We Are Creating Our Own Science Fiction Future

The award-winning science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson (left), says that it is difficult to write science fiction today because real science often catches up with fiction too quickly. It is hard to sort out science fiction from science fact today. There are some things, like "light speed travel" and "teletransporters" that were fun little devices in science fiction that few ever really thought could actually be made real, but the rest of the stuff has already been created or is just over the horizon.

What Robinson says is that we, collectively, are creating our own science fiction reality through real science. Our attitudes about science are shifting from fear to recognition that science can help make our world better. It is up to designers to now use the advances of science to create a better world.

Sciemce has made tremendous advances in their role as "discoverers" of the nature of the universe (the Hubble) and life (DNA), and designers must build on those and other discoveries to now create that which does not yet exist - to turn fiction into fact. The future is not something we simple live into, it does not exist out there already, we must create it.

Click on the heading above to hear (in a series of 8 minute clips) a 90 minute lecture on some of his ideas that Robinson gave at Duke University at a conference put together by Jerry Canavan.

Edison Was a Genius of His Time

The modern world is an electrified world. The light bulb, in particular, profoundly changed human existence by illuminating the night and making it hospitable to a wide range of human activity. The electric light (left), one of the everyday conveniences that most affects our lives, was invented in 1879 by Thomas Alva Edison (right). That was just over 130 years ago. Think how much the world has changed since then. Edison was neither the first nor the only person trying to invent an incandescent light bulb but he gets the credit for making the first practical model.

What Edison did is figure out what substance could be used in an electric lamp in which a filament is heated to incandescence by an electric current. Edison was the entrepreneur who created the first practical prototype. Today's incandescent light bulbs use filaments made of tungsten rather than carbon of the 1880's.

Edison was born February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio and died October 18, 1931 in West Orange, New Jersey and, before even starting on the light bulb project, had already gained an international reputation for his work on the phonograph. He was a household name and a superstar dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" before he invented the lightbulb.

In his 20s, Edison decided he would spend the rest of his life inventing things so he set up a lab to do just that and pretty much worked around the clock for the rest of his life investigating any number of possibilities. Next to Leonardo da Vinci, it is hard to think of anyone who devoted so much of their life to investigating how things work and designing improvements.

Our Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier

Within a single generation, digital media and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialize and even conduct war. But is the technology moving faster than we can adapt to it? And is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we've gained?

In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world. Continuing a line of investigation she began with the 2008 FRONTLINE report Growing Up Online, award-winning producer Rachel Dretzin (right) embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations.

Joining Dretzin on this journey is commentator Douglas Rushkoff (left), a leading thinker and writer on the digital revolution -- and one-time evangelist for technology's positive impact who now seems to question whether or not we are tinkering with something more essential than we realize.

The Digital Nation Web site launched more than 10 months before the broadcast as part of FRONTLINE's first multiplatform project, publishing short online video reports in addition to a producers' blog and a mosaic of user-generated content called Your Stories designed to let visitors participate in the documentary process. The site also features embeddable video, and an archive of online events with expert guests. Self-guided online workshops for teachers and parents can be found there.

Click on the heading above to go to the Digital Nation site and see the video.

Why Design for Space?

With talk about NASA exploring human colonies in space, some people wonder why we don't spend more energy and resources on saving the planet we live on now. Saving planet Earth from our own mistakes is definitely something we need to do in order to become a Level I civilization (a civilization that can manage the resources of its planet).

The problem is, saving planet Earth is only an intermediate step for human survival. The long term problem is that our star, the Sun, is already middle aged and has lived out half its life. In another 5 billion years our Sun will run out of fuel. Long before that however, perhaps only 1 billion years, Earth will be uninhabitable by humans. We have a billion years to get, not to Mars (our next door neighbor), but out of our dying solar system altogether in order to survive. In order to do that we will have to become a Level III civilization (a civilization that can manage the resources of its galaxy.)

The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, Earth is 4.5 billion years old and we have only 1 billion years remaining to find a new home outside of our solar system. That is the supreme design challenge and the reason we are making baby steps to other planets now. We have a long way to go.

The Future of Architecture is Design and Engineering

There is something about the architectural designs of Santiago Calatrava that sets his work apart from other architects of his time. Calatrava adds to his architectural designs the power of engineering. After years of study in architecture and engineering, he can bring large structures to existence that could not be created without his strong background in engineering.

It is suggested that, as Frank Lloyd Wright was the top architect of the first half of the 20th century and Frank Gehry is the exemplar of the second half of the 20th century, Santiago Calatrava will the top architect of the first half of the 21st century.

