Disney to Build a New Park in Shanghai

The Chinese central government approved Walt Disney Co.'s planned $3.6 billion theme park (including hotels and shopping) in Shanghai. This could be one of the largest foreign investments ever in China, and marks an important milestone for the U.S. entertainment company's effort to extend its brand in the world's most populous nation.

A Disney park would bring tens of thousands of jobs to Shanghai, and help broaden its economy. The city aims to build itself into a world power in finance and shipping.

Chinese authorities on Wednesday confirmed an announcement by Burbank, Calif.-based Disney that it had won Beijing's endorsement for its project after years of planning. If it is completed, Shanghai Disneyland would offer the company a significant presence in the huge Chinese market. Shanghai is also in the midst of preparing for the $4.19 billion World Exposition due to start in May.

Disney already operates one theme park in the Chinese city of Hong Kong, which is separately administered and which mainland Chinese require a travel permit to enter. The Shanghai park, to be located near the city's international airport in the Pudong district, will be much larger and specifically designed with cultural touches meant to appeal to a domestic Chinese audience. China's population is so huge that the new park won't even have to rely on foreign tourists.

It is clear that designers around the world will have an eye on China from now on.

Science Animation: The Future of Visual Communication

Visual communication is becoming more prominent with the development of new digital production methods and growing distribution venues on the World Wide Web. New developments in animation tools and scientific imaging are coming together to help scientists visualize phenomena that in the past were too large (the Universe), too small (cellular structures), too fast (neuronal activity), or too slow (plate tectonics) to visualize.

The Inner Life of a Cell, is a ground-breaking eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students. The animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli. Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, it was featured during the 33rd annual SIGGRAPH conference in Boston.

Click on the heading above to see the video.

For a narrated version without the music go to
http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html

Making Visual Presentations Like Steve Jobs

For over 30 years, Apple CEO Steve Jobs (left) has produced incredibly effective visual presentations. Carmine Gallo reveals the techniques that Jobs uses to create and deliver his keynote presentations in his new book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience, (right).

According to Gallo, Steve Jobs does not sell computers; he sells an experience. The same holds true for his presentations that are meant to inform, educate, and entertain. An Apple presentation has all the elements of a great theatrical production—a great script, heroes and villains, stage props, breathtaking visuals, and one moment that makes the price of admission well worth it. Here are Gallo's five elements of every Steve Jobs presentation.

1. A headline. Steve Jobs positions every product with a headline that fits well within a 140-character Twitter post. For example, Jobs described the MacBook Air as "the world's thinnest notebook." That phrase appeared on his presentation slides, the Apple Web site, and Apple's press releases at the same time. What is the one thing you want people to know about your product?

2. A villain. In every classic story, the hero fights the villain. In 1984, the villain, according to Apple, was IBM (IBM). Before Jobs introduced the famous 1984 television ad to the Apple sales team for the first time, he told a story of how IBM was bent on dominating the computer industry. "IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple." Today, the "villain" in Apple's narrative is played by Microsoft (MSFT). One can argue that the popular "I'm a Mac" television ads are hero/villain vignettes.

3. A simple slide. Apple products are easy to use because of the elimination of clutter. The same approach applies to the slides in a Steve Jobs presentation. They are strikingly simple, visual, and yes, devoid of bullet points. Pictures are dominant. When Jobs introduced the MacBook Air, no words could replace a photo of a hand pulling the notebook computer out of an interoffice manila envelope. Think about it this way—the average PowerPoint slide has 40 words. In some presentations, Steve Jobs has a total of seven words in 10 slides.

4. A demo. Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain gets bored easily. Steve Jobs doesn't give you time to lose interest. Ten minutes into a presentation he's often demonstrating a new product or feature and having fun doing it. When he introduced the iPhone at Macworld 2007, Jobs demonstrated how Google Maps worked on the device. He pulled up a list of Starbuck stores in the local area and said, "Let's call one." When someone answered, Jobs said: "I'd like to order 4,000 lattes to go, please. No, just kidding."

5. A holy smokes moment. Every Steve Jobs presentation has one moment that neuroscientists call an "emotionally charged event." The emotionally charged event is the equivalent of a mental post-it note that tells the brain, Remember this! For example, at Macworld 2007, Jobs could have opened the presentation by telling the audience that Apple was unveiling a new mobile phone that also played music, games, and video. Instead he built up the drama. "Today, we are introducing three revolutionary products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device…an iPod, a phone, an Internet communicator…an iPod, a phone, are you getting it? These are not three devices. This is one device!" The audience erupted in cheers because it was so unexpected, and very entertaining.

Click on the heading above to see a video about the book.

Parkitecture: Taming the Home Garage

You may not want to actually join this competition but it does suggest an interesting design project for your students - re-design the common garage. Garages with huge blank doors seem to dominate our landscape and even overpower most houses (right). Too often it would be more accurate to describe them as a "garage with attached house".

Dwell magazine’s newest contest (left), sponsored by Lexus, is a challenge to incorporate forward-thinking technology into a freestanding building that can hold no more than three vehicles. Entrants are invited to submit at least two renderings using Google SketchUp—one interior and one exterior—that illustrate the technological possibilities and sustainable potential of the garage of the future.

First prize is $1,000 and coverage on Dwell.com
Winner Announced: November 23rd, 2009
Judging Criteria
* Must be an original, unbuilt rendering of a residential garage that holds no more than three vehicles
* Must include at least one integrated technological system geared toward automobile maintenance and/or storage
* Proposed structure must be constructed of predominately recyclable materials
Submission Details
* Include at least two Google SketchUp renderings of the garage, including an interior rendering that illustrates the proposed technological system and an exterior rendering
* Include the name of the entry
* Include a 500-word description of the overall concept, including choice of materials and an explanation of the proposed technology and overall sustainable features

Click on the heading above to go to the competition site.

Spectrum Showcases Fantasy and Science Fiction Illustrations

Spectrum, the fantasy and science fiction illustration annual, (left) announced that submissions are now being accepted for Spectrum 17. The Call For Entries poster (right) is being sent to illustrators who indicated an interest in entering. This year's poster was designed by comic artist Paolo Rivera.

Spectrum is open to any artist. International entrants are welcome. Students, fine artists, and illustrators are all treated equally. There are no limits on the number of pieces an artist can submit and there is no pre-screening prior to judging.

Spectrum is sold in the mass market through all the major bookstores. Copies are also sent to many art directors and publishers to maximize exposure for the artists featured in the book.

Cathy and Arnie Fenner started Spectrum in 1993 beause there was a tremendous amount of high-quality fantastic-themed art work created each year that wasn't being represented in other annual art books and shows, Spectrum was established to provide creators with a regular showcase for the best fantasy, science fiction, horror, and otherwise uncategorizable artwork created each year.

In 1993 A Call For Entries went out to the arts community and the response was overwhelmingly positive. A blue-ribbon jury convened to make selections from the work submitted and the results appeared in the first full color book, Spectrum 1, published by Underwood Books in 1994. A new installment in the Spectrum series has appeared every year since. Spectrum is designed for readers who enjoy fantasy and science fiction art and serves as a resource for art directors, art buyers, and artists.

Spectrum was the first to specifically feature categories devoted to 3D, comics, and unpublished works. Likewise, Spectrum was the first book to significantly cut the time between the jury's selection and the appearance of the annual: some of the other books appear up to two years after the close of their competitions, whereas Spectrum appears within eight months of our jury's selection.

Click on the images to see them in larger size.
Click on the heading above to go to the Spectrum site.

Shanghai World Expo Provides Chance for Design Exploration

Major world events like the upcoming Expo 2010 Shanghai, China provide good opportunities to look at how different designers approach similar challenges. Expo 2010 in China will run from May 1 to Oct 31, 2010. The theme is Better City, Better Life. There are 70 million expected visitors and 200 participating exhibitors. Most of the participants who construct pavilions are countries (Spain - on left) but some are large businesses like Cisco (right).

Your students can select a country and, with a little research, try to design a pavilion for that country that represents the culture and unique characteristics of the people, land and industry in the country. Students can think about what the pavilion itself will look like, what the exhibits inside will contain and how they will be designed. Students might focus on the general theme Better City, Better Life.

Click on the heading above to follow preparations for the Shanghai Expo 2010.

The Intersection between Engineering and Design

Elementary, middle and high school teachers across the United States competed for thousands of dollars of classroom materials in the Engineering Education Service Center’s first Engineering Curriculum Contest. The winners were selected from over 20 entries and best reflected high levels of creativity, innovation and student engagement.

From Spider Silk to Tsunamis to Mini-Skateboards and Water Purification, this year’s entries were examples of hands-on activities that help students learn and retain more math and science concepts. By choosing to teach engineering, educators can help students make the links between classroom learning, their everyday lives and the wider world.

Winning curriculum is available as a free download on the Engineering Education Service Center’s website engineeringedu.com. The Engineering Education Service Center’s 2009 Curriculum Contest was sponsored by the Engineering Education Service Center in an effort to reward teachers who are tackling this challenge.

Engineering Education Service Center (EESC) is an engineering education company that specializes in providing products for K-12 schools to teach and share the fun of engineering. From curriculum to books, DVDs, posters, T-shirts and other motivational products, EESC aims to make engineering understandable and accessible to everyone.

EESC is directed by Celeste Baine (right). Baine is a biomedical engineer, the director of the Engineering Education Service Center and an award-winning author. EESC has also published many books on various aspects of engineering (left).

Click on the heading above to go to the EESC site.

Visualization is Essential to Thinking

While no state education agency or university recognizes visual literacy as a core skill (like verbal communication and numerical literacy), it is clear that even scientists and mathematicians rely on visualization skills to solve complex problems.

Look carefully at this photo of a Nobel Prize winning scientist in a seminar room. Look at the blackboard and notice that, along with words and mathematical formulas, there are drawings. Look at the tables and notice that there are models of various Fullerene structures. Even consider the fact that these structures get their name from the famous architect, Buckminster Fuller, who realized early on that these were very stable structures and used them as the basis for his famous geodesic domes.

The drawings and models are standard visual techniques used in science, mathematics, the social sciences and the humanities to solve problems too complex, too large, or, in this case, too small without the aid of visual images and objects.

Professor Sir Harold Kroto (right), recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, is shown sitting in one of the seminar rooms of the University of Sussex on the day after his Nobel Prize was announced. He won the prize with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of C60 (Bucky balls) and other Fullerenes, models of which are shown in the foreground.

It is time for state education agencies and universities to quit pretending that visual literacy is not as "scholarly" as mathematical and verbal literacy. It is time for all to admit that human brains use not only words and numbers to process ideas but also sounds, movements, images, objects, environments and experiences.

There is an entire lobe of the brain devoted to visual imaging (the occipital lobe at the back of the brain in both the left and right hemispheres). How can every leading educational institution in the country continue to ignore that visualization is a key way humans learn, think and communicate? How can our school systems pretend America can remain competitive in scientific, technological, mathematical, economic, or any other area, by focusing on English and mathematics to the exclusion of visual thinking?

A Sense of Entry: Designing the Welcoming School

One problem with many school designs is that, like many homes, there is a front door that is rarely used by the people who use the building everyday. Students, teachers, and staff often enter the building by a back door off the playground or parking lot. Those entry areas often are drab and unadorned, leading them past garbage dumpsters and loading docks. Is it any wonder that students often are not eager to come to school? The real places people enter the building should be inspirational and inviting, not just the ceremonial front entrance used by visitors.

There was a similar problem at Walt Disney World in Orlando because employees actually enter underneath the park through a long underground corridor. That entry, however, is designed in such a way, with pictures, displays, uniform pickup spots, etc. that by the time the employee is ready to enter the park through a hidden doorway, they are fully "in character" and have forgotten any troubles with which they might have arrived.

In a book entitled A Sense of Entry: Designing the Welcoming School, authors and architects Alan Ford and Paul Hutton show exemplary entryways that embody basic principles of design that have been influential over the centuries.

After providing a history of the entryways of iconic structures such as the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, the 1958 Seagram Office Building, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the authors demonstrate their theory by looking at successful entryways of schools. A brief text introduces each of the projects, describing the elements of design they believe are vital to a welcoming entryway: "identity"--telling the building's story, "wayfinding"--helping users understand where the main entrance is, "influence of streets"--the school's relationship to the surrounding area, and "procession"--creating layers of entrance that transition users from exterior to interior spaces.

Exploring 25 unique design solutions by Denver-based firm Hutton Ford, this book is a visual celebration and analysis of the role of entrances in architecture. Entrances serve many purposes. From defining the character of the architecture to the more practical aspects of the transition from outside to inside, they momentarily protect us from inclement weather as we launch between exterior and interior, like an environmental buffer to mitigate temperature changes, even allowing our vision to adjust to light changes. In the book, the architects illustrate the important role that successful entrance and movement design can have on creating a positive architectural experience.

Since most architects have not yet learned principles of user-friendly design they offer few design options for the real users of schools. Students and teachers, however, can learn the principles outlined for how to create an inviting front entrance and apply these ideas to making small but important changes to the back and side entrances students and teacher actually use.

Challenge the students to design elements that would make entering their school welcoming and motivational. Christopher Alexander's book "A Pattern Language" also provides a description of key elements of successful entryways.

One Design Fix for the Future Challenge

Here's an interesting design challenge that could prove to be inspiring for our students (whether or not they actually enter the competition.)

METROPOLIS magazine's 2010 Next Generation Design Competition has issued its call for entries.

Good design determines how well products, spaces, and systems work from the beginning. Metropolis magazine thinks that great design ideas can make things work even better. One Design Fix for the Future challenges you to prove them right—whether you are an architect, interior designer, product designer, landscape designer, graphic designer, communication designer. They’re looking for ONE design fix you can make now in your designed environment—the products you use, your home, your workplace, your city, or any commercial application—that, in scale or as inspiration, can improve our future.

To enter, provide one small (but brilliant and elegant) fix—leading to an incremental (or dramatic) change in sustainability. Your fix needn’t have anything to do with “environmentalist engineering” to make a difference. Concentrate on what you know best, are aching to improve in a way that deploys your training and imagination.

DEADLINE: January 29, 2010 but, since the contest is really for professionals you may just want to make it a class assignment and then compare your students' results with the professional entries when Metropolis releases them.

Click on the heading above for details.

The Next Generation of Computing is Fabricating

This is one of those times in which something is so revolutionary (like the automobile and the computer) that we will miss its significance until it has been around for another decade. This article will mean very little to you but ten years from now you will remember having read something about it somewhere. Just file this away and watch as the implications start to roll out in the coming years.

The future of computing lies in the capacity for ordinary people to design and produce real objects the way we design and print documents now. This kind of "printing" is currently referred to simply as fabrication and Neil Gershenfeld (left) wrote a book called "Fab" (right) about the concept a few years ago.

Gershenfeld and his colleagues at MIT have created the Fab Lab program (logo on right) with sites around the world. The implications for developing countries are significant.

The Fab Lab program, with connections to a number of partner organizations, is exploring the emerging possibility for ordinary people in India or Africa to not just learn about science and engineering but actually design machines and make measurements that are relevant to improving the quality of their lives.

Fab labs provide widespread access to modern means for invention. They began as an outreach project from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). CBA assembled millions of dollars in machines for research in digital fabrication, ultimately aiming at developing programmable molecular assemblers that will be able to make almost anything. The scaled down Fab labs comprise roughly fifty thousand dollars in equipment and materials that can be used today to do what will be possible with tomorrow's personal fabricators.

Fab labs have spread from inner-city Boston to rural India, from South Africa to the North of Norway. Activities in fab labs range from technological empowerment to peer-to-peer project-based technical training to local problem-solving to small-scale high-tech business incubation to grass-roots research. Projects being developed and produced in fab labs include solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.

