Students Stand When Callerd Upon, and When Not
A 2009 NYT article about stand up desks introduced to an elementary school in Minnesota. These allowed students to stand, move around and fidget during class, and yielded positive learning outcomes. An example of thinking differently.
On this blog of design studio Eighty One, I found an assortment of creative office interiors.
http://www.eightyonedesign.co.uk/how-would-you-improve-your-graphic-design-studio-or-office/
Accessed 6/12/12
Google offices:
Office as set design, as adventure
Top left: Google office in Zurich, Switzerland, designed by Camenzind Evolution, Ltd.
1. DESIGN IS
http://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781568983141
Design Is celebrates the immense variety of design. Everyone and everything is here. Scholars, pundits, designers, architects, critics, and reporters are all represented, while everthing from election ballots to urban design, chairs to fuzzy logic, housing to the Internet is discussed. The richness of thought and stimulating ideas found here could only come from Metropolismagazine. Where else would bar codes be discussed along with cities, NASA rub shoulders with garden design, and a mechanical yam-pounder share space with Robert Moses? No other publication can provide the density of observation, range of perception, and unbridled enthusiasm for design found here. Like Metropolis itself, Design Is radiates the confidence and missionary zeal of those who would change the world
2. DOT DOT DOT
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/titles/art-design/graphic-design/dot-dot-dot-18.html
After seventeen issues, Dot Dot Dot remains the must-read journal on every designers desk. By steering clear of both commercial portfolio presentations and impenetrable academic theory, it has become the premier venue for creative journalism on diverse subjectsmusic, art, literature, and architecturethat affect the way we think about and make design. Dot Dot Dot 18 presents the latest fieldwork of a multidisciplinary group ofcontributors investigating the web of influences shaping contemporary culture. Smart, passionate, and imaginativelydesigned, Dot Dot Dot is for graphic designers and anyone interested in the visual arts.
3. TYPOHOLIC
http://www.victionary.com/book/typoholic_info.html
Letters and words are the most efficient way to talk. The great demand for quick and effective communication has challenged designers’ originality to innovate expressions in words, phrases and letter forms. From digital types to real life installations, Typoholic is a thorough review of modern type-making that makes the core of communication itself. In two separate sections, the book introduces more than 40 new illustrative and animated type families that come in a narrative package of alphabets, numbers and punctuations, followed by 200 colourful pages of ad-hoc projects featuring custom type designs as logo marks, campaign installations and editorial art. The book would particularly highlight how meanings of words and phrases multiples when typography meets design, handworks, photography, performance art and illustrations that individually convert the process of reading into unique experience which one can embrace, encounter, touch and explore.
4. DESIGN PLAY
http://www.victionary.com/book/design-play_info.html
Games and tricks often breed big ideas, and the idea of ‘Play’ has prompted artists and designers to bring peculiarity into the routine and amuse the bored with visual tricks and interactive designs. Be it simple or complicated, deliberate or unintentional, this art of spreading joy demands a strong commitment to break the rules and a knack of poking fun in a lighthearted way. From mimicries to interactive approaches that engage users in the development of desirable design outcomes, Design•Play put together a rich source of playful ideas that challenge your normative perceptions by means of five distinctive kinds of ‘Play’ embraced in graphic, product and spatial designs.
5. CREATIVE ISLAND
http://www.laurenceking.com/product/Creative+Island+2.htm
Following the success of the first volume, Creative Island 2 takes an entirely fresh look at the extraordinary range and quality of design in Britain today, including work from 25 design disciplines – from architecture and engineering to fashion and jewellery; from new media and graphics to theatre and retail design, and many more. Showing more than 100 recent projects, and also featuring design ideas and visuals of work that is yet to be realized, each one tells the designers’ stories of their work in their own words. Through a series of themes, John Sorrell explores the relationships between different projects and the way in which different disciplines cross-fertilize, which, he argues, is the key reason for the current wealth of inspired design from the United Kingdom.
Students were put in groups of 3 and were limited to forms & colors found in there sketch books. Each person needed to have a form or color represented in the final pattern.
Print Magazine issue 65, 1 February 2011
Special issue on collaboration, guest edited and designed by Project Projects.
Project Projects is a NYC Design studio working with mostly cultural clients and doing a lot of publishing as well.
On page 34, Michael Rock of 2×4 says there are essentially three types of collaboration: “Prosthetic: Partnering to fill a lack (as in a writer and art director team up in an agency); Systematic: partnering to tackle extremely complex problems (as in architecture and film); and Distributive: partnering, often asynchronously, to take advantage of global distribution (as in outsourcing).”
Fluxus, the 60’s art movement, focused on inter-disciplinary efforts. Cofounded by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles. Fluxus artists sought to disrupt the traditional role of the artist as isolated creator with collaborations between writers, composers, artists and designers.
Here’s another example of conversations. These guys get together every week in their Brooklyn loft to learn coding. Trouble is, there are 5 of them, and yet they limit attendance to 6 — which means one person can attend?! Weird. They should absolutely do these as webinars, so that a passive public can participate.
http://kitchentablecoders.com/2012/02/25/001-LISP/
From their website:
Table:Every week we host a workshop on a topic we’re passionate about.
We keep it down to 5 people because that’s how many fit around our kitchen table.
There’s no projector. We just hang out for the day, and enjoy a collaborative learning experience.
Chefs: Hi, we’re David, Amit & Ted. We both design software for a living and share a studio.
We’re ever curious about new and old languages, as well as the people who shaped them.
Sometimes we teach graduate courses, so we figured why not do informal workshops at our studio with like-minded folk.
another example we could use in the last chapter. Follow the link to see them in motion.
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/20136/ruslan-khasanov-making-of-sunbeam-type.html
khasanov, based in ekaterinburg, russia,
has developed an entirely sunlight-formed typeface, shaped through the dispersion of light. this phenomenon is most commonly observed in the occurrence
of a rainbow, displaying the spatial separation of white light into the differing wavelengths– resulting in a notable variation in color.
in order to harness this light effect, khasanov first experimented with glass and mirrors as he added water to these reflective media in an effort to create
the glittered, rainbow alphabet. in the initial ‘sunbeamtype’ explorations, the designer achieved interesting effects, although he realized he had not quite tapped into
the potential for what he had envisioned as a radiant, sunbeam typeface. khasanov tells designboom, ‘I thought of the light dispersion phenomenon (the splitting of the
white light into a rainbow). all I needed was to deflect the light by transparent refracting mediums. I’ve used gel by dabbing on a glass and then I draw
the letters on with a clean brush. all I had to do was to bring that glass to the sunbeam and to reflect letters by a lens on the background.’ by re-determining
the angle and a distance from which the digital camera was positioned to the piece of glass with gel-scrawled type, the designer was able to achieve a fascinating
trick of light. it was due to this subtle shift in materials and method that the designer was able to document his sun-formed font.
From “Now in Production” at the Walker Art Center.
from the Walker blog:
http://blogs.walkerart.org/design/2011/10/26/gdnip-3-konstantin-grcic-eric-ku-chair-design/
Eric Ku’s Chair/Chair.
In the Gallery…
Ku’s Chair/Chair in the typography section of the exhibition.
From the gallery label… Eric Ku’s Chair is made from pieces that when taken apart, spell out the word “chair.” Ku was inspired by a famous work by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs(1965). Kosuth placed a real chair in the gallery next to a photograph of the same chair (photographed in that gallery) and a definition from a dictionary.
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965).
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