Calatrava was born on July 28, 1951 in Valencia, Spain. At age 8 he began to draw and paint in the Arts and Crafts School and at 13 he was an exchange student in France. Returning to Valencia, he entered the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura, where he graduated and attended a post-graduate degree in Urban Planning.

Calatrava decided to continue his studies in engineering. Then in 1975, he entered the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, receiving his Ph.D. in 1979. Having completed his studies, he worked with small engineering projects and began to participate in competitions. In 1983 he won his first competition: Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich, where he had set his office. A year later, his first bridge project, starting the worldwide recognition of his name attached to such construction.

In 1989 he established his second office in Paris, and the third in Valencia in 1991. With a knowledge of modern engineering and its technologies, he can make his structures unique examples of 21st century design. His design for Orient Station (above right) in Lisbon, Portugal is just one example of his designs that seem to epitomize the 21st century.

Project H Takes Design Revolution on the Road

Project H Design hit the road in a vintage Airstream trailer with their Design Revolution Road Show, starting with exhibitions in San Francisco and Los Angeles in February. The show is run by Emily Pilloton and showcases 40 examples of humanitarian design.

On February 1st, design nonprofit Project H Design hit the road for a 35-school, 75-day, 6300-mile tour and exhibition showcasing design for social impact. The Design Revolution Road Show will take place in a vintage Airstream trailer that features a mobile exhibition of 40 humanitarian products and a lecture/workshop series that will visit 25 high schools and colleges around the country.

The 40 products featured in the Design Revolution Road Show’s exhibition have been showcased in the book Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People. Project H founder Emily Pilloton and project architect Matthew Miller will be behind the wheel for the duration of the road show, hosting lectures, workshops, and exhibition tours at every stop.

The programming will bring the evidence of and tools for design for social impact to the doorsteps of students, with the ultimate goal of enabling and empowering the next generation of creative problem-solvers to apply their skills to the world’s most pressing problems and improve life on a global scale.

Click on the heading above to follow the Design Revolution Road Show as it moves across the country.

"Up" Wins Annie Award

Pixar Animation Studio's "Up" received the Best Animated Feature Award from ASIFA-Hollywood. The 37th Annual Annie Awards were presented in a ceremony in Los Angeles Saturday, February 6, 2010.

The Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor, director, producer and one of pop culture's most recognizable figures, William Shatner, hosted the Awards ceremony at UCLA's Royce Hall in Los Angeles, CA. The black-tie evening began with a pre-reception at 5 p.m. followed by the Annie Awards ceremony at 7 p.m. and post award party at 10 p.m. The Annie Awards ceremony is webcast on www.annieawards.org beginning Tuesday, February 9, 2010.

The awards for designers included:

Best Animated Feature - Up - Pixar Animation Studios
Best Home Entertainment Production - Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder - The Curiosity Company in association with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Best Animated Short Subject - Robot Chicken: Star Wars 2.5 - ShadowMachine
Best Animated Television Commercial - Spanish Lottery "Deportees" - Acme Filmworks, Inc.
Best Animated Television Production - Prep and Landing - ABC Family/Walt Disney Animation Studios
Best Animated Television Production for Children The Penguins of Madagascar - Nickelodeon and DreamWorks Animation
Animated Effects - James Mansfield "The Princess and the Frog" - Walt Disney Animation Studios
Character Animation in a Television Production - Phillip To "Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space" - DreamWorks Animation
Character Animation in a Feature Production - Eric Goldberg "The Princess and the Frog" - Walt Disney Animation Studios
Character Design in a Television Production - Bill Schwab "Prep and Landing" - Walt Disney Animation Studios
Character Design in a Feature Production - Shane Prigmore "Coraline" - Laika
Directing in a Television Production - Bret Haaland "The Penguins of Madagascar - Launchtime" - Nickelodeon and DreamWorks Animation
Directing in a Feature Production - Pete Docter "Up" - Pixar Animation Studios
Production Design in a Television Production - Andy Harkness "Prep and Landing" - Walt Disney Animation Studios
Production Design in a Feature Production - Tadahiro Uesugi "Coraline" - Laika
Storyboarding in a Television Production - Robert Koo "Merry Madagascar" - DreamWorks Animation
Storyboarding in a Feature Production - Tom Owens "Monsters vs. Aliens" DreamWorks Animation

Fashion Institute Shows Actual Costumes from Top Movies

If you love fashion and you love film, and happen to be in Los Angeles, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Museum and Galleries' exhibition of costume design shows the actual costumes from the top movies of the year. They are exquisitely crafted and the details are beautiful. This is FIDM's 18th annual show honoring the skill and talent of costume designers.

