glad to be of help! (all text credit goes to fred).
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Sarah Doherty <sdoherty@mica.edu> wrote:
hello zvezdana-
glad of your interest in the d center design convos! they have been really wonderful!
i passed your questions on to some of my fellow board members, especially fred scharmen who is one of the principal coordinators of the events. see his responses below which echo my own thoughts as well.
let me know if you need or want more info and or responses!
best-
sarah
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Fred Scharmen <sevensixfive@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: design convo’s – book publication
To: Sarah Doherty <sdoherty@mica.edu>
Cc: Klaus Philipsen <kphilipsen@archplan.com>, Brian Oster <boster@cbhassociates.com>, Ben Stone <ben.stone@gmail.com>, Marian <marian.glebes@gmail.com>
I can take a pass at answering some of these questions.
What would you say has been the main purpose of Design Convos?
When we started them, we weren’t really sure what the main purpose would turn out to be, other than to provide a venue for presenting and thinking about design work in the city (with both “design work” and “the city” defined in the broadest possible sense here). The thing that’s kind of become the main purpose is this – it’s been a very effective way to link up people and work that might otherwise not have gotten linked up. People might come in thinking that what they do is not relevant to a design context, or they think that others in different contexts won’t be able to relate to it, and they leave with hopefully a broader perspective and some new potential friends and collaborators.
In what way have they helped interdisciplinary efforts?
These Conversations have put artists in the same room with developers, teachers in the same room with activists, politicians in the same room with architects, engineers together with community organizers … the list could go on and on. In the best cases, each discipline is able to absorb a little bit of what the constraints and opportunities are in other disciplines, from the point of view of the people inside them, and hopefully, each discipline is able to recognize that there are a lot of interesting resonances and productive differences in the spaces between what they do.
And could you name two or three concrete things that came out of them? For example, an exhibition, project, etc.
Sure, there’s Gary Kachadourian’s Baltimore Infill Survey: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baltimoreinfillsurvey/ , that came out of a Conversation on Vacancy that Gary hosted. There were a few articles written about it, and it got entries from all over the world via flickr. I think Sarah Doherty’s Access Alley project got a new level of interdisciplinary interest when it was presented at an early Design Convo, too.( http://www.axisalley.wordpress.com ) Eric Leshinsky’s notion of ‘cultural containers’ which was the subject of a convo he hosted, has helped focus some of my own thoughts as a spatial practitioner, I’ve expanded his thoughts in a few published articles. We’ve helped push the visibility of people doing interesting work in Baltimore, in everything from street art to bio-remediation, and after showing their work in our venue, they’ve gone on to do even bigger and greater things – kind of the ‘cultural container’ principle at work.
What we’ve been most of proud of, though, is this ability to make introductions and connections between people and practices. Many collaborations have been realized after people have exchanged email addresses during design conversations, with projects realized at festivals like Artscape and Transmodern, even architectural commissions growing from meetings here. These are harder to quantify, but in some ways even more ‘concrete’ than anything. My favorite story about a concrete outcome is the fact that I met my girlfriend Marian, also a cofounder of Dcenter and a Design Convo co-conspirator, at an early Design Conversation. ;D