Fab labs share core capabilities, so that people and projects can be shared across them. This currently includes:

A computer-controlled lasercutter, for press-fit assembly of 3D structures from 2D parts
A larger (4'x8') numerically-controlled milling machine, for making furniture- (and house-) sized parts
A signcutter, to produce printing masks, flexible circuits, and antennas
A precision (micron resolution) milling machine to make three-dimensional molds and surface-mount circuit boards
Programming tools for low-cost high-speed embedded processors

These work with components and materials optimized for use in the field, and are controlled with custom software for integrated design, manufacturing, and project management. This inventory is continuously evolving, towards the goal of a fab lab being able to make a fab lab.

Click on the heading above to hear Gershenfeld talk about Fab Labs at the TED conference.

Looking for a Good Design School?

High School students interested in becoming designers are looking for good design schools to attend after graduating.

Some of the factors that will determine what would be the best design school for any particular student include:
How far are you willing to move from home?
What part of the country do you want to go to school in?
What area of design are you particularly interested in?
How good is your portfolio?
Are you ready for the big time or do you like an intimate, caring environment?
How much can you afford to spend for school?

Brian Hoff (right), who created the website The Design Cubicle in 2008, has provided a useful collection of websites of some of the top design schools. His idea was to use the school's websites to speak for themselves so the list may be more of a reflection of good websites than good design schools but there is surely some overlap there.

The 27 schools on Brian's list range from Cal Arts (left) on the West Coast to Harvard Graduate School of Design on the East Coast and everything in between. There are a few good schools that weren't included but readers have provided those in the comments.

Brian also has several other great articles on his site about things like logo and type design. Click on the heading above to check out the website and see the splash pages of 27 top design schools.

Designers Seek the Coveted G-Mark Sign of the Good Design Awards

The Good Design Awards is a comprehensive program for the evaluation and encouragement of design organized by Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization (JIDPO).

The award’s parent organization is the Good Design Products Selection System (commonly known as the G Mark system), established in 1957 by the then Ministry of International Trade and Industry (the current Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry). This award system was born out of the belief that design was essential in breaking out of the cycle of poverty in Japan at the time. Since then, the Good Design Award has been given to outstanding designs for more than 50 years in the pursuit of prosperous lives and industrial development. Approximately 35,000 Good Design Awards have been given in continuing these efforts.

The most distinguished designs are selected from those submitted for consideration for the Good Design Awards. JIDPO receives approximately 3,000 submissions from more than 1,000 companies and designers every year. These designs are screened by about 70 design experts, who select and recommend those designs worthy of the Good Design Awards.

The Good Design Awards aims to channel the power of distinctive designs to build prosperous lives and encourage sound industrial development - to brighten and enrich society through design. Design is essential to improving the lives of every individual in the twenty-first century.

Click on the heading above to learn more about the Good Design Awards.

Designing for a Sustainable World Theme of World Usability Day

World Usability Day consists of over 200 events in more than 43 countries held Worldwide on the second Thursday in November each year to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

This year the theme for World Usability Day is Designing for a Sustainable World. According to the organizers, World Usability Day is about making our world work better. It's about "Making Life Easy" and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first.

World Usability Day 2009 is approaching design from Cradle to Cradle. Coming from a user-centric perspective and looking beyond form and function, they are exploring the impact design has on our World. The ‘Cradle to Cradle’ approach is to start the design with the premise of using materials that can fully enter a new life cycle by either going back to nature or going back into the design process as a new product. This holistic approach to sustainable design shows how usability can apply to all of what we do and build.

Designing for a Sustainable World focuses on how our products and services impact our world. They look at all products and services, whether they are buildings, roads, consumer products, business, services or healthcare systems; throughout their life cycle. The impact focuses on - our environment, energy, water, soil, and more. Have the materials and processes that have been used been recycled and are they re-usable? Are they user and environmentally friendly? These are questions we all must consider as we design, purchase, use and dispose of products each and every day.

World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use.

Click on the heading above to learn about this years event.

Job Descriptions Reveal Education Needed for Designers

Below is a job description for a position seeking a designer to work as an Information Architect. It occurred to me that the description, not unlike many design job descriptions, illustrates two important points about design education. One is that designers do a lot of things other than make things look pretty. The other is that design education is a solid foundation for general education because it includes a wide range of knowledge, skills and abilities.

Here is part of an actual job description under the category
Knowledge/Skills/Abilities:

* 4+ years working as an information architect or interaction designer including experience designing organization, navigation, and search for, complex consumer websites and simpler marketing microsites
* Versed in user-centered design methods and techniques
* Experience conducting competitive reviews that led to strategic insights and recommendations
* Excellent verbal, written, analytical and process oriented skills
* Experience working on multiple projects simultaneously
* Prepare IA documentation: use cases, interaction models, site maps, wireframes, workflows
* Ability to work collaboratively on multi-disciplinary teams and with clients
* Thorough understanding of common web and digital interface conventions
* Experience working beyond the web site with emerging mediums: mobile, social, gaming, kiosk
* Proficient in InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Visio, Microsoft Office
* Understanding of Flash, HTML, DHTML, JavaScript and Content Management Systems
* Varied client and/or agency experience a plus

Have your students look at a few job descriptions for positions they might like to have when they are older. Show some design job descriptions to your school guidance counselor so they take what you do more seriously.

Media Piracy or Fair Use?

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) (left) is trying to protect its movies and other content from being illegally copied and sold on the streets, sometimes even before the movies make it to theaters. The MPAA is the trade association of the big Hollywood film companies whose mission it is to look out for the interests of the film studios.

Some media piracy is being done for financial gain (often in foreign countries) but other "piracy" is more like people sharing videos with friends. Like the failed attempt to stop the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol during Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, some feel media regulators need to provide more legal alternatives for people to share media because it can't be stopped.

The industries had some success by shutting down The Pirate Bay (TPB) (right) but many of the people who used to use the service have not stopped downloading movies from the Web. According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading", and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy-movement". The Pirate Bay has over 3,800,000 registered users.

In 2006, The Pirate Bay's website servers in Stockholm were raided by Swedish police, causing it to go offline for three days.
In 2009, four administrators of TPB were found guilty of copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. $3,620,000 USD). Despite the trial the website remained relatively unaffected.

Media piracy has been around in some form or another for a long time but the Internet and the common practice of file-sharing has changed the rules somewhat. Rather than embracing the new technology or offering fair alternatives to obtaining digital copies of movies, television shows, music, games, etc. the media industries persist in trying to stop the practice of file sharing. The MPAA and the movie studios it serves may have to take advantage of the very system and practice it is currently trying to stop.

Cardboard Construction and Animation

As budgets get tighter with an ailing economy one material that is still easy to come by is cardboard. Regular box cardboard can be used to make models for architecture, product design, and even animation. If you want bigger sheets try appliance stores or you can buy 4' x 8' sheets at cardboard supply places.

The Center for Understanding the Built Environment (CUBE) has a curriculum for developing a Box City - a miniature version of your whole community made out of cardboard.

TreeHugger is a great website promoting environmentally friendly activities that showed some examples of design projects done with cardboard (left and right). Notice that the trick to making good cardboard structures is to create all the details with cardboard and avoid just painting on flat surfaces.

Click on the heading above to see a two-minute video showing how to create and animate a cardboard animated film. The video ends with stop-action shots of the animator moving each piece incrementally between clicks of the camera.

The story below includes a link to an interesting animated cardboard film.

Portfolios and Show Reels for Motion Designers

Any design student hoping to have a career in motion graphics, animation, film, advertising or other areas involving motion graphics will need to have, in addition to a portfolio, what is called a show reel. A show reel, sometimes called a demo reel and sometimes written as one word (showreel), is a compilation of motion graphics work edited to show the range of work you have done.

Wikipedia describes it like this: A demo reel, or show reel, is the motion picture or video equivalent of an artist's portfolio. It is typically used as a tool to promote the artist's skill, talent, and experience in a selected field, such as acting, directing, cinematography, editing, special effects, animation, or video games and other graphics. The demo reel is frequently submitted with a résumé to a prospective employer. When a reel contains scenes from actual productions, a shot list or credit list may also be submitted to describe the artist's specific involvement in each portion of the reel. While the usage of video excerpts on such showreels can be regarded as a breach of copyright, it is generally accepted in the film industry to do so, as it is the only tool of an artist to actually self-promote her/his work.

Click on the heading above to see an amazing animation done with large sheets of cardboard (left) by a Dutch designer named Sjors Vervoort (right). Then go to his website to see his portfolio and showreel at http://www.sjorsvervoort.nl/

Can Design Transform the World?

There is a new book from Penguin called Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World (left) by Warren Berger. The book investigates the “glimmer” moments in design: the moment when a new solution to an old problem is revealed. It features the insights of designer Bruce Mau (right) going beyond the how-to approach and looking at design as a force of change in today’s world.

Berger talked with over 200 leading design experts and discovered ten major principles of “design thinking”, which he outlines in the book. They include innovative ways to solve community problems and improving your creative flow.

The author says, "What designers do, first of all, is to question the way things work. Then they begin to reimagine the world we live in, and come up with new alternatives—fresh ways of doing things. This can run the gamut from a new way to peel a potato to a new way to design healthcare systems. In the book, I take readers inside the design studio of Bruce Mau, while also profiling other designers, primarily to study how they approach problems—how they seek out new possibilities and bring them to life. So I interviewed, observed, and analyzed quite a few designers, including non-professionals who are designing everyday objects that solve problems. But the one designer that I really focus on is Mau."

Berger chose to focus on Bruce Mau because he is a superstar in the design world and an inspiration to a lot of young designers. He’s controversial and outspoken, and talks about how design can save the world which some people think is overly-ambitious. In his own book "Massive Change", (right) Mau evokes a sense that, with all the problems of the world right now, this is actually a great moment in time – a time of amazing possibilities. It’s a time when we, as a society and as individuals, can really design a better future.

Click on the heading above to go to Bruce Mau's website.

Visualization Plays a Big Role in New Math Standards

The so called "core" standards that only include English and math still have to acknowledge the powerful role visualization plays in learning. Two of the eleven mathematics standards are about the use of images, visual objects, and spaces to learn and express mathematical concepts. Schools and universities, none-the-less, refuse to acknowledge visual communication as a core skill.

Standard 7 is about Modeling.
Modeling uses mathematics to help us make sense of the real world—to understand quantitative relationships, make predictions, and propose solutions.

A model can be very simple, such as a geometric shape to describe a physical object like a coin. Even so simple a model involves making choices. It is up to us whether to model the solid nature of the coin with a three-dimensional cylinder, or whether a two-dimensional disk works well enough for our purposes. For some purposes, we might even choose to adjust the right circular cylinder to model more closely the way the coin deviates from the cylinder.

Standard 8 is about Shape.
From only a few axioms, the deductive method of Euclid generates a rich body of theorems about geometric objects, their attributes and relationships. Once understood, those attributes and relationships can be applied in diverse practical situations—interpreting a schematic drawing, estimating the amount of wood needed to frame a sloping roof, rendering computer graphics, or designing a sewing pattern for the most efficient use of material.

Understanding the attributes of geometric objects often relies on measurement: a circle is a set of points in a plane at a fixed distance from a point; a cube is bounded by six squares of equal area; when two parallel lines are crossed by a transversal, pairs of corresponding angles are congruent.

Students understand that:
Shapes and their parts, attributes, and measurements can be analyzed deductively.
Mathematical shapes model the physical world, resulting in practical applications of geometry.
They can solve problems involving similar triangles and scale drawings and
apply properties of right triangles and right triangle trigonometry to solve problems.

Click on the heading above to see the standards.

Design Museums Provide Lesson Ideas

Design museums have educators on staff who create lesson ideas for school groups who visit their museums. These lessons can often provide inspiration for ways we can teach design in schools.

In the United States, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum provides hundreds of design lessons that were developed and tested by teachers in every subject area. In the UK, the London Design Museum provides programs specially developed for school age kids.

GET INTO PRODUCT DESIGN (right) is a 3-day course at the Design Museum in London for 12-16 year olds inspired by the influential style of Dieter Rams, where students explore innovative product design with industry professionals to create their own product design solutions and prototypes.

MARVELOUS MARISCAL (left) gives students a chance to create a giant comic strip inspired by the work of Javier Mariscal and add 3D designs models to a magical Mariscal landscape. Students get help from a team of talented designers and are inspired by the work of Javier Mariscal to create kooky cartoon chararcters.

MAKE A MODERN HOME is a workshop for budding young architects and 3D designers. Taking inspiration from the craftsmanship and building techniques of leading UK architect David Chipperfield, students use construction kits from Meccano to make a 3D model of their ideal modern home with expert designers and architects on hand to assist and a bumper range of design materials to choose from for making a landscape for their home,

Click on the heading above to go to the Design Museum in London's website.

Cumulus is an International Association for Design Schools

Cumulus is an International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media which have a common desire to enhance the quality of education through co-operation, and student and teacher exchanges within the European Union Erasmus program.

Cumulus positions itself as the only global association to serve art and design education and research. It is a forum for partnership and transfer of knowledge and best practices.

The 150 member institutions represent most of the European countries and during past years several countries around the world have also joined Cumulus. Member universities now represent 42 different countries. They are represented by people like Luisa Collina (left) from Milan, Christian Guellerin (center) from France, and Fred Murrell (right) from the USA who argue that education is at a point where thinking globally is not just a nice idea, it is a necessity.

The University of Art and Design in Helsinki and the Royal College of Art in London, in co-operation with Danmarks Designskole, Gerrit Rietvelt Academy, Universität Gesamthochschule Essen and Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Wien initiated the Cumulus Network in 1990. The Network was transferred to Cumulus Association in 2001.

Cumulus has been a pioneer in developing jointly organized MA-programs, intensive workshops, projects and biannual conferences. It has published 'working papers' which have documented the discussions and seminars in conferences, and a First Aid Kit to help students and professors in planning mobility actions.

Click on the heading above to go to the Cumulus website.

Dean Kamen Helped Develop Coca-Cola's New Dispenser

We had an earlier story about the new Coca-Cola fountain dispenser called Freestyle (left). There is an interesting connection to inventor Dean Kamen (right), the developer of the Segway.

Kamen's company, DEKA, (DEan KAmen) had already developed a wearable system for injecting insulin for diabetics. Coca-Cola talked to him about using that technology, which carefully measures and mixes liquids, to help them develop a new way to mix Coca-Cola fountain drinks. The result is Coca-Cola's Freestyle fountain dispenser.

The Freestyle won't be showing up in every fast-food restaurant immediately, but the new fountain is seen as the biggest single innovation in Coca-Cola's history. Tests have already shown that, in addition to providing fresher-tasting drinks, the Freestyle system boosts sales, provides a greater number of choices, and, since the machines communicate electronically, can provide instant data on sales of each product.

Kamen was paid a fee by Coca-Cola but, since he is already a billionaire, what was most important to him is leveraging Coca-Cola's global beverage distribution system for his dream of figuring out how to get clean water to every child in the world.

For years, Kamen's company, DEKA, has been developing an innovative water-purification machine. To get the machines into production, however, to scale it up, and bring down the cost curve, Kamen needs a big company like Coca-Cola. Kamen's scheme aligns with Coca-Cola's business because they depend on clean water—the single biggest ingredient in the company's products.

What if, while meeting Coca-Cola's desire to distribute it's products around the world, Dean Kamen's dream of providing life-saving clean water to kids around the world could be met at the same time?