More than 100 costumes from 20-plus movies released in 2009 are displayed, including outfits from "Nine" (left) (by Colleen Atwood) and gowns from "The Young Victoria" (right) (by Sandy Powell). Also on view are the costumes by last year's Oscar winner for costume design, Michael O'Connor, for "The Duchess."

The exhibition opened on Feb. 9, and runs through April 7, 2010. The FIDM Museum and Galleries are at 919 S. Grand Ave. in downtown Los Angeles.

NASA Challenges Students to Design for the Moon

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is holding a design contest for high-school and college students. The challenge is to submit an original work on the theme: Life and Work on the Moon.

Art, industrial design, architecture, computer design and the fine arts are encouraged as entries, and this year, poetry and short stories are also welcome. Design students are encouraged to collaborate with science and engineering students on their projects to make sure their works are "valid for the Moon's harsh environment."

Entries may be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and digital, including music and video. The complete instructions indicate the size limits for each format. There will be cash prizes, certificates of achievement and exhibit opportunities; however foreign entries will not be eligible for the cash prizes.

Students enrolled full time at art schools, high schools, colleges, community colleges, trade schools, design schools, professional schools, or universities are eligible to enter. Only US Citizens are eligible for cash prizes. International students may enter, but will not be eligible for cash prizes. Selected works will be chosen for exhibits at NASA facilities across the country, including Washington, DC. Top awards will be $1000 for Post Secondary Students and $500 for Secondary Students. There will also be smaller cash awards in each category and Certificates of Achievement

The entries will be judged not only on creativity and originality, but also on whether they depict a realistic scenario for the harsh lunar environment. Students are encouraged to consult suggested resources posted on the competition website and to consult with scientists and engineering students or faculty at their institutions.

Deadline for all entries is April 15, 2010. More information on contest requirements and the works of last year's winners are available on the NASA website. Click on the heading above to go to the NASA contest site.

Philadelphia Reads a Graphic Novel Together

Philadelphians are reading French author Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel, The Complete Persepolis (left), as the selection for the 2010 One Book, One Philadelphia.

One Book, which is entering its eighth year, features more than 100 lectures, discussion groups, and workshops at numerous venues throughout the city. Organizers also helped coordinate high school programs for students in 10th grade and up. They have distributed 5,000 copies of Persepolis to every city library and at least one class in every public high school in the district. Charter schools and Catholic high schools are also participating. The writer and artist for the graphic novel (or comic book as she prefers to call it), 39 year old Parisian Marjane Satrapi (right), launched the program with a lecture at Philadelphia's Central Library in September.

First published in France in 2000 to rave reviews, Persepolis has become an international hit. In 2007, Satrapi added filmmaker to her resume when she released an animated version of the book.

The selection of Persepolis as the One Book for Philadelphia is an indication that the graphic novel has achieved not just public recognition, but is held in high regard by literary critics and scholars. Persepolis attains the same level of literary greatness as Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus.

Satrapi, who cites Spiegelman as a formative influence on her work, says that combining words and images is for her "a natural way to tell stories. . . . Besides, the earliest ways human beings told stories was the drawing," she said, referring to cave drawings.

Click on the heading above and click on "video" to see the trailer for the movie version of Persepolis.

BusinessWeek Covers the Value of Design

The business world has certainly recognized the pivotal role design plays in the competitive global economy. Companies, and even cities and whole countries around the world, know that their place in the world economy will be determined by how well they do in design in the 21st century.

BusinessWeek magazine has several special reports on design including:
The Value of Design
Why Design Matters
The Value of Design to Startups
How to Redesign Health Care
The Role of Design in Business
and a slide show about World's Most Influential Designers. (Click on the heading above to see the slide show)

How many of the world's greatest living designers do you know?
For example do you know about Shigeru Miyamoto (left)? You know his work.
Miyamoto, 57, called the father of modern video games, continues to affect the industry, decades after he created such popular games as Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and The Legend of Zelda. As the head of Nintendo's game design department he has brainstormed new ideas for the DS, Wii, and Wii Fit, keeping consoles in today's living rooms and selling millions of new games.

Click on the heading above for Business Week's slide show with photos and bios of the world's most influential designers.

