nikolaus Hafermaas made an interesting observation about visual design. If you’ve a visual designer, you’re working with a rapidly depleting finite resource: people’s personal attention.
Rafael Esquer just showed some of his most recent work here at the Student Conference. I like his Made in NY logo that he did for NYC. Here’s a short interview with Esquer.
Timeline of the AIGA Design Conference. Nicely done little Flash movie.
Publish looks at Microsoft’s newly announced interactive design application, Sparkle, comparing it with Flash. More on Sparkle.
Todd Radom designs sports logos, including ones for the Super Bowl, Fenway Park’s 90th anniversary, and the new Cleveland Browns. Read about his design for the Washington Nationals logo in Fast Company.
Dressed to the Nines is an interactive look at the design of baseball uniforms. “Whether we are looking at someone in a uniform or we are trying it on ourselves, it is the feeling of the fabric, the design on the cap and jersey, the colors, cut, and history of the outfit, that all lend meaning to our relationship with the game.”
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