Where the Wild Designers Are

The upcoming movie "Where the Wild Things Are" is a designer's dream. Start with the book by one of the world's great illustrators, Maurice Sendak, add one of the world's most innovative film makers, Spike Jonze, and then roll in cinematographer Lance Acord, (Jonze's collaborator on "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation"), and production designer K.K. Barrett and you get one of the most visually stunning adaptations of a children's book to film. This, from start to finish, is a movie made by designers.

Despite school counselors and parents still telling students not to go into art if they want to make a living, design is one of the biggest career fields for visual thinkers today. Like so many movies, designers play a huge role in making stories come to life on the screen. Sit through the credits of most movies today and you will see the names of some of the top design firms followed by the designers who work for them. Most films employ several different design companies who specialize in particular visual effects.

Here is a sampling of the people and jobs just in the Art Department for Where the Wild Things Are:
KK Barrett, Production Designer
Lisa Thompson, Set Decorator
Will Hawkins, Art Director - Pre-Production Art Director
Jocelyn Thomas, Art Department Coordinator
Honi Keller, Set Dresser
Josephine Johnson, Art Department - Assistant Art Finisher
Josh Sheppard, Storyboard Artist
Steve Orefice, Painter - Paint Foreman
Jack Elliott, Greensman
Michael Bell, Set Designer
Maya Shimoguchi, Model Maker
Glen Hanz, Sculptor
Stefan Dechant, Illustrator
Ralph Moser, Concept Artist
Andy Robinson, Scenic Artist
Bo Haldane, Assistant Set Dresser
Kent Jones, Sculptor
Daniel Engle, Model Maker
Tel Stolfo, Set Designer
Mario Peraic, Greensman - Greens Foreman
Eric Ramsey, Storyboard Artist
Cheree Miller, Art Department Coordinator
Tuesday Stone, Art Department - Art Department Assistant
Ben Barber, Set Dresser
Christopher Tandon, Art Director - Pre-Production Art Director
Rohan Dawson, Set Decorator - Set Finisher
Hugh Anderson, Set Decorator - Set Finisher
Jeff Thorp, Art Director
Flynn Kavanagh, Set Dresser - On Set Dresser
Anna McGrath, Art Department - Art Department Assistant
Federico D'Alessandro, Storyboard Artist
David Swanson, Greensman - Greens Leading Hand
Sonny Gerasimowicz, Set Designer - Wild Things Designed for the Screen
Cleve Gunderman, Model Maker - Mold Shop Supervisor
David Simon, Sculptor
David Smith, Sculptor
Brian Rae, Model Maker - Mold Department
Paul Daffy, Greensman
Darryl Henley, Storyboard Artist
Adam Mull, Art Department - Art Department Assistant
John Santucci, Set Dresser - On Set Dresser (2nd Unit)
Lucinda Thomson, Art Director
Gus Lobb, Set Decorator - Set Finisher
Tim Disney, Art Director - On Set Art Director
Oliver Anderson, Set Decorator - Set Finisher
Adrienne Ogle, Set Dresser - On Set Dresser (2nd Unit)
Duke Cullen, Art Department - Creatures Art Supervisor
Glen Johnson, Greensman
Ray Harvie, Storyboard Artist
Jeffrey Small, Model Maker - Mold Department
Carol Koch, Sculptor
Lyle Conway, Sculptor
Michael O'Brien, Model Maker - Mold Department
Pilo Silva, Greensman - Greens Foreman
Kevin MacCarthy, Storyboard Artist
Robin Dufay, Art Department - Art Finisher
Claire Kaufman, Set Decorator
Ben Bauer, Art Director - On Set Art Director (2nd Unit)
Peter Andrus, Art Director
Amanda Nelis, Art Department - Art Department Production Assistant
Michael A Jackson, Storyboard Artist
Jaudi Negri, Greensman
James Ojala, Model Maker - Mold Department
Nick Vanderwert, Sculptor - Sculptor Leading Hand
Charles Kuc, Sculptor
Jason Barnett, Model Maker - Mold Department
Johnny Torres, Greensman
Frank Musitelle, Greensman
Thomas Hebert, Model Maker - Mold Department
Anna Meszaros, Sculptor
Daniel Power, Sculptor
Erika Olson, Model Maker - Mold Department
Edward Guerrero, Greensman
Brant Lavalla, Model Maker - Mold Department
Danny Fraser, Sculptor
Hamish Alderson-Hicks, Sculptor
Ken Niederbaumer, Model Maker - Mold Department
Amber Skowronski, Model Maker - Mold Department
Lis Johnson, Sculptor
Maudie Brady, Sculptor
Timothy Phoenix, Model Maker - Mold Department
Russell Lukich, Model Maker - Mold Department
Melanie Poudroux, Sculptor
Jonathan Lawrence, Sculptor
Selenia Rios, Model Maker - Mold Department
Anthony Lucas, Model Maker - Model Unit Supervisor
Patrick Meade, Sculptor
Paul Allen, Sculptor
Simon Bowland, Sculptor
Steve Carroll, Sculptor

There is an even longer list for the designers of visual effects, not to mention wardrobe, hair, and makeup design. Show this list to your students, their parents, and your school guidance counselor.
Click on the heading above to see the trailer for the movie.

Designers Are Beginning to Think Bigger

Rather than designing the next useless gadget, designers are trying to think bigger and solve large real-world problems by switching their mindset from "designing" to "design thinking". This is an approach that moves designers from designing products to designing systems. It moves people from being consumers to being participants.

Tim Brown (right) is the CEO of innovation and design firm IDEO, taking an approach to design that digs deeper than the surface. Having taken over from founder David E. Kelley, Tim Brown carries forward the firm's mission of fusing design, business and social studies to come up with deeply researched, deeply understood designs and ideas - IDEO calls it "design thinking."

IDEO is the kind of firm that companies turn to when they want a top-down rethink of a business or product -- from fast food conglomerates to high-tech startups, hospitals to universities.

IDEO has designed and prototyped everything from a life-saving portable defibrillator to the defining details at the groundbreaking Prada shop in Manhattan to corporate processes.

Click on the heading above to hear Tim Brown discuss the idea of thinking bigger at a TED conference.

Systems Design Replaces Product Design

The cutting edge of design today is, rather than designing a product, designing an entire system related to the product. For example, rather than designing a running shoe, design a whole system for runners to have their shoes track their distance, time, pace, calories burned, etc., connect it to their iPod, iPhone, or wrist band and let them compare or compete with other runners around the world.

The Nike + is an example of such a systems design. When you buy a pair of Nike shoes you can become part of a world-wide running community. In 2008, Nike + was launched with the Nike+ Human Race - the World’s Largest Running Event. Nike hosted race events in 25 cities around the world, and by logging into nikeplus.com, every city and every road became a race-day course.

By using tools like Nike+ and the Nike+ SportBand, people participated from anywhere: a country road, an urban sidewalk or at one of the 25 designated Nike+ Human Race cities. The Nike+ Human Race took place anywhere a registered runner chose to hit the pavement. Nike organized 25 physical race cities, but the Nike+ Human Race was open to everyone, everywhere. If you don’t live in a race city, you just signed up at nikeplus.com to participate and run in your city. Using Nike + iPod or Nike+ SportBand runners tracked their miles on race day and then downloaded miles on nikeplus.com to have their results officially counted as part of the race.

The 25 race cities had finish-line parties with major bands performing and included:
Austin, Bogotá. Buenos Aires, Caracas, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Los Angeles, Lima, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Munich, New York, Paris, Quito, Rome, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo, Warsaw, and Vancouver.

Click on the heading above to see a video about the program.

AIGA is the Organization for the World's Greatest Designers

AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) counts among its 20,000 members some of the most influential designers in the world, like Michael Beirut, Chip Kidd and Clement Mok.

Michael Bierut (left) leads a team of graphic designers at Pentagram who create identity design, environmental graphic design and editorial design solutions. He has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in several permanent collections including: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Denver Art Museum; the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany; and the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, Switzerland. He was the national president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1998 to 2001 and is a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art.

Chip Kidd (right) is associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. Turning out jacket designs at an average of 75 a year, Kidd has freelanced for Doubleday, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Grove Press, HarperCollins, Penguin/Putnam, Scribner and Columbia University Press in addition to his work for Knopf. Kidd also supervises graphic novels at Pantheon, and in 2003 he collaborated with Art Spiegelman on a biography of cartoonist Jack Cole, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. His output includes cover concepts for books by Mark Beyer, Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Frank Miller, Michael Ondaatje, Alex Ross, Charles Schulz, Osamu Tezuka, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, John Updike and others. His design for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel was carried over into marketing for the film adaptation. Oliver Sacks and other authors have contract clauses stating that Kidd design their books.

Clement Mok (far right) is a designer, software publisher/developer, author, and design patent holder. He has founded several design-related businesses — Studio Archetype (acquired by Sapient), CMCD and NetObjects, Inc.. From 1998 until 2001, he was Chief Creative Officer of Sapient. Currently, he leads a new subscription-based royalty-free stock image business and consults on a variety of product development projects. In 1996, Mok set out his design philosophy in his book Designing Business. Most recently, he published the second edition, Designing Business 2.0 (2000), which highlighted design application and business principles within the context of today's digital media. Mok currently serves on the board of trustees of the Art Center College of Design, the board of directors of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and sits on the advisory boards of numerous technology companies and colleges.

Charles Harrison Fought Racism to be a Designer

Charles Harrison (left) was an industrial designer at Sears, Roebuck & Company for more than three decades. One of the first African Americans to enter the design field, Harrison began working for Sears in 1961 and eventually became the company’s Chief Designer. He says at first he had to work on his own like a free-lancer because African Americans couldn't work side-by-side with white designers.

During his distinguished career, Harrison created an astonishing 750 products—from radios and sewing machines to hair dryers—for nearly every area of the home. Among his most iconic designs are the first-of-its-kind plastic garbage can (right), a lighter, more durable alternative to its metal counterpart; and a redesign of the now classic View-Master (far right).

In October 2008, Harrison became the first African-American to receive the Lifetime Achievement National Design Award by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

Harrison currently teaches design at Columbia College in Chicago.

Click on the heading above to learn more about Charles Harrison.

AIGA Make/Think Conference in Memphis

AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) held its "Make/Think" conference in Memphis, October 8-11, 2009 where 1500 professional graphic designers gathered to share ideas and re-connect with others in their profession. There are over 20,000 members of AIGA with chapters across the country.

Planners (left) like Executive Director Ric Grefe, President Debbie Millman, designers Michael Bierut, Clement Mok, Sean Adams, William Drenttel and many others worked hard to make the event one of the best design conferences in the world. Dozens of volunteers (right) made it possible to manage all the details during the 3-day event.

Presenters ranged from David Butler, Director of Global Design for Coca-Cola to Sol Sender and Scott Thomas who designed President Obama's campaign logo and website. Presenters ranged from 19 year old Ethan Bodnar to design legends Charles Harrison, Clement Mok and Doyald Young.

Click on the heading above to see videos from the conference. Click on the images to see larger versions.

Doyald Young: The Dean of Type Designers

Doyald Young has specialized in the design of logotypes, corporate alphabets, and typefaces since 1955. His meticulous and classic style of letter design is an inspiration to younger typographers.

Just a short list of some of his work is awe inspiring. He has designed logotypes and trademarks for the industrial design firm of Henry Dreyfuss Associates, California Institute of Technology, University of California at Los Angeles, exhibition catalogs for UCLA’s Clark Memorial Library, The Music Center of Los Angeles County, Mattel Toys, Max Factor, and Vidal Sassoon, the redesign of Prudential Insurance Company of America’s company name and corporate font, and the GE Logo Font for General Electric Company’s corporate identity program.

As an associate of International Design Associates of Japan, Young designed logotypes for over a dozen hotels, including restaurants, bars and amenities: ANA Hotel Tokyo, Hilton International Japan, Tokyo Hilton, Hilton Osaka, Narita Golf Club, Pacific Star Hotel, Guam, Palace Hotel Tokyo, and the new 30-story Kintetsu Hotel at Universal City Osaka, and designed The Hawaiian Sony Open logo for Mari Makinami, Design Resource.

His entertainment credits include: Liza Minnelli and Frank Sinatra specials, Disney’s 30th Anniversary Celebration, Harry Connick Jr., k.d. lang, Bette Midler, Prince, The Grand Reopening of Carnegie Hall, The Grammy Awards, The Annual Academy of Country Music Awards, The Golden Globe Awards, and The Tony Awards,and most recently, the Art Directors Guild logo.
Mr. Young has served as typographical consultant to Xerox Corporation, Southern California Edison Company, and Bechtel Corporation, designed fonts for Esselte Letraset, Agfa Corporation, Visual Graphics Corporation, and consulted with Emerson Stern and the Salk Institute on the development of a written American Sign Language alphabet for The National Institutes of Health.

Click on the image of books on the right to see three of Young's classic books on type design (including his recent "Dangerous Curves") and click on the heading above to go to Doyald Young's Web site.

Young Designers Compete in Command X

“Command X: Season 2” is a graphic design reality show featuring seven up-and-coming designers who have the chance to break into the industry in front of 1500 peers, design icons and potential employers. Throughout the AIGA conference in Memphis, contestants took on a series of design challenges to complete and present on the main stage within 24 hours.

The seven participants received a complimentary registration to the conference to show off their talent before the world's best designers although they were up all night and hard at work on their next design challenge most of the time. The winner of “Command X: Season 2” was Monina Velarde, Wheaton, IL (left). She received, in addition to "glory":
$1,000 in cash
Adobe CS4 Design Premium (a $1,799 value)
A complete set of limited edition Punc't posters, provided by Neenah Paper
An iPhone with the “Think Ink: Color Unleashed” application, provided by Neenah Paper
A Monotype Library, OpenType Edition, on CD, provided by Fonts.com by Monotype Imaging (1,033 fonts, a $3,499 value)

The other six designers chosen to participate in season two of “Command X” were:
Matthew Carl, Elmont, NY
Ryan Fitzgibbon, San Francisco, CA
Bobby Genalo, Brooklyn, NY
John Graziano, Lewisville, TX
Alison Yard Medland, Silver Spring, MD
and Katherine Walker, Chicago, IL

“Command X,” developed under the creative leadership of Number 17, was hosted by Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and judged by a panel of esteemed judges including Bonnie Siegler of Number 17; Chip Kidd, graphic designer and author; Paul Sahre, graphic designer, illustrator, educator and author; and some surprise guest judges. Sean Adams, AdamsMorioka, Inc. partner, acted as the mentor and guided the contestants through the process.

Prodigy Produces Book on Design

Creative Grab Bag (right) is an interesting book in which designers were challenged to create designs outside their normal area like design a building, poster, illustration, collage, magazine cover, book cover, shoes, typeface, comic strip and so on.

The interesting thing about the book is it was created by Ethan Bodnar (left) who was 19 years old when the book came out in 2009. This means he started the book while still in high school. He's now a sophomore in college. He was one of the youngest presenters at this years national AIGA conference in Memphis speaking before 1500 professional designers.

Creative Grab Bag is a collection of work from 101 artists, illustrators and designers from around the world. Many are well known and others are emerging designers. Author Ethan Bodnar created over 30 unique tasks and gave each contributor a task that was different from their typical work. The book contains images of each artist’s creative task, typical work, and a biography and short reflection on the creative process. Together, they capture the spirit of exploration and innovation and challenge readers to break out of their usual work.

In the back of the book the challenges are printed on Grab Bag Cards so you and your students can become part of the process and take on one of the challenges. This is a great resource for any design class.

Click on the heading above to go to Ethan's site.

Have Students Try Designing Motion Graphics

Motion graphics can be a good challenge for high school students to learn about typography and animation. Print magazine (right) is sponsoring a competition for motion graphics that should provide some good inspiration from professionals for your students.