Backchannel is the Focus of Educon

With access to laptops and smartphones, audiences today are no longer sitting quietly taking notes during live presentations. Instead, they are creating a second conversation called the backchannel, where people are online searching for resources, checking facts, and connecting with others inside and outside the room. The backchannel extends the reach of ideas and creates a sense of community and connectedness among the participants.

The backchannel is put into use everyday at a high school in Philadelphia called Science Leadership Academy (SLA) and at an annual conference called Educon held at the school each January. Chris Lehmann (shown here with Cristina Alvarez), is the principal of SLA and originator of Educon. Alvarez, principal of Hunter School in Philadelphia, is studying SLA as part of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania.

Students at SLA have their electronic media on in school during classes because Lehmann and his teachers have shown that this backchannel is where real learning takes place. Educators come from across the country, and also participate online from around the world, to see how the backchannel works at SLA and at EDUCON where several hundred participants use the backchannel throughout the 3 days of panels, presentations, and conversations.

In his book, The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever (right), communications consultant Cliff Atkinson shows that if these new kinds of audience participation are embraced and the conversations properly handled, the outcome can be a new, more effective form of communicating. Whether you’re a host, presenter, or an audience member, Atkinson shows how this convergence of social forces is upending the presentation norm and how you can effectively manage the change.

Click on the heading above to go to the website supporting the book "Backchannel."

Dozen Distinctive Destinations from the National Trust

When you think of travel destinations the first that come to mind probably don't include Huntsville, AL; Marquette, MI; Sitka, AK or Bastrop, TX (right). Those are some of the destinations included in the National Trust's annual designation of the Dozen Distinctive Destinations. Their criteria start with distinctive historic preservation sites.

For ten years the National Trust has used the Dozen Distinctive Destinations program to highlight how historic preservation helps communities create a sustainable future and a strong economy through heritage tourism. This year’s list of distinctive destinations range from a culturally diverse New England seaport steeped in the arts and a bustling city known as the “Gateway to the West” to an Appalachian music-heritage trail, an Alaskan gem rich in Native American and Russian history and a charming Southern city that blends antebellum architecture with space age history.

And this year for the first time, the public will determine which of the 12 destinations will be the 2010 Fan Favorite. Starting today you can vote for your favorite city or town on this year’s list. And when you vote, you can enter to win a complimentary two-night stay at any Historic Hotel of America (no purchase necessary).

You can vote as often as you’d like at www.preservationnation.org/ddd through February 28 (open to legal residents of the U.S., 18 years of age or older).

The Dozen Distinctive Destinations for 2010 are:
Provincetown, MA; Bastrop, TX; Fort Collins, CO; Huntsville, AL; The Crooked Road, VA; Marquette, MI; St. Louis, MO (left); Cedar Falls, IA; Rockland, ME; Simsbury, CT; Chestnut Hill, PA; and Sitka, AK.

Click on the heading above to learn more about the Dozen Distinctive Destinations and see a short video of them all.

Third Places Popping Up Across the Country

Third Places are an alternative to your home (first place) and your work site (second place) where you can meet with people, get some work done or just hang out.

Ray Oldenburg wrote a book about the idea called "The Great Good Place" (right) in which he identifies third places, or "great good places," as the public places on neutral ground where people can gather and interact. In contrast to first places (home) and second places (work), third places allow people to put aside their concerns and simply enjoy the company and conversation around them.

Third places “host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Oldenburg suggests that beer gardens, main streets, pubs, cafés, coffeehouses, post offices, and other third places are the heart of a community's social vitality and the foundation of a functioning democracy. They promote social equality by leveling the status of guests, provide a setting for grassroots politics, create habits of public association, and offer psychological support to individuals and communities.

Most third places just sort of happen but now people are consciously designing third places for social meetings like Catalyst Ranch (left) and places you can go to get some work done like WorkSpring (right) in Chicago.

Click on the heading above to see some of the interesting spaces created for Catalyst Ranch or go to http://www.workspring.com/ to see the same concept but a little less distracting for a shared work environment.

Henry Ford Academy Dedicated to Design-Based Learning

The Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies (HFA) is a sixth-to-twelfth-grade public charter school in Detroit. In a corner of the 760,000-square-foot building that it shares with Detroit’s College for Creative Studies (CCS), HFA was designed to foster innovation and creativity in its student body with its physical layout, which is more like a design practice than a secondary school. The Henry Ford Academy is a school dedicated to design-based learning that lives in the building where GM’s legendary Harley Earl became the father of the modern car.

The 120,000-square-foot space occupies portions of four levels in an eleven-story building. Administrative offices and a large gym are on the first floor, and the upper levels hold classrooms. Creating a high level of student engagement was a goal of CCS’s president, Richard Rogers, when he undertook the restoration of this historic building in Detroit’s New Center district.

Originally called the Argonaut, the Art Deco structure was designed by Albert Kahn in 1928 for General Motors, and it housed the first design department in the history of the auto industry. The building takes up an entire city block, and when GM relocated its headquarters more than a decade ago to the Renaissance Center on the waterfront, the building became one of the growing number of vacant sites in downtown Detroit.

Rechristened the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education, the building, which was donated to the school by GM, now serves as a second campus for the college, just a few miles from its first. It is home to CCS’s five undergraduate design departments and its new M.F.A. degree programs in design and transportation design. The restored building contains classrooms and faculty offices for the college as well as loft-style residence halls for up to 300 students. It will have retail and offices, both aimed at reinvigorating the street. Eighty thousand square feet have been set aside for future development, including incubator space for start-up design companies.

HFA is a public school to introduce the city’s predominantly African-American community to career paths in art and design. So CCS partnered with the nonprofit Henry Ford Learning Institute and the Thompson Education Foundation to bring HFA into the Taubman Center. The academy’s curriculum—developed with CCS, the institute, and partners like IDEO and Stanford’s d.school—uses problem-based design challenges to invigorate the classroom experience and prepare students to be critical thinkers and creative professionals.

This model, which is also being replicated in schools in Chicago and San Antonio, is aimed at reversing dropout rates and turning urban public schools into centers of innovation.

The idea of putting a public school in a public space began in 1997, when an experimental school called the Henry Ford Academy opened in Dearborn, Michigan. The Ford Motor Company and the Henry Ford Museum teamed up with nonprofits and businesses to develop a school at the museum to prepare students for college and professional life.

Click on the heading above to learn more about the Henry Ford Academy.

Visual Literacy is the Challenge for 21st Century Schools

Schools should focus more on the visual than the art in their visual art classes. "Art" education in schools should be about visual literacy not just about visual art. Visual Literacy includes art but it also includes visual culture, design and visual communication.

Visual literacy includes visual science as well as visual culture. The two main domains of knowledge were identified by C.P. Snow in 1959 as the "two cultures" of Science and the Humanities. Art has always been identified with the Humanities but today we recognize that visual literacy is part of the sciences as well as the arts.

What do we mean by visual science? Take a look at the photo of the eclipse of the sun by the moon that took place on July 22, 2009. It was the longest total solar eclipse that Earth will witness in the 21st century. This composite of 31 images from the eclipse shows the solar corona, the wispy "atmosphere" of the sun peeking out from behind the moon as well as the cratered, rayed surface of the moon itself.

While the image is very beautiful it is visual science not art. Science students need visual skills as much as art students do. They should not be denied access to visual learning just because the only visual classes offered in schools are for visual artists. Schools need to provide cross-disciplinary classes in visual literacy that include visual communication, design, and visual culture as well as art.

Creating and analyzing images like this is essential to 21st century learning. Visual literacy in the form of visual communication and design should be part of every students' education every year along with visual art and visual culture.

Click on the heading above to hear an interview with Felice Frankel, a visual scientist who uses photography to visually communicate complex concepts.

Educon 2.2 Promotes Social Networking in Schools

Most educators seem to want to limit the use of electronic devices in their classrooms - no cell phones, no laptops, no iPods. The folks at Educon 2.2 think social networking in schools enhances motivation and learning. They have their students texting each other during their classes while the teacher is talking.

They model this behavior at the Educon conference by using Twitter to talk to each other during presentations (left). In a keynote or panel presentation everyone has their laptops open and are making running comments in real time. The audience comments, both at the conference and on-line around the world, are part of the presentation. Presenters shape their presentations based on instant questions and responses flowing on their screens.

The hall was so full that some people used their computers to watch live streaming video of the presentations at the front of the room with earplugs to better hear the presenters (near left). Others, like Will Richardson, (right) turned their computers around to point the camera at the presenter to capture video of the presentation as a way of notetaking.

The "con" in Educon stands for conference but also for conversation because the three-day event is designed to be a conversation among educators. The idea is that real learning takes place when students and teachers are actively engaged in dialogue via electronic devices. Texting, instant messaging, Internet searching, moodling, and twittering are all encouraged in these classrooms.

Educon is an annual conference held at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA), a high school in Philadelphia, run by the principal Chris Lehmann with lots of help from teachers, students, and parents. Chris says that they don't tell students to shut off their cell phones, computers and pagers when they enter the school because they will need them to learn from each other and from other students around the world.