PRINT IN MOTION (left) is Print magazine's new competition dedicated to motion graphics. Winning entries will be featured on their website and receive a special mention in an issue of Print.

Work must have been created between November 15, 2008 and November 15, 2009. Entire videos should be entered; stills will not be considered. Entries must be postmarked no later than November 15, 2009.

Files can not exceed 30mb, but sizes less than 10mb are recommended for optimum loading time and are entered online.

Click on the heading above to see Print's Website for the competition.

Choice of Colors is Powerful in Public Recognition

The real estate powerhouse Re/Max won a ruling on the use of the colors red over white over blue in real estate signs in a Texas trademark-infringement case. The court said “A real estate yard sign is intended to catch the attention of people driving past. … In this context, the color and dominant design … can communicate a source to consumers viewing the signs from a distance, or while passing,”

Re/Max International Inc. of Denver, one of the world’s largest residential real estate brokerage companies, won a law suit in Texas federal court saying that Texas real estate brokerage firm Trend Setter Realty’s for-sale yard signs and other marketing materials infringe on Re/Max’s trademarked red-over-white-over-blue so-called “horizontal bar design”.

An order by the court grants Re/Max’s request that Trend Setter and its agents be prohibited from using signs, business cards, advertising and other materials that resemble Re/Max’s design.

Re/Max tried unsuccessfully to settle with Trend Setter before being forced to take the issue to the courts. Trend Setter alleged Re/Max’s design was generic and otherwise not protected by trademark law. More than 25 percent of respondents in a study thought that the design of the Trend Setter signs implied that the company was part of or affiliated with Re/Max.

INDEX: Rewards Designs to Improve Life

INDEX: written with what has become its ubiquitous iconic punctuation (left), encourages people to imagine a better future, and show what they're going to do to help us get there.

Kigge Hvid, CEO of INDEX: (right), explains, "INDEX:'s mission is to secure high-quality Design to Improve Life internationally. Therefore we inspire, collect, advocate, communicate, evaluate, connect and discuss Design to Improve Life globally."

Created by Denmark, INDEX: Design to Improve Life reflects tenets that made Danish design powerful in the last century – humanism; social understanding and democratic thinking. They produce large scale public events, educational and informative programs, communication and outreach.

They have a biennial design award focusing on design that substantially improves the lives of people, which they say is the world's largest award for design - a 500,000-euro purse divided evenly among winners in five categories. The award is given in five categories; Body, Home, Work, Play and Community.

Along with the award, they host other projects that include:

INDEX: Award Exhibition: A large-scale world-touring exhibition presenting the finalists of the award, in the five universal categories. The exhibition is presented at a central public square in hosting cities – and always accessible and with free admission to showcase that the world can be improved in many ways through design.

INDEX: Summer Camps and INDEX: AIGA Design Challenges engages design and business students from all over the world in designing to improve life.

INDEX: Outreach: reaches out to students, children, teachers, professionals, companies, public authorities, seniors etc. with services, knowledge and inspiration about Design to Improve Life.

INDEX: Education: is right now in the process of designing the first ever package for teaching Design to Improve Life among primary and lower-secondary pupils and high school students. The web-based format which comprises material for students as well as teachers is to be used within the curriculum of social studies, as the subject matter concerns new processes and methodology and new ways of thinking. After piloting on a business high school, a technical high school and a traditional high school in November the material will be made available for all schools on an open source basis.

INDEX: Communication: is the essential infrastructure to ensure our digital and physical presence is established and disseminated around the world.

Corporate Design Foundation Advocates for Design

Today we might not think that it would be so hard to convince businesses that they would benefit from good design but it wasn't so long ago that businesses weren't very receptive to the idea.

Corporate Design Foundation, a non-profit education and research organization, was founded by Peter Lawrence (left) on the belief that design can make a major contribution both to an individual's quality of life and to a corporation's success, and that both individual and organizational interests can be served through the effective use of the design disciplines: product design, architecture and communication design. CDF's mission is to improve the quality of life and the effectiveness of organizations through design.

The Foundation frequently serves as a catalyst working with corporations, educational institutions, professional groups and other organizations to influence future business leaders by working with business school faculty to include design in the curricula of leading business schools. They develop collaborations between design, business and others schools or disciplines to further the understanding of design through multidisciplinary courses and conduct research that examines the relationship between design and business success at Fortune 500 corporations and in innovative 'niche' companies.

CDF acts as design's leading advocate to business by promoting individual design and business success stories through the publication of @issue: The Journal of Business and Design (right) and demonstrates design's value to businesses by offering conferences, workshops and other educational programs targeted to business leaders.

Click on the heading above to check out some of Corporate Design Foundation's services and resources.

Students Make the Future Look Bright

John Maeda, (right) superstar designer and new President of the Rhode Island School of Design, came by to congratulate the students who put together the conference A Better Word by Design in Providence, Rhode Island.

The real stars however were the students like Willem Van Lancker (left) who helped design and manage every aspect of this highly successful conference. Students from the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University work together each year to plan, on their own, this conference which this year drew 500 participants and presenters from around the world. Over a dozen world-class speakers and as many panelists from all areas of design are drawn to present at this conference because of its quality.

The conceptual soundness, planning and attention to detail make this an A-list design conference each year. Click on the heading above to go to the conference website and plan to attend next year yourself.

The 2009 Committee included:
Andrea Jones, Brown '10
Frieda Kay, Brown '12
Andrea Krukowski, Brown '11
Seungkyun Lee, RISD '10
Eugene Nelson, Brown '11
Ambika Roos, Brown '11
Matt Severson, Brown '11
Joyce Tu, RISD Grad '10
Willem Van Lancker, RISD '10

Advisory Committee
Tino Chow, RISD '09
Steve Daniels, Brown '10
Mike Eng, RISD '09
Sharon Langevin, Brown '09

Students Create A Better World by Design Conference

Students at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) put together one of the best design conferences around. A Better World by Design was founded in 2007 by Steve Daniels, Brown '10, and continues to be organized annually by the student-run research center Better x Design, founded in 2008 to promote globally conscious design curricula at Brown University and the Rhode Island School for Design (RISD).

A Better World by Design brings together a world-wide collection of about 500 designers and students to Providence, Rhode Island, to reach across disciplines under a common goal. Presenters like Emily Pilloton (right) and Vivian Loftness (left) shared engaging stories and sparked discussions about the role of design in the world.

A Better World by Design was founded and is organized annually by an interdisciplinary group of students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Business Week Names Top Design and Business Schools

Business Week has come up with their list of the World's best design programs. BusinessWeek selected 39 master's and MBA programs from North America, Europe, Asia, South America and Australia that significantly integrate design thinking and business.

The list has both business-based and design-based programs that significantly integrate Design Thinking and Business. Students in these programs take classes in art, management and science and create projects in multi-disciplinary teams with students from other schools. They aim to use design for strategy rather than merely for aesthetics and may find jobs as design managers, researchers or business consultants. These programs have formally established hybrid curricula.

Some schools in the U.S. include:
University of Cincinnati
Stanford University
School of Visual Arts
Savannah College of Art and Design
Pratt Institute
Northwestern University
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Case Western Reserve University
Weatherhead School of Management
Carnegie Mellon University
California College of the Arts
Art Center College of Design

Other schools are in Canada, Sweden, Taiwan, India, Korea, London, China, Helsinki, Italy , The Netherlands, Australia and Japan.

Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum says that when he started this list several years ago, the choices were very limited. Today, colleges and universities in the US, Asia, Europe and Latin America are making big strides in building new programs that integrate design, business, engineering and marketing programs to create new learning plaftforms for creativity.

Nussbaum says there is huge demand for graduates who know Design Thinking and how to work collaboratively. The Design part gives students the methodologies and tool kits to go into new cultures and situations, quickly understand the human needs there, create new options that could satisfy those needs and then iterate quickly to make the right choices before hitting the market place.

In the US, despite the great strides being made, design education is still lagging design practice in the real world. Silos in American universities still separate Social Sciences (Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology and other fields) from Design.

Nussbaum maintains that, "If the US is to reverse it's slide in the global economy, it's universities have to do a better job at Design Thinking."

Click on the heading above to see Business Week's complete list.

Tesla Electric Roadster is Faster Than Your Car

American and German auto makers dragged their feet for decades claiming they couldn't produce a practical electric vehicle, so folks from the computer industry decided to create their own auto company to show that it could be done.

Because one of the biggest complaints about electric cars is that they won't have the kind of power of a gasoline powered engine, the founders of Tesla set out to produce a fast, powerful sports car. Once having proven they could do that then they could go ahead and produce regular sedans for the rest of us.

The Tesla Motors roadster is an all-electric vehicle with zero emissions. There’s no engine, no fuel tank, just a deep bank of lithium-ion batteries and a single-gear, direct-drive motor that hits maximum torque instantly. The sport edition goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds - faster than a Chevy Corvette, the Porsche 911 and the Ferrari Spider.

The Tesla roadster is a low-slung, two-door, hard-top convertible with cockpit seats that has a range of 244 miles on a full charge, (proven in real-world driving tests). It meets all the standard safety requirements and looks and handles like any other exotic roadster, including the Lotus. Tesla is an all-electric car that can compete with elite gasoline sportscars at about the same expensive price. The company has now begun offering a four-door sedan for $49,900 that will be delivered in 2011.

Click on the heading above to go to Tesla's Web site.

Sorting Out Educational Priorities

A group of influential educators called "Common Core" is critiquing the recommendations of another set of education experts called the "Partnersip for 21st Century Skills".

The dispute is over how much emphasis to place on content and how much to place on skills. The organization Common Core, which calls for giving students strong content grounding across academic disciplines, has organized an open letter critiquing the skills-based program put forward by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and calling for the group to revise its goals.

That letter is signed by some big names in education policy, including Randi Weingarten, of the American Federation of Teachers; education historian Diane Ravitch; Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch Jr.; Chester Finn, of the Fordham Foundation; and John Silber, the retired president of Boston University. Some of those people have been on record previously as opposing the 21st-century-skills push.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills promotes the cultivation of a broad range of critical-thinking, creative, and analytical skills among students, including technological know-how, as well as "soft skills," in areas such as communication (right). Those skills are vital to succeeding on the job and in life, the organization argues, and schools should nurture them. Supporters of that approach say they are not overlooking the importance of hard-and-fast academic content, but critics of the skills movement have not been assuaged.

In its open letter, titled "A Challenge to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills," the letter-writers say the approach of the Partnership, or P21, "marginalizes knowledge and therefore will deny students the liberal education they need." They add that "skills can neither be taught nor applied effectively without prior knowledge of a wide array of subjects."

The letter accuses P21 of attempting to "teach skills apart from knowledge," and calls for the program to be "fundamentally revised." As it now stands, it is "undermining the quality of education in America."

There are at least three ways to slice the educational agenda:

Common Core is approaching it from the direction of subject areas: history, science, literature, geography, civics, mathematics, the arts, technology, and foreign languages.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills emphasizes skills such as such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving.

I have another way to look at it.

(1) CONTENT - Place the subject areas in historic evolutionary perspective starting 13.8 billions years ago, (A) the universe (Physics), (B) our solar system and Earth (Geography, Geology), (C) life (Chemistry, Biology), (D) consciousness (Neuro-Science, Psychology, Philosophy), (E) civilization (Civics, History, Religion, the Arts), (F) technology (the Industrial Revolution, technology), and (G) Information (computer science, information technology, Web).

(2) TOOLS - Place the tools for learning in a separate list without confusingly co-mingling them with content:
(1) Words (English, foreign languages), (2) Numbers (mathematics), (3) Sounds (speech, music, acoustics), (4) Movement (physical education, sports, dance, robotics), (5) images (drawing, painting, photography, mapmaking, video), (6) objects (manipulatives, museums, sculpture, products, artifacts), (7) environments (architecture, urban planning, landscape, environmentalism), and (8) experiences (theatre, children's museums, theme parks, field trips, video games, toys, experiments, virtual reality).

(3) SKILLS - Place processes for using the tools within content areas in a separate list to include:
(1) Ideation - goal-setting, brainstorming, problem-identification, creative thinking, (2) Research - inquiry, investigation, experimentation, (3) developing Criteria - analysis of needs, assessment rubrics, critical thinking), (4) Visualizing - more brainstorming, generating many possible solutions, sketching, planning, diagramming, (5) prototyping - model making, testing, more hands-on experimenting, craftsmanship, problem-solving, (6) development/production - selecting the most promising possibility, creating the solution, completing the process, fabricating, (7) implementation - distribution, putting the idea into action, making something happen, trying it out, and (8) evaluation - testing, assessment, evaluating, observing results, looking for room for improvement.

The mistake we are making in education is not in choice of content or development of skills but in not providing the learners brains the full range of tools they need to take in information, process it, and output results. The brain is physically structured to process words, numbers, sounds, movement, images, objects, spaces and experiences. Cutting learners off from any one of these (no matter the differences in learning styles) is like cutting out key elements of the food pyramid. All brains work better using the full range of tools they are built to use in solving problems (skills) in a variety of contexts (content)

The Precision of Animation Drawing

Design professionals have styles of drawing particular to their professions to which students should be exposed. There are distinctive drawing conventions that differ for auto designers, animators, comic book artists, fashion designers, architects, product designers, and movie concept artists. Students should see examples of these different ways to draw and understand the advantages of each form.

Animators are held to one of the highest standards of drawing of any profession. They must draw frame after frame with characters in different positions without distorting the features or going "off model". In addition, the line quality of animation and comic book artists is elegant, clean, and precise.

Every animated film or TV show has a style book that they refer to on a regular basis to keep their work consistent. You can get a look at the style book for the Simpsons in a book called "The Simpsons Handbook: Secret Tips from the Pros".

Test your observational skills to see if you can draw a Simpsons character even while looking directly at the model and then look at the tips to see how close you got. There are many videos on YouTube with people claiming to show you how to draw Simpsons characters who would never get hired by Matt Groening (the creator of the Simpsons).

Anime Festival in New York City

Fans of Astro Boy, Robotech, Speed Racer, Voltron, Fullmetal Alchemist, Naruto, and Pokemon convened in New York the last weekend in September. The New York Anime Festival is an annual anime convention held at the Jacob K. Javits Center in Midtown Manhattan. It features exclusive anime screenings, guests from America and Japan, manga, cosplay, video games, live-action Japanese cinema, fashion, food, and the cultural treasures that gave birth to Japanese pop culture.

Anime is a Japanese term based on the word "animation" and is used to describe animation originating from Japan.

Many participants dress up as an anime character which is called "Cosplay". Cosplay is a combination of the words "costume" and "play" and is used to describe the act of dressing up as an anime character.

While most animation in America is shown on Saturday mornings, there is a wide range of genres of anime in Japan. There are any number of anime series and movies perfect for children, but there is also anime with stories and subject matter aimed for teens and even adults.

Hayao Miyazaki (the Walt Disney of Japan) is the most famous anime creator who did Kki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away. Other popular anime include Animation Runner Kuromi, Fruits Basket, Grrl Power, Hikaru No Go, Munto, Panda-Z, and The Prince of Tennis.

Apparently the convention of drawing characters with large eyes started with a Japanese comic creator named Osamu Tezuka. When drawing his comics, he was inspired by the large eyes found on Disney characters. Since then, big eyes have been an inseparable part of anime.

Many anime characters often have vibrant hair in a range of colors you'll never see in real life. Outlandish hair is one way creators are able to easily differentiate one character from another. While every anime face will have its unique traits, giving characters blue, green, orange, purple, and pink hair is a way to easily and immediately tell who is who.