Click on the heading above to go to the Educon 2.2 website.

Scott Stowell Designs With Quirky Humor

Scott Stowell (right) spoke to a packed house at the AIGA-NYC chapter meeting at the Tishman Auditorium in lower Manhattan in January.

Stowell runs an independent, New York–based design studio called Open that works across a range of media, including identity systems; print design, such as advertising, packaging, or publications; motion graphics; and Web design. Many of Open’s projects integrate design solutions that encompass more than one of these categories. People found an issue of Good magazine that Stowell designed with a picture of an AK47 on the cover (left) mistakenly file with gun and hunter magazines in bookstores.

Open’s clients include the PBS documentary series Art:21, Bravo, Good magazine, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the New York Times, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Planet Green, and WNYC Radio. Stowell has served as Vice President of the New York Chapter of AIGA and teaches graphic design at Yale University and the School of Visual Arts.

You get an idea of his quirky humor when you see that the URL for Open is www.notclosed.com. Click on the heading above to check it out.

Costume Design at the Academy Awards

The nominations are out for the Academy Awards and there are five nominees for Achievement in Costume. Costume design is a tricky category because we sometimes forget that, in movies, everyone on the screen is in costume even if they look like the man next door. It takes careful consideration to make someone look "normal" in a film. Just think how much time and effort we put into creating the "costumes" that we wear when we step out of the house.

We are often drawn to the more extravagant costume dramas when we think about the category because we are more conscious of the fact that the characters are in costume. Colleen Atwood designed the costumes for the movie "Nine" (left). She has been nominated for an Oscar 8 times and has won twice before. Rob Marshall and Tim Burton like to use her on their movies.

Sandy Powell did the costumes for "The Young Victoria" (right). She also has won twice before with 8 nominations. Martin Scorcese and Todd Haynes like to use her talents in their movies.

The other nominees are Janet Patterson for "Bright Star"; Catherine Leterrier for "Coco before Chanel"; and Monique Prudhomme" for "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus".

The "D" in TED is "Design"

The TED conference, taking place February 9-13, 2010, is arguably the most famous, important, and amazing conference in the world.

All of the attendees at the TED conference are famous enough that they would be keynoters at any other conference. While listening to any given presentation the person in the seat next to you might be Bill Gates, comedian Sara Silverman, or author J.K. Rowling. The attendees as well as the presenters are some of the brightest, most powerful, and most productive people in the world. Many are billionaires and arrive at the conference in their own private jets. Some fly the jets themselves. Some designed the jets.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Designers presenting at this years TED conference include game designer, Jane McGonigal; interface designer, John Underkoffler; designer/illustrator, Marian Bantjes; architect, David Rockwell; web artist, Ze Frank, and others.

For those not famous enough to make the guest list or who can't afford the $6000 registration fee, the sessions are available for free online in high quality video. Click on the heading above to go to the TED conference online.

Academy Awards Include Many Designers

Most of the attention at the Academy Awards is lavished on the actors but several of the Oscars are given out to designers. Film is a visual medium that relies on the visual skills of directors, cinematographers, art directors, editors, animators, costume designers, makeup artists, documentary filmmakers, and many others. Some designers, like storyboard artists, lighting designers, and model makers, don't get individual awards but help the art directors on the entire production. If you stay to watch the credits of most movies today, most of the names and roles identified are designers.

Categories of Academy Awards that require strong visual skills include:

Best animated feature film of the year
"Coraline" (Focus Features) Henry Selick
"Fantastic Mr. Fox" (20th Century Fox) Wes Anderson
"The Princess and the Frog" (Walt Disney) John Musker and Ron Clements
"The Secret of Kells" (GKIDS) Tomm Moore
"Up" (Walt Disney) Pete Docter

Achievement in art direction
"Avatar" (20th Century Fox) Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg
Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair
"The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" (Sony Pictures Classics) Art Direction: Dave Warren and Anastasia Masaro
Set Decoration: Caroline Smith
"Nine" (The Weinstein Company) Art Direction: John Myhre
Set Decoration: Gordon Sim
"Sherlock Holmes" (Warner Bros.) Art Direction: Sarah Greenwood
Set Decoration: Katie Spencer
"The Young Victoria" (Apparition) Art Direction: Patrice Vermette
Set Decoration: Maggie Gray

Achievement in cinematography
"Avatar" (20th Century Fox) Mauro Fiore
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (Warner Bros.) Bruno Delbonnel
"The Hurt Locker" (Summit Entertainment) Barry Ackroyd
"Inglourious Basterds" (The Weinstein Company) Robert Richardson
"The White Ribbon" (Sony Pictures Classics) Christian Berger

Achievement in costume design
"Bright Star" (Apparition) Janet Patterson
"Coco before Chanel" (Sony Pictures Classics) Catherine Leterrier
"The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" (Sony Pictures Classics) Monique Prudhomme
"Nine" (The Weinstein Company) Colleen Atwood
"The Young Victoria" (Apparition) Sandy Powell

Achievement in directing
"Avatar" (20th Century Fox) James Cameron
"The Hurt Locker" (Summit Entertainment) Kathryn Bigelow
"Inglourious Basterds" (The Weinstein Company) Quentin Tarantino
"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" (Lionsgate) Lee Daniels
"Up in the Air" (Paramount in association with Cold Spring Pictures and DW Studios) Jason Reitman

Best documentary feature
"Burma VJ" (Oscilloscope Laboratories)
A Magic Hour Films Production Anders Østergaard and Lise Lense-Møller
"The Cove" (Roadside Attractions)
An Oceanic Preservation Society Production Nominees to be determined
"Food, Inc." (Magnolia Pictures)
A Robert Kenner Films Production Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
"The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers"
A Kovno Communications Production Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith
"Which Way Home"
A Mr. Mudd Production Rebecca Cammisa

Best documentary short subject
"China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province"
A Downtown Community Television Center Production Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill
"The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner"
A Just Media Production Daniel Junge and Henry Ansbacher
"The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant"
A Community Media Production Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert
"Music by Prudence"
An iThemba Production Roger Ross Williams and Elinor Burkett
"Rabbit à la Berlin" (Deckert Distribution)
An MS Films Production Bartek Konopka and Anna Wydra

Achievement in film editing
"Avatar" (20th Century Fox) Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua and James Cameron
"District 9" (Sony Pictures Releasing) Julian Clarke
"The Hurt Locker" (Summit Entertainment) Bob Murawski and Chris Innis
"Inglourious Basterds" (The Weinstein Company) Sally Menke
"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" (Lionsgate) Joe Klotz

Achievement in makeup
"Il Divo" (MPI Media Group through Music Box) Aldo Signoretti and Vittorio Sodano
"Star Trek" (Paramount and Spyglass Entertainment) Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow
"The Young Victoria" (Apparition) Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore

Best motion picture of the year
"Avatar" (20th Century Fox)
A Lightstorm Entertainment Production James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
"The Blind Side" (Warner Bros.)
An Alcon Entertainment Production Nominees to be determined
"District 9" (Sony Pictures Releasing)
A Block/Hanson Production Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham, Producers
"An Education" (Sony Pictures Classics)
A Finola Dwyer/Wildgaze Films Production Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey, Producers
"The Hurt Locker" (Summit Entertainment)
A Voltage Pictures Production Nominees to be determined
"Inglourious Basterds" (The Weinstein Company)
A Weinstein Company/Universal Pictures/A Band Apart/Zehnte Babelsberg Production Lawrence Bender, Producer
"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" (Lionsgate)
A Lee Daniels Entertainment/Smokewood Entertainment Production Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness, Producers
"A Serious Man" (Focus Features)
A Working Title Films Production Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Producers
"Up" (Walt Disney)
A Pixar Production Jonas Rivera, Producer
"Up in the Air" (Paramount in association with Cold Spring Pictures and DW Studios)
A Montecito Picture Company Production Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman, Producers

Best animated short film
"French Roast"
A Pumpkin Factory/Bibo Films Production Fabrice O. Joubert
"Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty" (Brown Bag Films)
A Brown Bag Films Production Nicky Phelan and Darragh O'Connell
"The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte)"
A Kandor Graphics and Green Moon Production Javier Recio Gracia
"Logorama" (Autour de Minuit)
An Autour de Minuit Production Nicolas Schmerkin
"A Matter of Loaf and Death" (Aardman Animations)
An Aardman Animations Production Nick Park

Best live action short film
"The Door" (Network Ireland Television)
An Octagon Films Production Juanita Wilson and James Flynn
"Instead of Abracadabra" (The Swedish Film Institute)
A Directörn & Fabrikörn Production Patrik Eklund and Mathias Fjellström
"Kavi"
A Gregg Helvey Production Gregg Helvey
"Miracle Fish" (Premium Films)
A Druid Films Production Luke Doolan and Drew Bailey
"The New Tenants"
A Park Pictures and M & M Production Joachim Back and Tivi Magnusson

Achievement in visual effects
"Avatar" (20th Century Fox) Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones
"District 9" (Sony Pictures Releasing) Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros and Matt Aitken
"Star Trek" (Paramount and Spyglass Entertainment) Roger Guyett, Russell Earl, Paul Kavanagh and Burt Dalton

Rick Carter Was Production Designer for "Avatar"

The nominations for Academy Awards have been announced and, in the category of Art Direction, Rick Carter's work on "Avatar" will be hard to beat. Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg designed the film with Set Decoration by Kim Sinclair.