Click on the heading above to go to the Website for the New York Anime Festival.

Robotics May Help Wheelchair Designs

Dean Kamen's team of designers created an advanced wheelchair, the ibot (http://www.dekaresearch.com/ibot.shtml), that used some of the features of his gyroscope-aided Segway personal transport.

Now a team of design students in Austria has created a concept for a similar chair that attempts to make the wheelchair a beautiful and functional accessory.

The CARRIER was developed as semester project at the University of Applied Arts in the Studio Industrial Design 2 Esslinger. (www.creativednaaustria.com). The CARRIER Wheelchair attempts to take into consideration everything confronting a wheelchair user making sure the user is fully independent, capable of traversing any terrain and situation (left).

The frame is specially shaped to maneuver over a commode. A “trap door” opens so you can use the toilet in a dignified manner without awkward transfers or assisted lifts. Stairs and inclines are managed with a “Galileo Wheel” that combines a wheel and track into a single drive with advantages from both. The entire chair even lifts to help you reach higher objects (right).

One of the things missing from Kamen's ibot and, for that matter, his robotics competition for students (FIRST), is design. Focusing on engineering alone creates products that look like WALL-E while we fall in love with EVE.

Click on the heading above to see more pictures and learn more from Yanko Design.

Edutopia Provides Tips for Teaching With New Media

Edutopia is the vision of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) headed by Executive Director Milton Chen (left). They have a Web site, magazine, videos, professional-development series, and online community sharing success stories in K-12 education to help create better schools for the 21st century.

Edutopia's Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media (right) is a new resource available as a download or in print from Edutopia. This resource provides succinct tips on how you can use the latest technologies to prepare your students for success - from tips that will "Break the Digital Ice," to how to start "Working Better, Together." Download your copy today at edutopia.org/ten-top-tips. Click on the heading above to go to the site.

Viewing Holographic 3D Images on Your Computer

Click on the heading above to see an amazing application that presents a holographic 3D image that you can rotate/tilt, etc. right on your home or office computer. There are a few easy steps to get it set up but I guarantee it is worth it.

This effect is created using a variety of free software programs like ARToolKit. ARToolKit is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications. These are applications that involve the overlay of virtual imagery on the real world.

For example, in the image to the left a three-dimensional virtual character appears standing on a real card. It can be seen by the user in the head set display they are wearing. When the user moves the card, the virtual character moves with it and appears attached to the real object.

You can get this same effect on your computer right now without any special glasses by clicking on the heading above. With a few minutes of set-up time you can see the image (right) projected in front of you and manipulate it yourself. When you move, the image moves.

And not only that, but you can create your own as well with free software.
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/ is a website that contains a link to the ARToolKit software, projects that have used ARToolKit, sample ARToolKit applications, a discussion group and full documentation. All the information needed to be able to easily develop AR applications with ARToolKit can be found there.

One of the key difficulties in developing Augmented Reality applications is the problem of tracking the users viewpoint. In order to know from what viewpoint to draw the virtual imagery, the application needs to know where the user is looking in the real world. ARToolKit uses computer vision algorithms to solve this problem. The ARToolKit video tracking libraries calculate the real camera position and orientation relative to physical markers in real time. This enables the easy development of a wide range of Augmented Reality applications.

ARToolKit was originally developed by Dr. Hirokazu Kato, and its ongoing development is being supported by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and ARToolworks, Inc, Seattle.

Learn About Industrial Design from the Professionals

Looking at the program of the Industrial Designers Society of America's national conference, one can learn a lot about what industrial designers are thinking about, who they are, and how they see their role in the future.

Peter Bressler (left) is founder of Bresslergroup, a design firm in Philadelphia, PA. He is one of the speakers at this year's Industrial Designers Society of America national conference held in Miami.

In his presentation he provided an overview of the historical roots of the Industrial Design profession. According to Bressler, depending on the source, industrial design began the first time a rock was lashed to a stick in order to "do lunch", or it was born of the transition from craft to mass manufactured functional devices as exhibited in the 1870s centennials in Philadelphia and London, or it began with the philosophical design teachings of the Bauhaus under the leadership of Walter Gropius in 1925.

Industrial Design is a profession that creates useful and beautiful artifacts and interactions. The field has changed profoundly with each decade. Industrial Designers have variously been seen as crafts-persons, doer-philosophers, and problem solvers. They are faced with the irony of trying to solve society’s problems with beautiful objects that also consume resources, fill landfills and choke the planet. He challenged designers at the conference to see if they can gain insight into the best future course for Industrial Design by examining how they evolved to where they are.

Click on the heading above to see what the BresslerGroup does.

Industrial Designers Have a New Executive Director

The Industrial Designers Society of America has a new Executive Director at their headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. Clive Roux became IDSA's new executive director September 14, 2009, replacing Frank Tyneski, who resigned in April after 18 months in the post. After a five-month search, North America’s largest industrial design trade association choose Roux, a South African with worldwide business experience. He will be introduced at IDSA’s annual international conference, scheduled for Sept. 23-26 in Miami.

With significant global experience across the design disciplines—including four years working in Africa, seven years in Europe, seven years in Asia and nine years in the US—Roux will bring both design thinking and business management skills to his new role, which will help him represent the Society both within the design world and to the business community.

Roux most recently was chief marketing officer for Baumgartens, the Atlanta-based, environmentally focused supplier of office supply products. Before that he ran his own consulting firm and spent 17 years as a design leader in Africa, Europe, Asia and the United States with Philips Design, a unit of the Dutch healthcare, lighting and consumer products giant Royal Philips Electronics.

Like many trade associations, IDSA has experienced declining membership, from roughly 3,300 to less than 2,800 over the past few years. IDSA faces the challenge of remaining relevant to its constituents in an increasingly global environment.

Click on the heading above to learn more about the new Executive Director on the IDSA website.

Industrial Designers Meeting in Miami

The Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) is meeting in Miami September 23-26, 2009. The conference theme is Project Infusion:
Project: An interactive endeavor accomplishing an end result
Infusion: the act of infusing, pouring in and instilling, as in infusing good principles into the mind

IDSA members and other domestic and international attendees across diverse disciplines, are meeting to exchange ideas, opinions and insights at this annual gathering of industrial designers.

Even though we might not have a chance to attend conferences like this, just by looking at the conference information - the speakers, the topics - we can learn a lot about what issues face industrial designers today. We can get hints for how to include industrial design into our curricula.

Look at the conference program and speakers bios to see the range of people who are in the field of industrial design and what is on their minds today. You might even be surprised that you have an important industrial designer that you didn't know about right in your own back yard.

Click on the heading above to learn more about the conference.

Finding Design Centers Across America

In addition to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City (left) and the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (right), you can find regional design centers all across the country. You can find design exhibits and events in your state, wherever you live, if you know where to look.

The World of Coca-Cola, for example, is a museum in Atlanta, Georgia that traces the history of the company and the changes in design for its iconic bottles, logo, and advertising over the years. Click on the heading above to check it out.

Wisconsin has several museums devoted to design icons. They have the Harley-Davidson Museum and the William F. Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design both in Milwaukee and the Kohler Design Center in Kohler, Wisconsin.

Take a look at the three articles below about these design centers. Can your students find the design centers in your state?

The Kohler Design Center Features Product and Interior Design

The everyday things in your home are part of product design - including the fixtures in your bathroom and kitchen. When you put them together in pleasing ways you are doing interior design.

The Kohler Design Center in Kohler, Wisconsin is a three-level showcase of innovative product design and technology, creative achievement, and American history reflected in this family-owned business.

A fusion of old and new, the space offers a comprehensive representation of Kohler Co.'s state-of-the-art products and examples of the company's contributions to gracious living and interior design. While Kohler's products are designed by people who might belong to the Industrial Design Society of American (IDSA), many of the products are displayed in bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms designed by members of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID).

The building was originally used as a recreation hall for residents of the Village of Kohler. In 1985 it was transformed into a 36,000-square-foot showcase for the extensive array of quality products offered by the Kohler family of businesses.

The Design Center has grown to become a dramatic exploration of design ideas, the quintessence of Kohler's commitment to providing products that contribute to a higher level of gracious living.

Click on the heading above to learn more about the Kohler Design Center.

Harley-Davidson Museum Traces the Evolution of Iconic Motorcycle's Design

The history of product design includes household items, furniture, cars and even motorcycles.

The Harley-Davidson Museum, located near downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, opened its doors to the public on Saturday, July 12, 2008. The 130,000-square-foot Museum adds a new dimension to the Harley-Davidson experience.

Visitors get a feel for the freedom, camaraderie and pride that Harley-Davidson riders experience every time they fire up their motorcycles. Inside the Harley-Davidson Museum are motorcycles and artifacts that tell the story of the Motor Company's history and heritage.

At the Harley-Davidson Museum you can:

Walk through exhibits that tell the stories of the extraordinary people, products, history and culture of Harley-Davidson. In addition to the fantastic motorcycle collection, stories are told through photographs, videos, apparel, rare documents and other artifacts.
Peek into a portion of the Archives never before open to the public, home to over 450 motorcycles and thousands of artifacts the Archives team pulls from for exhibits.
Read the personalized messages created by individuals worldwide on the Living the Legend rivets, found on the Living the Legend walls and plazas.
Stroll around the 20 acre Museum site, enjoy the riverwalk or just sit back along the waterfront taking in the Milwaukee skyline.
Check out the unique Museum-inspired items at The Shop.
Examine the industrial architecture and attention to detail found both inside and outside the Museum's three buildings.

The American Museum of Advertising and Design is One-of-a-Kind

The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design is an interactive educational center located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin focusing on advertising and design, and their impact on our culture. It may be unique in the world as a museum with its focus on advertising and design.

The Museum's goals are to:
Honor and lend recognition to past achievements within the scope of advertising and design
Foster public awareness of the influential role of advertising and design on society
Serve as an educational resource for advertising and design students and professionals and the community at large

With its unique emphasis on the social, historical and aesthetic implications of advertising and design, the Eisner Museum is an important center for research in and discussion of advertising and design.

The Eisner Museum invites school groups with interactive exhibits exploring historical and contemporary topics in advertising and design in ways that relate to daily life. Docent-led school tours are tailored to fit a variety of age groups and curricular subjects, beginning at the elementary level.

The museum offers year-round resource and services for educators. Online Teachers’ Guides are offered as a supplement to a tour and are available on their website in PDF format.

Click on the heading above to learn more about the museum.

Visual Science Takes Another Big Leap

A 360-degree Virtual Reality Chamber brings researchers face to face with their data. Scientists can climb inside the University of California, Santa Barbara's three-story-high AlloSphere for a life-size interaction with their research.

The AlloSphere, a unique virtual reality environment turns large data sets into immersive experiences of sight and sound. Inside its three-story metal sphere researchers can interpret and interact with their data in new and intriguing ways, including watching electrons spin from inside an atom or "flying" through an MRI scan of a patient's brain as blood density levels play as music.

Housed in a 5,760-square-meter space in the California NanoSystems Institute building, the AlloSphere is essentially a house-size digital microscope powered by a supercomputer. Its outer chamber is a cube covered with sound-absorbing material, making it one of the largest near-anechoic (nonechoing) spaces in the world. Inside are two joined hemispheres of perforated aluminum that contain a suspended bridge.

More than 500 audio elements—woofers, tweeters and the like—are suspended in rings just outside the hemispheres. High-resolution video projectors can project images across the entire inner surface. The result is something far beyond other virtual reality systems such as a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) or a planetarium: 360 degrees of sounds and images in a chamber large enough to hold 30 or more researchers at once.

It is a real research instrument, not a virtual-reality environment for entertainment. The bridge is often crowded with physicists, engineers, computer scientists and artists working on projects for weeks or months at a time. Researchers interact with their data, which can be streamed live, using 3-D glasses, special wireless controllers, and sensors embedded in the bridge's railings. (Gesture control and voice recognition are in the works.)

Inside the AlloSphere, researchers can use a joystick to maneuver through three-dimensional constellations of the atoms. There is a project to visualize measurements of the background radiation of the universe made by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. Viewers can see the microwave residue from the big bang "painted" across the sphere of the sky, and—after the data are translated for human ears—hear a version of what the early universe may have sounded like.

Another ongoing project is attempting to model the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, which describes the electron's changing quantum states. The instrument has been operating since 2007, but its systems are continually being developed and upgraded. In a year the school plans to have it operating at levels approaching the limits of our perception of actual reality: a visual resolution of 24 million pixels [on the entire surface] and a full 512-channel sound system.

Click on the heading above to see a video about the Allosphere.

News Stands Full of Design Magazines

Beside the publications of the major design organizations there is also a wide selection of magazines about design available in the magazine section of your local book store. There are also several magazines (including Fast Company, Wired, U.S. News and World Report, Time, etc.) that do an annual issue devoted to design.

Dwell magazine delivers intelligent coverage of modern residential architecture and design by presenting examples of well-designed spaces that integrate the residents and their ideas and values.

Metropolis magazine examines contemporary life through design--architecture, interior design, product design, graphic design, crafts, planning, and preservation.

I.D. magazine, published since 1954, is America’s leading critical magazine covering the art, business, and culture of design. Winner of five National Magazine Awards, the publication appears seven times a year. Issues include the Annual Design Review (America’s oldest and most prestigious juried design-recognition program) as well as the I.D. 40, and Design + Business.

Cinefex is a quarterly magazine devoted to motion picture visual effects. Since 1980, it has been the bible for effects professionals and enthusiasts.

HOW strives to serve the business, technological and creative needs of graphic-design professionals. The magazine provides a practical mix of essential business information, up-to-date technological tips, the creative whys and hows behind noteworthy projects, and profiles of professionals who are influencing design. Founded in 1985, the HOW brand now extends beyond the print magazine to annual events for design professionals, yearly design competitions, digital products and books.

See how many design magazines your students can find at their local bookstore.

Who Owns Spider-Man?

The estate of comic artist Jack Kirby is trying to regain copyrights back from the newly formed alliance between Disney and Marvel Comics.

The heirs of Jack Kirby -- the comics legend who made Marvel what it is today -- are using a little-used copyright rule that lets them take Kirby's creations away from Marvel (soon to be Disney-Marvel) and put them back under the estate's control. There will be trademarks covering the characters that still belong to Disney-Marvel; and the collectively created characters, stories, art and situations will be jointly held by two hostile parties: Disney-Marvel and the Kirbys.
The Kirby estate may end up with the economic right to the characters and get a share of the profits but not control over the right to veto various uses and licenses.

The Kirbys are being represented by Toberoff & Associates, a Los Angeles firm that helped win a court ruling last year returning a share of the copyright in Superman to heirs of the character's co-creator, Jerome Siegel.

Sony has the film rights to Spider-Man (left) in perpetuity, while Fox has the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Paramount has a distribution agreement for Marvel's next few self-produced movies, including a second "Iron Man" film. Meanwhile, Hasbro has certain toy rights and Universal holds the Florida theme park rights to Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, among other characters.

Jack Kirby, the Artist Behind Marvel's Super Heroes

When you look at a comic book cover you will see a list of five names of people who created it. The first name is the writer, the second is the penciller, the third and fourth are usually the inker and colorist, and the fifth is the letterer.

Stan Lee is practically a household name now because he created many of the comic characters (Spiderman, the X-men, the Hulk, etc.) who have been the basis of today's blockbuster movies (and he has a cameo role in most of them).

His friend and partner, Jack Kirby, is the person who actually drew these characters however. Stan Lee is a writer - Jack Kirby was the artist.

In 1941, Kirby and writer Joe Simon created the highly successful superhero character Captain America (left) for Timely Comics. During the 1940s, Kirby would create a number of comics for various publishers, often teamed with Simon. He contributed to a number of publishers, including Archie Comics and DC Comics, but ultimately found himself at Timely's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics. In the 1960s, Kirby co-created many of Marvel Comics' major characters including the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and the Hulk along with writer-editor Stan Lee. Despite the high sales and critical acclaim of the Lee-Kirby titles, Kirby felt treated unfairly, and left the company in 1970 for rival DC Comics.

Jack Kirby passed away in 1994. His former assistant, Mark Evanier, published an authorized biography of the man who would come to be commonly known, and widely thought of, as the King of Comics (right). It’s a fitting tribute to the man who co-created much of the comic world today.

The Alphabet Soup of Design

For every area of design there is a national organization, often with state and regional chapters, a website, conference, publication and a variety of activities and events.

Keeping track of all these organizations isn't easy. That's one of the services this magazine provides for you.
Here are just some of the acronyms that represent different areas of design:

AIGA is the American Institute of Graphic Arts. www.aiga.org
IDSA is the Industrial Design Society of America. www.idsa.org
AIA is the American Institute of Architects. www.aia.org
AAF is the American Architectural Foundation. www.archfoundation.org
IxDA is the Interaction Design Association. www.ixda.org
ASID is the American Society of Interior Designers. www.asid.org
ASLA is the American Society of Landscape Architects. www.asla.org

See how many of these national design organizations your students can recognize and see how many more they can find. Check out their websites, see who their top designers are, check out their award winners, see what books, magazines and resources they provide.

Andres Duany and the New Urbanism Movement

Imagine that you got tired of suburban sprawl and tried to design an idyllic small town neighborhood like many people grew up in and found that it is against the law.

That's what Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk found when they tried to recreate the old neighborhoods where kids could play ball in the street, people walked and met their neighbors when they went to the corner store to get some milk for tomorrow's breakfast, and you didn't have to get in your car to take the kids out for ice cream.

Andrés Duany (left) is a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), a town planning firm. DPZ is widely recognized as a leader of the New Urbanism, an international movement that seeks to end suburban sprawl and urban disinvestment. In the years since the firm first received recognition for the design of Seaside, Florida, in 1980, DPZ has completed designs for close to 300 new towns, regional plans, and community revitalization projects. This work has exerted a significant influence on the practice and direction of urban planning and development in the United States and abroad.

Zoning laws accumulated in such a way that corner grocery stores, garages off the alley in the back of the house, and small, safe streets became illegal in America. No longer could you have an apartment over the garage for a son coming back from college or a grandparent to live near the family or live above your law office or bakery.

Laws are designed to keep a college professor from building a modest house next to the business executive's McMansion. You must get in your car to drive to work, get kids to school, or pick up a dozen eggs. Suburban Nation (right) is a good introduction to the problems and the promise of New Urbanism.

Click on the heading above to see an interview by Charlie Rose with with Duany and his partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

Fast Company Magazine Features Today's Design Masters

The current issue of Fast Company magazine is devoted to contemporary Masters of Design. Fast Company is a full-color, (10 issues per year) business magazine launched in 1995 that reports on innovation, digital media, technology, change management, leadership, design and social responsibility. Included in the current issue are articles about:

David Butler, the man challenged to make Coke even bigger (and staying ahead of Pepsi).
David Adjaye, starchitect-in-the-making and his love of light and social conscience with projects in London, Moscow, and the National Mall in D.C.
Lisa Strausfeld who, after seven years as a digital designer at Pentagram, is redesigning government.
Alberto Alessi, an Italian designer and his flexible system for enforcing creative discipline.
David Rockwell, who has created designs from the first Nobu to this year's Academy Awards set to the new Walt Disney Family Museum.
Barbie World, a flagship shop in Shanghai, and emerging-market ambitions for the iconic American doll.
Femme Den and how an internal think tank at Smart Design is helping companies tap the $2 trillion female market, and others.

Click on the heading above to read about these Design Masters on Fast Company's web site.

Michelle Obama Honors National Design Award Winners at White House

The 10th Annual National Design Awards Gala will take place on October 22, 2009 when the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum will celebrate the 2009 National Design Awards with its annual Awards ceremony and dinner held at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City.

This summer, however, on July 24, 2009, Michelle Obama, the First Lady, (right) hosted a ceremony at the White House for the winners and finalists of the 2009 National Design Awards, part of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. She praised the recipients for their innovative ideas, and for serving as inspiration for future generations of designers. Click on the heading above to hear Mrs. Obama's speech and hear who the award winners are.

At her request, before the White House event, the public was invited to 5 Smithsonian sites in Washington, D.C. to meet some of the award winners and be part of the celebration. Events for students and the general public were held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Building Museum, the National Museum of the American-Indian, the Hirschorn Museum, and the Smithsonian "Castle".

The National Design Awards were conceived by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum to honor the best in American design. First launched at the White House in 2000 as an official project of the White House Millennium Council, the annual Awards program celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement. The Awards are truly national in scope–nominations for the 2009 Awards were solicited from a committee of more than 800 leading designers, educators, journalists, cultural figures, and corporate leaders from every state in the nation.

The National Design Awards is one of the few programs of its kind structured to continue to benefit the nation long after the Awards ceremony and gala. A suite of educational programs will be held in conjunction with the Awards by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s award-winning Education Department, including a series of public programs, lectures, roundtables, and workshops based on the vision and work of the National Design Award winners.

National Design Awards are given in the following categories:
Lifetime Achievement
Design Mind
Corporate and Institutional Achievement
Design Patron
Architecture Design
Communication Design
Fashion Design
Interaction Design
Interior Design
Landscape Design
Product Design

Interaction Design is the Fastest Growing Design Field

Interaction Design is one of the fastest growing fields in design. There are several books (right), websites, organizations, and other resources for those interested in learning about interaction design.

Interaction Design (IxD) defines the structure and behavior of interactive products and services. Interaction Designers create compelling relationships between people and the interactive systems they use, from computers to mobile devices to appliances; Interaction Designers lay the groundwork for intangible experiences.

IxDA is an organization for interaction design. The IxDA Manifesto is " We believe that the human condition is increasingly challenged by poor experiences. IxDA intends to improve the human condition by advancing the discipline of Interaction Design. To do this, we foster a community of people that choose to come together to support this intention."

IxDA is an online network for interaction designers. With the help of more than 10,000 members since 2004, the IxDA network provides an online forum for the discussion of interaction design issues as well as other platforms for people who are passionate about interaction design to gather and advance the discipline.

Click on the heading above to go to the IxDA website.

Doing Well Versus Doing Good in Advertising and Design

I don't have the answers but one of the things folks in the media literacy and design education fields need to get their heads around is the tension between teaching students about media and design while not liking what media and design professionals do.

It will be difficult to get students and their parents to take design education and media literacy seriously if the position of teachers is that media and design are bad things that should be avoided or eliminated from our culture. We are caught between the parents' desire for students to do well and our desire to be sure students also do good.

A case in point is an article in Fast Company magazine about the young vice-president of design at Coca-Cola. Look at this guy, at the top of his game, and heading up one of the biggest design efforts in the world, and listen to us telling students that he is a bad man because he promotes drinking an unhealthy beverage. Who do you think is going to win that one?

David Butler (right - wearing a T-shirt with a Coke message in Thai), the company's vice president of global design, masterminded the top-secret development of a revolutionary new machine called Freestyle for dispensing Coke that will soon be sweeping the world.

With 450 brands operating in 200 countries, and 20,000 retailers selling 1.6 billion servings of Coke products per day (18,000 servings per second) there are few bigger jobs in the design world. Butler oversees a team of 50 designers within Coke and works with some 300 agencies worldwide.

Look at Butler, think about how this 40 something man now runs one of the biggest design ventures in the world - and then imagine telling prospective students they shouldn't want to be like him. That is a lose-lose proposition.

According to the article in Fast Company magazine, Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization changed the way Butler thought about design. He saw how systems thinking could be applied in a more holistic way. In the past, he says, design had been focused on straightforward problems: Come up with a drinking vessel, say. But now it was being asked to solve multipronged problems: How do we get clean drinking water? "We're moving from linear problems to wicked problems," he says, and the old default solution -- hire a rock-star designer -- no longer works. "The model of a master of design creating that magical object that is going to change the business is an old way of thinking. I can't use it to work on wicked problems. I need to have capability internally."

Can educators continue to make a difference with students and their parents if our position is consistently anti-business, anti-media, anti-advertising and anti-design when our students want to become successful in those very businesses?

Click on the heading above to see the full story about David Butler in Fast Company magazine.

UK Design Museum Mentors Student Designers

The Design Museum in London (right) has developed a design program for students to go along with exhibits they have scheduled during the year. Their program, called the Design Factory, is designed for college students but the concept could be easily adapted for other museums and for other age groups.

The museum's annual higher education project is designed for BA design students, spanning product, fashion/textiles, graphics/illustration and architecture/spatial design.

Developed in consultation with design tutors (mentors), the Design Factory invites students to respond to the project brief Future Design For Future Need through gallery research and creative practice, using Design Museum exhibitions, public events and online resources as primary sources of inspiration and research.

Design Factory offers students a range of opportunities including:
• Professional feedback on project work submitted to the Design Factory Judging Days
• Input from practicing designers at the Design Factory Student Symposium
• Cross college networking
• Potential inclusion in the Design Factory Student Exhibition at the Design Museum as part of Design Overtime in Spring 2010

Design Factory is created to encourage challenging, experimental, open ended, multi-disciplinary responses that opens up students' design processes and thinking.

The simple program involves a design brief, research at the museum and their online site, tutoring, and a related design task. Click on the heading above for a full description. (In the description, HE stands for higher education and HCD stands for human-centered design.)

Designing With People in Mind

Experience design is the idea of designing with people in mind. Whether the actual design is a printed or digital design, an object or product, a place or environment, the idea is to examine how it will be experienced by people.

In Riane Eisler's book "The Real Wealth of Nations" (left) she argues that the real wealth of our nation is its people. Design educators can translate this to designing with people in mind as well as designing the infrastructure of our physical environment and a sustainable environment through green design of the products we use.

Eisler (right) says, "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan emphasizes the need to invest in our material infrastructure (bridges, roads, etc.) and our natural infrastructure (green jobs, environmental sustainability, etc.). I urge you make a larger investment in the third, even more critical infrastructure: the human infrastructure."

She also says, "By making human capacity development a focal point, we will not only stimulate economic recovery through an extremely cost effective investment; we will also position ourselves to restore and renew our standing as a positive force in the global community, culturally, politically, and environmentally. Our economic crisis is not due simply to the globalization of unregulated capitalism; the problem goes much deeper - and so must the solutions. We’re shifting from the industrial to the post-industrial era where our most important asset is what economists like to call “high-quality human capital”: flexible, innovative, capable people.

Producing this high-quality human capital requires good childcare in homes, good early childhood education in schools and communities, good healthcare, and other long-term investments in caring for the real wealth of our nation: people."

These are all challenges for good experience design such as that being done by the design firm IDEO to improve health care experiences in hospitals and places like the Ronald McDonald Houses for families of seriously ill children.

The goal of design education in schools is to develop flexible, innovative, capable people.

Click on the heading above to go to Riane Eisler's web site.

A+DEN Conference in Chicago

The Architecture and Design Education Network (A+DEN) is holding its annual conference November 5 - 7, 2009 at the Chicago Architecture Foundation in Chicago for people who educate the public about architecture and design.

This year’s gathering will be held in conjunction with the first meeting of the Association of Architecture Organizations (AAO). AAO, which is currently being organized, will launch at the November conference. The mission of AAO will be to foster the development of an alliance of like-minded non-profit organizations who educate the public about architecture and the built environment, and to serve as a forum for national and international dialogue and the sharing of best practices, materials and ideas.

The AAO portion of the conference will be November 5 – 6, 2009, and the A+DEN gathering will be November 6 – 7, 2009. There will be overlap programming on November 6, which will provide a valuable networking opportunity for both groups.

Click on the heading above to go to the A+DEN website.

Putting Together a Poster

When a student wants to design a poster they have to use knowledge and skills from a variety of fields. They have to act as the (1) art director who selects the best (2)idea from a creative director, (3) lettering, (4) illustration, (5) copy (text) and (6) layout for the message to be conveyed. Each of these tasks requires a different set of skills that the student must learn.

In the Harry Potter poster, for example, the words "Harry Potter" (left) were designed by Robert Walker and the illustration (right) was done by Drew Struzan. The rest of the text (body copy) was created by a writer and laid out by a graphic designer.

Look at the story below to see how it all came together.

Creating Posters in Your Design Curriculum

Art teachers are inundated with requests for poster designs and contests asking students to design posters for some good community or national cause. Administrators often support these requests because they feel it is good for community relations.

Poster contests are inappropriate for most traditional art programs, but if there is a design curriculum in place, students will have the knowledge and skills necessary to design posters for such occasions or for class assignments in science, English, social studies, etc.

Poster design involves three major skills - typography, illustration, and layout design. These are often done by separate specialists in these fields and put together by an art director. The illustration for the Harry Potter poster (left) was done by the famous illustrator Drew Struzan but the lettering was done by type designer Robert Walker, and the poster was put together by a graphic designer.

In laying out type, students need to carefully check kerning (adjusting the spaces between letters and words) and contrast (having enough light and dark contrast) so they don't use yellow letters on a white background.

Students should start with ideation in each of these areas - What is the best typeface for the message; what is the best illustration; and what is the best layout?

In the ideation process students must be encouraged to go beyond the typical cliches. They need to be taught how to be creative and to brainstorm many ideas until they come up with one that is original and appropriate for the topic. Look at Milton Glaser poster designs (right) to see how he came up with innovative ideas.

Students need to learn how to visualize ideas by doing many thumbnail sketches of possible letter choices, illustration ideas, and potential layouts. There are many choices to be made like whether to use a horizontal (landscape) or a vertical (portrait) orientation of the paper.

Perhaps, most difficult to teach, is to prototype the design before going to the final version. There are far too many posters in which the elements are either too crowded or have large gaps because of poor planning. Students should lay out the heading, illustration and body copy on separate sheets of paper (often tracing paper works best) so they can move them around on the page to get them positioned exactly before working on the poster board itself.

Women in Design

While there are many noteworthy women in design, as in most areas of life, they are not given equal treatment. Although half the students in architecture schools are women, only about 13% of working architects are women.

The list of influential women in design is long and contains people like architect Denise Scott Brown (left), Pritzker Prize winning architect Zaha Hadid (right), graphic designer April Greiman, theatre designer Julie Taymor, design curator Ellen Lupton, design writer Chee Perlman, museum design curator Paola Antonelli and many others.

Teachers need to take special care to insure that women are included in any history, discussion or treatment of design in schools. Schools can help enrich the growing public awareness of the work of women designers - past, present and on the horizon.

There are many good resources online and in communities across the country. For example, the Organization of Women Architects and Design Professionals has been an active support network in the San Francisco Bay Area for the many women involved in architecture, building engineering, planning, landscape architecture, interior and graphic design, and related environmental design fields. There is an Association of Women Industrial Designers (AWID) and similar associations for women in graphic, web, interior and just about any other field of design.

Click on the heading above to see the book "Women of Design" which is a good starting resource. Check out the long list of women trailblazers, pathfinders and groundbreakers in design.

Prop Designers Have Ideas for Halloween Costumes and Decorations

When looking at ideas for designing Halloween costumes you might want to look specifically at prosthetic makeup effects and also prop designers. Props (short for properties) are the things in movies and on the stage that aren't "sets" or "costumes" but are objects that are carried, worn, used or picked up by someone (like a gun or a sword).

Prop designers have knowledge of construction techniques and special materials that are light weight but durable and can be made to look like wood, metal or any other material. Many action hero costumes require prop design.

Harrison Krix is a 27 year old Graphic Designer in Atlanta who also takes commissions to make props. He did an elaborate prop costume of a character called "Big Daddy" from the video game "Bioshock" and shows, step by step, how he did it on his website.

You start with a concept drawing (not shown) that you turn into a pattern or plan (left) that you construct over a frame or armature (second) and finish with surface materials, colors and textures (far right).

Click on the heading above to go to his website and scroll down to see a video of his "prop costume".

Advice to Young Designers: Learn to Love the Computer

Computer-driven architecture and design will be a necessity for students in school now to learn if they want to be competitive in 10 years. Architect Frank Gehry (right), pioneered the use of digital fabrication in the 1990s by borrowing 3D modeling software used to design airplanes.

The sculpted titanium facade of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao - followed by the billowed steel sails of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (left) and the incongruously curved brick walls of the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT - could not have been built in any other way.

Gehry uses new technologies to make possible buildings so complex they previously existed only in the imagination. Using today's tools, you could basically model any shape, press a button, print out the construction templates and say, 'Build this.'"

Even more conventional designers will need to use computer fabrication. One of the advantages of using computers to model designs is lowering costs. Digital tools streamline the design and engineering process, minimizing labor hours and materials waste in order to make high-end, customized architecture more affordable.

Gehry starts his design process with wooden blocks and sketches. Next, his model makers translate the designs into cardboard prototypes. Eventually these are imported into Catia, the high-end 3-D software Gehry borrowed from the aerospace industry more than a decade ago.

Click on the heading above to watch a video of Gehry and Dennis Shelden, one of his technology experts, explaining why computer design is necessary.

Ken Burns is a Visual Communicator

There are those who make films as an art form, others for popular culture, and still others for design. Ken Burns (right) makes films as basic visual communication -documentary films.

THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA'S BEST IDEA is a six-episode series showing on PBS in September directed by Ken Burns and written and co-produced by Dayton Duncan.

Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales — from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska — THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA'S BEST IDEA is a story of people: people from every conceivable background — rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy. It is a story full of struggle and conflict, high ideals and crass opportunism, stirring adventure and enduring inspiration - set against the most breathtaking backdrops imaginable.

Ken Burns is such a powerful visual communicator that a slide show feature of iPhoto (an effect where you can pan or zoom on a still photo to give the effect of motion) is called the Ken Burns Effect.

Click on the heading above to go to the PBS site for the 12 hour series.

Experience Design is the Newest Field of Design

Experience design is an emerging field of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience with less emphasis placed on improving functionality of the design. Experience design is often used today to refer to interactive web design but it also encompasses diverse disciplines such as theater, graphic design, storytelling, exhibit design, theme-park design, online design, game design, interior design, architecture, and so forth.


In 2001, Nathan Shedroff (right) wrote "Experience Design" (left) and created a website linking to all the examples in the book. Most of that is gone but he still has a website that gives you some of the flavor. (Click on the heading above to go to his website.)

Shedroff says there are, at least, 6 dimensions to experiences: Time/Duration, Interactivity, Intensity, Breadth/Consistency, Sensorial and Cognitive Triggers, and Significance/Meaning.

I sometimes have students start off the semester with an information design project (drawing, graphics, web, photography, video), followed by object design (prototyping and model-making) and environment design (redesigning the room) and then end the semester with an open-house at which the students transform the room, display their work and design games and interactive activities demonstrating what they learned to other students, faculty, visitors, and friends. The task for the Open House is to create an interactive environment in which the visitors become participants and come to understand what the students learned by interacting with their exhibits, games, and activities.

It feels like a party (including food, drinks, music, special lighting, and student produced videos) but it is a basic introduction to the idea of thinking about how people will experience your work rather than focusing on the work itself. David Kelley and the folks at IDEO often present clients with a video of a design being used rather than a model or prototype of the design.

Next American City New Issue Released

Next American City magazine had a party in Philadelphia for the release of their Fall Issue 24: Bloomberg Uninterrupted.

Dubbed the Mayors’ Issue (left), the magazine features a cover story on Mayor Bloomberg’s third term in office, a piece on Phoenix’s new public art project, a roundtable with six mayors talking about hopes for their respective cities and their fight during the recession and finally, a glimpse into NAC’s first Next American Vanguard conference.

Editor Diana Lind ( on right) and co-founder and chair of the Board of Directors, Adam Gordon (left) were among the magazine's producers who were on hand to greet supporters.

Next American City is a national quarterly magazine about making cities better. They observe, document and conceive realistic solutions about how to improve cities—how to ensure that future generations’ lives are improved, and not made more dangerous or unnecessarily complicated by the decisions we make.

Next American City is published by The Next American City, Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting socially and environmentally sustainable economic growth in America’s cities and examining how and why our built environment, economy, society and culture are changing. In addition to publishing the print and online magazine they hold events across the country, and do advocacy on issues central to the future of cities.

Click on the heading above to go to the Next American City's website.

October is a Good Time to Teach Costume and Makeup Design

With Halloween coming in October this is a good time to introduce students to costume and makeup design. Many of the inspirations for costumes and makeup come from movies, TV shows, video games, and comic books. Teachers can also introduce students to costume design used on stage for live theater.

Teachers can use Halloween as an opportunity to teach students about costume and makeup design done by professionals for movies, the stage, and, to a lesser extent, television. There is plenty of information available by searching online under keywords like costume design, makeup design, and prosthetic makeup. Introduce students to the winners of the Academy Awards for Costume Design and have them think about which films this year might be nominated for best costume design.

From the looks of it, makeup and costuming play a big part in Johnny Depp's upcoming movie version of "Alice in Wonderland" which won't hit theaters until March 5, 2010 (right).

There are magazines and websites for all manner of makeup and costume design. There is, for example, a magazine just for people who create prosthetic makeup designs.

Click on the picture of the leopard makeup on the left to see a larger version where the prosthetic details can be seen more clearly.

The Top 100 Urban Thinkers

Without planning and design, our built environments can just grow into unlivable, uncontrolled collections of freeways, power supplies, billboards, factories, and pollution (left). The fact that many of our cities have some wonderful spaces that enhance our quality of life is because of the hard work of many urbanists and city planners.

A website called Planetizen took a poll of its members to find out who they thought were the most important urban thinkers. They must have some pretty knowledgeable members because their list of the top 100 is a veritable who's who of urban planning and design. This list is an excellent start for anyone interested in learning or teaching more about urban design.

Planetizen's poll was active for one month, from August 7th to September 7th, 2009. A significant issue that will surely be raised is the lack of women: only 9 out of the top 100 are female. This is countered somewhat by the decisively wide lead by which Jane Jacobs takes the top spot. The women who are included are impressive, but of course, there is a significant number of women making a big difference in urban planning who aren't on the list.

Click on the heading above to see the entire list of 100 urban thinkers on Planetizen's website and use that list as a foundation for any curriculum about urban planning and design.

Jane Jacobs Changed the Face of American Cities

Students need to know about a woman who is considered by many to be the most influential person in helping shape the growth of cities in North America.

Jane Jacobs (right) was an American-born Canadian urbanist, writer and activist. She is best known for her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) (left), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times.

Along with her well-known printed works, Jacobs is equally well known for organizing grass-roots efforts to block urban-renewal projects that would have destroyed local neighborhoods. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and after moving to Canada in 1968, equally influential in canceling the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of highways under construction.

The Power of Visual Storytelling

The top television commercial for the year didn't use a single word except the name of their product, Coca-Cola, on the bottle and cap and a small tag at the end that simply says "open happiness". This is an example of the power of good visual storytelling, strong story-boarding and superb digital animation.

Click on the heading above to see the commercial.

The advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy and Psyop won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial for Coca-Cola's "Heist" at the 2009 Creative Arts Emmys, Saturday, September 12 in Los Angeles. The winning spot, directed by Psyop's Todd Mueller and Kylie Matulick, features a crew of clever bugs who make off with a sleeping guy's bottle of Coca-Cola, and debuted at this year's Super Bowl.

"Heist" was chosen for the Emmy over Goodby's "Wedding" for Sprint, Amex "Airport Lounge," out of Ogilvy and starring Tina Fey, another 30 Rock star vehicle "Alec in Huluwood," out of Crispin, two Bud spots out of DDB Chicago, "Circus" and "Magazine Buyer," as well as a pair of Wieden's other efforts, Nike's "Bottled Courage" for Nike and Career Builder's "Tips."

Other industry-related winners include DUCK director Jamie Caliri, who earned the Outstanding Main Title Design for his titles for Showtime's United States of Tara, a pop-up book style intro that depicts the calm-to-chaotic shifts in the world of the show's main character, a single mother with multiple personalities.

Everyone Deserves Good Design

When we think of designing for people with disabilities we often think mainly about functionality, but doesn't everyone deserve to be surrounded by the coolest things?

Think about wheel chairs. Most of the people who own a wheel chair are going to spend the rest of their waking life in that chair. Shouldn't it be at least as satisfying as our cars and other highly designed objects? Have you seen a really cool wheel-chair that you would like to have even if you didn't need it?

If you agree, let's test how much you really buy into this idea. What about making really cool designs for people who can't even see them?

Created by Siwei Liu, Tactility is a cell phone for visually impaired users that relies on a Braille keypad and has the basic features of a handset for making and receiving calls. There’s also a slot at the bottom of the phone, allowing it to be worn around the user’s neck or attached to a belt or bag for better accessibility.

While the user may not be able to see the sleek design they can certainly feel it and gain satisfaction from having objects that feel great and work well.

Coming up with designs like this is a good exercise for all students to help them think about everyone's needs for useful objects that also enrich our lives.

A Visual Science Museum for Micro-Organisms

Visual Science and design are on the flip-side of the coin that has art and visual culture on the other side. They are all aspects of our visual world.

For several centuries, artists from the visual art and culture side have had museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to display depictions of the human figure, still-lives, landscapes or non-figurative motifs. One subject has been widely neglected all those years: Micro-organisms!

The Micropolitan Museum finally exhibits these often overlooked works of visual science which are only visible with the aid of the microscope. Curator Wim van Egmond has collected the finest microscopic masterpieces nature has ever produced during eons of natural selection.

Click on the heading above to go to the Micropolitan Museum of microscopic "art" forms.

Wild-Life Foundation Creates Virtual Living Planet Community

The Living Planet Community is a web community of real Canadians who are taking action to live a healthier life for people, the planet and for our children. When visitors to the website join the Living Planet Community they are lending their voices to a collective, positive and unified call for everyone - governments, businesses and individuals - to do their part, especially to fight climate change.

WWF-Canada is helping show Canadians how their actions add up when they work together. On this website, people can commit to personal actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, join or create like-minded groups, and invite or challenge others to join them.

For example, on the site area, Take Action on Climate Change, people can browse different actions and select ones to commit to doing now (or very soon). Participants can also add actions they've taken over the past year. The program then calculates how much Greenhouse Gas (CO2) has been reduced. The system adds up everyone's contributions into a Canada-wide total and tallies provincial totals as well.

Click on the heading above to see their website.

Dubai Opens Luxury Metro

Dubai continues its campaign to have the biggest and best of everything. The tallest building in the world will open there in December and now they have opened the longest automated metro system in the world, complete with luxury compartments, Wi-Fi and air conditioning.

On Wednesday, at 9:09 p.m. on the ninth day of the ninth month of 2009, the first train went into service on the brand new Dubai Metro. The opening of the Burj Dubai, which will be the tallest building in the world and which was originally supposed to open on the same day, has been postponed until December.

The Red Line runs for 52 kilometers, it has 29 stations and separate compartments for first class passengers and for women. It also has wireless Internet service on every train. But most significantly, it only took 30,000 workers four years to finish the world's "longest fully-automated, driverless metro system."

Halfway along the route between the city center and the Jebel Ali container port is the Palm Jumeirah Monorail, which whisks passengers to the man-made island resort of the same name.

Philippe Starck Launches Reality TV Show About Design

A new reality TV show about design on Britain's BBC2 follows French design guru Philippe Starck (left) on a search for an apprentice from a group of young hopefuls (right) who live together in one of Starck's design hotels.

Similar to The Apprentice, Starck's new series, which began on BBC2 in September, is called Design for Life. Following the typical format, he takes 12 young British designers, sets them challenges and each week eliminates the weakest. The winner becomes part of Starck's "tribe" (his Parisian design company) for six months and their winning concept given the opportunity to become as famous as Starck's iconic orange-squeezer that looks like a 1950s sci-fi space rocket.

The aim of the series, according to Starck, is to create an "English style". He doesn't believe that the British have had a new national design aesthetic since Terence Conran opened his first branch of Habitat in the early 1960s.

Unlike other shows, the contestants were selected by Starck himself (not by producers) on the basis of paper drawings that were submitted. He selected ideas that were not necessarily great but that he felt had potential... people who think freely and differently. A lot of what he is trying to do is get people to embrace a new way of looking at the world.

Apparently the result of Starck's series is that the carefully guarded successful design is, in fact, a thing of beautiful and functional design and might enjoy a longer life than the television show itself.

Bias Against Visual Communication in "Serious" Education

If you look at the list of basic or core skills listed by your State Education Agency or University System you will find the word's visual communication or visual literacy noticeably missing.

Yes, you will see "art" listed in a compendium of courses that students might elect to take or an art history course required in some general education requirements but you will not find "visual communication" or "visual literacy" listed as a basic or core skill for learning, thinking, or communicating.

They will all list something like "written communication", "quantitative literacy", or sometimes even "informational literacy" but they will carefully avoid suggesting that learning, thinking, or communication can take place through visual images, objects, environments or visual experiences.

Leaving out visual communication is not an oversight - it is intentional. In fact, many state education department and university officials will say that to include visual literacy as a core skill in universities or K-12 education would require a complete restructuring of our entire system of education. They are for "educational reform", but including visual communication would be expecting too much.

The Wall Street Journal (left) is an example of a "serious" publication that is only recently, and begrudgingly, introducing some images and color into their pages. Even the scholarly publication of the National Art Education Association, Studies in Art Education, (right) follows the format of scholarly journals with heavy reliance on text and few if any images inside (none in color).

Contemporary Fashion Design from India

Often when we think of other cultures we have them fixed in our minds as they existed centuries before. India, for example, should call up more than images of ancient India or contemporary Bollywood movies. There is also a burgeoning contemporary fashion industry in India that should be presented to our students.

Fashion designer Rina Dhaka (center in picture on left) has been a part of the Indian fashion scene for the past fifteen years. Appreciation for her work has extended beyond India and international fashion magazines 'Vogue' and 'Elle' have featured her work (right).

With Indian women beginning to work in the outside world and becoming more independent, there's a market for both western and Indian clothing, party wear and office attire. As Dhaka points out, "We have beautiful Indian clothing, antique Indian shawls and old sarees and now we have us, Indian designers, who will try hopefully to keep the culture intact and make a strong fashion statement."

Click on the heading above to see a video about Dhaka and Ranna Gill's fashion influence.

"Art" - a Convenient but Often Inaccurate Term

Art is a perfect word - short, easy to say, and it doesn't take up much space on a page. As a result we use it for just about anything even when it doesn't fit.

The Art section of my local Sunday paper (The Philadelphia Inquirer) struggles with the inclusion of design, visual culture, and visual communication under the term "art" by saying this use is "eclectic". Today's paper says "In this new 2009-10 art season, the Muppets square off against modernism and Renoir goes up against Hollywood. The mix of exhibitions planned by the region's art museums has rarely been so eclectic."

They felt the explanation was necessary because the James A. Michener Art Museum has an exhibit about Jim Henson (left) the late creator of the Muppets; the Reading Public Museum has an exhibit of 100 movie costumes from the Golden Age of film; the Brandywine River Museum has an exhibit of Rockwell Kent's classic illustrations; and the Delaware Art Museum is showing the high-speed photos of MIT scientist Doc Edgerton (right).

Strictly speaking, none of these are art. They are more accurately defined as visual culture, design and visual communication but those words are long and unfamiliar. I don't blame people for not using such long words more often so my compromise is to add the words "and Design" anywhere the word "Art" is used more broadly. (Hence the name of this magazine.) The extra three syllables don't tell the whole story but definitely open up the conversation beyond the usual associations with "Art" by itself and "Art and Design" isn't that much harder to say or write.

Doc Edgerton's high-speed photos are not art, they are visual communication in science. Movie costumes, illustrations and the Muppets are not art, they are design. Taking the time to make the distinction is essential to helping the public understand the richness, complexity, and diversity of our visual world.

Portable Solar Power for Your Personal Electronics

The pictures tell the story.
Click on the images to see larger versions.

Emily Pilloton Created Project H to Design for the Disadvantaged

We have previously written about Project H and its initiatives like Hippo Rollers and Learning Landscapes. What we didn't realize is that these amazing projects are the work of a 28 year old woman, Emily Pilloton (right).

At the age of 26, Emily Pilloton founded Project H with a $400 loan from her parents and a network of people she knew from being an editor at Inhabitat. After being trained as an architect and working as an industrial designer, she got fed up with design in the traditional sense and vowed to focus on design that improved Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness (Project H).

Her first task was to re-design, fund and deliver 75 Hippo Rollers, a water transporting device, to a South African community (far left). Pilloton's team then turned their attention to an AIDS orphan school in Uganda. They came up with a grid of half-buried tires that could support a dozen active games they invented, turning it into a "learning landscape." And then they went there and built it for $1000. Three more are being built in the Dominican Republic, North Carolina (left) and the Bay Area.

In the last year she also wrote a book, Design Revolution: 100 Products and Solutions that Empower People. Click on the heading above to go to the Project H website.

Visual Science Images from the Repaired Hubble Telescope

The counterpart to visual art and visual culture is visual science. Visual science is the creation of images that communicate observations and processes in scientific investigations. Scientific illustrators do drawings, paintings and models to explore and explain scientific phenomena while others use telescopes and microscopes affixed to cameras or special devices like fMRIs (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to explore what can't be seen by the human eye.

One of the greatest tools ever created for visual science is the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Named after the trailblazing astronomer Edwin P. Hubble (1889-1953), the Hubble Space Telescope is a large, space-based observatory which has revolutionized astronomy by providing unprecedented deep and clear views of the Universe, ranging from our own solar system to extremely remote fledgling galaxies forming not long after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Launched in 1990 and greatly extended in its scientific powers through new instrumentation installed during four servicing missions with the Space Shuttle, the Hubble, in its eighteen years of operations, has validated Lyman Spitzer Jr.'s (1914-1997) original concept of a diversely instrumented observatory orbiting far above the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere and returning data of unique scientific value.

Hubble's coverage of light of different colors (its "spectral range") extends from the ultraviolet, through the visible (to which our eyes are sensitive), and into the near-infrared. Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 meters (94.5 inches) in diameter. Hubble orbits Earth every 96 minutes, 575 kilometers (360 miles) above the Earth's surface.

Click on the heading above to go to NASA's Hubble website.

Designing for Movies

There are hundreds of design jobs in the motion picture industry. The top design role is called "production designer" or "art director" with many other designers supporting them. For students who want to be designers and also like movies there are plenty of opportunities if they have what it takes.

One of the most famous movie designers is Rick Carter (right). Production Designer Rick Carter, whose work will be featured in Twentieth Century Fox's upcoming "Avatar" and Warner Brothers' "Sucker Punch," will receive the Hollywood Film Festival's Hollywood Production Designer of the Year Award at the Festival's October 26 Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony.

Carter was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Art Direction for "Forrest Gump" (left) (1994). He also received two nominations from the Art Directors Guild for Excellence in Production Design for "Amistad" (1997) and "Artificial Intelligence: AI" (2001). "Amistad" also earned Carter a Satellite Awards nomination, while "Artificial Intelligence: AI" garnered him an AFI Awards nomination.

Throughout the span of his over 20 year career in production design, Carter worked on such high-profile films as "Munich" (2005), "War of the Worlds" (2005), "The Polar Express" (1994), "Cast Away" (2000), "Jurassic Park" (1993), "Three Fugitives" (1989) and "The Goonies" (1985). He also worked on the Emmy Award® winning television series "Amazing Stories" from 1985-1986.

Carter will be honored during the Hollywood Film Festival's black-tie Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony banquet before a gathering of 1,200 industry and guild executives, stars, celebrities, filmmakers and media, from the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. Previous recipients of the Festival's Production Designer honors are Robert Boyle, Henry Bumstead, Stuart Craig, William Creber, Dante Ferretti, Sarah Greenwood, Grant Major, Harold Michelson and John Myhre.

Look at the production design work Rick Carter did for the soon to be released movie Avatar by clicking on the heading above.

Designing for the Stage

Set design, costume design and lighting design are three opportunities for designers who are interested in working in live theatre. One of the most inspiring designers whose work will be well-recognized by students is Julie Taymor (left), director and designer for The Lion King.

In the early 1990s the Walt Disney Company had successful Broadway versions of its popular animated films, such as Beauty and the Beast, but creating a stage version of The Lion King posed a special problem because the principal characters were all animals.

Because of her known expertise in the theatrical use of masks, Disney Chair Michael Eisner asked Julie Taymor to design the Broadway production of The Lion King. She took the unusual approach of clothing the principal actors in traditional African costumes, with stylized animal masks worn on their heads, leaving their human facial expressions fully visible (right).

Other animals are represented by large puppets, many operated by puppeteers who perform in full view of the audience. Taymor directed the production, designed the costumes, co-designed the masks and puppets and re-wrote many of the film's scenes and songs. Giraffes were played by actors on stilts; a single elephant was portrayed by four actors, one for each leg. In all, the production employed over 100 puppets representing 25 different species.

When The Lion King opened on Broadway on November 13, 1997, the New York Times hailed it as "the most memorable, moving and original theatrical extravaganza in years." Taymor received two Tony Awards for the production. She was the first woman ever to receive the coveted award for directing a musical; she was also honored for her brilliant costume design. The Lion King is still running on Broadway, while touring companies take Julie Taymor's vision to audiences around the world.

Click on the heading above to watch a video showing some of the costumes on stage. No really, watch the video.

Designing for Children's Television

People (students and teachers alike) who like design and education might find happiness designing for children's television programs like Sesame Street.

Sesame Street, which celebrates 40 years this November, was honored with an Emmy Award for New Approaches — Daytime Entertainment recognizing the use of new media.

The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) announced the winner at the 36th Annual Daytime Entertainment Emmy Awards on Sunday, August 30th. Entries, judged online in their native format, were from over-the-air, cable, satellite and internet broadcasters. Sesame Street also won in three other categories: Best Directing in Children’s Television; Outstanding Performer in a Children’s Series (Kevin Clash as Elmo); and Best Costume Design. In addition, Sesame Street was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sesame Street debuted on PBS in 1969. Sesame Workshop’s website www.sesamestreet.org is a major organizational initiative for the nonprofit. Users can find free 3D interactive games and videos, including celebrity appearances, to accompany the series’ new season debuting November 10th on PBS.

Click on the heading above to watch Sesame Street receive the Emmy.

Botanical Illustration: Science and Visual Communication

You can find Alice Tangerini's drawings in a museum but it wouldn't be an art museum.

It's not the kind of drawing you would show in a New York art gallery or art museum so it might be more accurate to refer to Alice Tangerini's work as scientific illustration. In her case, more specifically, botanical illustration (right). She is one of the best in the world at what she does. She says she sometimes has to hold her breath while drawing because the detail is so delicate.

Scientific illustration is a perfect field for those who like to draw and paint and also love science. Scientific illustrators have to know a lot about science and have highly developed skills of observation and representation.

Alice Tangerini (left) has served as staff illustrator in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, since 1972. Her duties at the Smithsonian, aside from illustrating, include managing and curating the collection of botanical art in the Botany Department.

She is a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators and organized its first annual meeting in 1979 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has participated in numerous GNSI exhibits and given many lectures and workshops in botanical illustration, specializing in black-and-white techniques. She has taught at Montgomery College, in Maryland; Virginia Commonwealth University, Corcoran School of Art, in Washington, D.C.; the Desert Botanical Garden, in Phoenix, Arizona; and the Smithsonian Resident Associates Program.

Click on the heading above to listen to an NPR interview with Alice Tangerini.

Industrial Designers Meet in Singapore

What can our world be in 2050? That's the question industrial designers from around the world are asking themselves when they meet in Singapore for their World Congress in November.

The Congress will generate a series of propositions for a desirable future, under the theme of “Design Difference: Designing our World 2050”.

According to conference committee chair, Low Cheaw Hwei (left), "Design goes beyond invention. It is envisioned through imaginative concepts, transformed through creative processes and applied to what we value in our lives, culture, society, and environment. Good design is often ahead of the market and sometimes beyond the horizon."

The program will be comprised of a three-day forum of studio presentations by creative leaders, interactive debates and plenary sessions structured to explore the difference that design can bring to individuals, organizations and communities in the coming decades. There will be a strong action agenda, culminating in a “Come Monday morning, I will . . .” declaration of intent by Congress participants.

Designers, business leaders, community leaders, educators, scientists and entrepreneurs all have a stake in the difference that design can make in developing a better world by 2050. The Icsid World Design Congress offers a unique opportunity to share ideas with some of the world’s leading thinkers from a broad spectrum of disciplines and to imagine a better future through design.

The ICSID World Congress is being held in conjunction with the Singapore Design Fesitval (right) with the theme Design 2050: Possibilities for Tomorrow. Presenting some 100 design-related activities over 11 days, the Festival will see participation from Singapore and key international Partners such as Australia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Click on the heading above to go to the World Congress site.

Stackable Building Look Captures the Imagination

Some designs catch your eye with their inventiveness. This apartment complex looks almost like stacked legos or jenga (a wooden block game) but each building block was carefully planned into the surrounding environment in Singapore in this design by a company called OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture) from the Netherlands.

The architect played with the different stacking arrangements until he came up with this interlaced arrangement of apartment blocks. The Interlace is a carefully concieved design, taking into account the surrounding micro-climate, wind and solar resources, as well as privacy for individual apartments with lush rooftop gardens, and flowering balconies.

Click on the images to see a larger view.
Click on the heading above to learn more about OMA whose partners include Rem Koolhaas.

Evaluating Student Logo Projects

How do students know what makes an effective logo design?

For businesses the power of having strong brand identity cannot be underestimated. Major brands such as Apple and Coca-Cola have built up a positive brand identity, which has helped make them popular and successful.

One of the first things that has to be produced for a new company, website, or product is a distinct logo design to give it a face and a name. This can be difficult but there are a few factors that need to be considered when designing a strong logo design.

Is the logo design:

instantly recognizable?
distinct from others?
simple and not overly complicated?
clear and easy to read?
the right tone and style for the target audience?
able to create some sort of reaction from the user?
able to stand out from the others on the market?
able to focus attention on the brand?
able to convey the brand's values?

Click on the heading above to go to Web Design Ledger to get other tips and tutorials for helping students design logos.

Design Provides a Link Between Humanities and Science

The separation between the humanities and the sciences is being closed to a degree by the growth of design education. The argument by C.P. Snow (left) in "The Two Cultures", (a 1959 lecture later turned into a book) was that the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society — the sciences and the humanities — was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.

Although there are still arts and humanities teachers who do not warm up to science and math and vice-versa, there is a growing number of architecture, digital media and design courses that link the two cultures - basically by necessity given the nature of the design fields. Architecture is virtually impossible without engineering and math. Digital animation, media production, and game design require computer programming and math. Product design involves chemistry, material science and math.

Design, media and technology are continuing to close the gap between the "two cultures" but much work remains. Digital animators like John Lasseter (Pixar, Disney) recognize that a successful film like "Toy Story" needs a strong story that relates to people as well as the ground-breaking digital animation effects that draw people to the theater.

John Brockman, in his book "The Third Culture", argued that the future intellectuals would now consist of “those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world” who are dealing with the real issues facing humanity in our new world of bioengineering, cyberspace, and nanotechnology. Science was now the dominant paradigm and the achievements of the new public culture it creates “will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.”

In a newer book, "The New Humanists", (right) Brockman continued the argument with “Unlike the humanities academicians, who talk about each other, scientists talk about the universe.” The traditional literary camp is “indulging itself in cultural pessimism,” in contrast to the optimism of science, whose discoveries are “either good news or news that can be made good thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques.”

Envisioning the Habitat of the 21st Century

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and HP (Hewlitt Packard) have announced the 3rd Advanced Architecture Contest, on the theme of THE SELF-SUFFICIENT CITY: Envisioning the habitat of the future.

The aim of the competition is to promote online discussion and research through which to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like.

The competition is open to architects, planners, designers and artists who want to contribute to progress in making the world more habitable by developing a proposal capable of responding to emerging challenges in areas such as ecology, information technology, socialization and globalization, with a view to enhancing the connected self-sufficiency of our cities.

The competition prizes will consist of three scholarships for the IaaC Masters in Advanced Architecture for academic year 2010-11, cash prizes, and the latest generation of large-format HP printers. The selected projects will go on show in a major exhibition, due to open in Barcelona in May 2010, which will then travel to key cities around the world. The best projects will also be featured in a book to be published by Actar. The project is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Housing, the Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona City Council, and the publishing house Actar.

For more information on submission, calendar, rules and registration go to the official website by clicking on the heading above.

London Design Festival September 19-24, 2009

The London Design Festival is an annual event established in 2003 to celebrate and promote London as the creative capital of the world. This year it is being held from September 19-24, 2009.

The Festival provides a platform for the creative talent at work and creates a unique opportunity to visit over 200 specific events and activities reflecting the diversity of world-class design talent in the capital.

The London Design Festival is the UK’s biggest annual celebration of design and reflects London’s status as the world creative hub. It is made up of the widest possible range of design disciplines, all of who prosper in the city. These new ideas and activities make each Festival dynamic, different and uniquely London. Supported by government, the design sector, and leading businesses, the Festival offers a platform for the best design talent.

The Festival supports emerging talent that reflects London’s diverse influences. The Festival works with national museums, retailers, universities, trade shows, magazines, international design businesses and individual designers.

The Festival works year-round with key London venues and spaces such as Trafalgar Square, Southbank Centre, the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) (right) and Somerset House to program engaging design-related content that reflects London’s diverse design story, and makes it a global destination for new ideas and talent.

New Monopoly Game Involves the Entire Planet

Add Google Maps and Google Earth to a Monopoly game and you turn the whole planet into a giant board game. This adaptation of a familiar game to an incredible scale is a sign of the kind of thinking kids will engage in for the future.

Anyone can own a virtual piece of the globe thanks to Monopoly City Streets, a new global campaign by Hasbro in partnership with Google. Participants will be able to buy, sell, and develop property on any street in the world using Google Maps and Google Earth technology.

Launching on September 9th, the campaign will promote the Monopoly City edition, an updated version of the board game where players build 3D cities from scratch. Meanwhile, the four month online version turns the whole world into a board game.

Click on the heading above to go to the website to follow the ongoing developments.