Rick Carter is one of Hollywood's most celebrated production designers, whose credits include "Forrest Gump," "Jurassic Park," "War of the Worlds," "The Polar Express," and now James Cameron's "Avatar." In the photo on the right Carter (on left) is shown working with director, James Cameron (right).

Carter (born 1952) is an American production designer and art director. Other films he worked on include Amistad, Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Cast Away, What Lies Beneath, and Back to the Future Part II and Part III. Many of the films that he has worked on are directed by Steven Spielberg or Robert Zemeckis.

Click on the heading above to see the trailer for Avatar showing the incredible production design by Rick Carter.

Research is Key in Period-Piece Design

Sarah Greenwood (right) has been nominated for an Academy Award for her production design of the movie "Sherlock Holmes" (left). The Oscar she has been nominated for is Best Achievement in Art Direction for the richly designed period-piece film which she shares with set decorator Katie Spencer.

Greenwood has been nominated before. In 2008 she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Achievement in Art Direction
for Atonement (2007) also shared with Katie Spencer. In 2006 Greenwood was nominated Best Achievement in Art Direction for Pride & Prejudice (2005) (also with Katie Spencer).

Greenwood is called upon to design films that are referred to as period pieces which try to capture the look and feel of specific places and periods of time in history. In Sherlock Holmes, for example, Greenwood's researchers found actual photos of the construction of London's Tower Bridge which she used to design the pivotal final scene for the movie.

Click on the heading above to see the trailer for Sherlock Holmes which shows Greenwood's rich design for the film.

Developing Better Learning Spaces

Technology provides opportunities for creating and "living" in virtual spaces but the physical spaces in which students learn have a tremendous impact on what and how they learn. Too many classrooms still look pretty much like they did 100 years ago, just with more metal.

David Jakes (right) gave a presentation called "On the Development of Learning Spaces" at Educon 2.2 to help participants understand how space impacts learning. He says the design of learning spaces informs the learner about the intent of the lesson. When learners see rows of desks lined up facing the front of the room (left) they already know that the teacher considers him or herself the source of knowledge and the person in charge of learning. They see that they are to work individually and not collaborate with other students and they see that the information is going to be presented in a lecture format with no expectation of discussion, collaboration, or hands-on activities.

Click on the heading above to go to Jakes' site with his presentation about learning spaces at Educon 2.2.

Paper Pop Ups Develop Spatial Design Skills

Christina Jenkins (left), a student at Parsons' The New School for Design and a teacher workshop presenter for the NYC Department of Education, had an interesting take on technology at Educon 2.2, the conference for tech geeks. She taught the participants how to make paper pop ups.

Christina was exploring the question "When does technology integration make sense in the classroom, and when does it not? She proposed using "design thinking" to disrupt instructional routines (like endless PowerPoint presentations) and help us rethink how we teach with technology.

Making pop ups out of paper, sometimes called paper engineering, is an excellent way to develop pathways in the brain that help students think spatially and in 3 dimensions. These are necessary skills for product designers, architects and others who deal with 3 dimensional and spatial thinking.

There are many books on how to create pop ups and many more examples of pop up books on a variety of topics (right). A few lessons in how to create a pop up card or page makes it clear that we need hands on experiences to rewire our brains to be able to think spatially and dimensionally. The degree of creativity in what at first seems like a basic "follow the instructions" exercise is startling. Paper engineering designs not only pop up but they also rotate, slide, pivot and move in a variety of surprising ways.

Pop up books are sometimes expensive to buy (one popular pop up book sells for $299) but inexpensive to make. A pair of scissors and some plain white paper are all that you need to get started.

Click on the heading above to see a video of a pop up book of the alphabet.

Sketchbooks Identify Designers

Cartoonists, animators, and designers in general almost always have a sketchbook or two close at hand. If they are separated from their beloved sketchbooks they will grab a nearby napkin. Designers think and talk with pictures.

Those who design the world in which we live have different habits that those who simply live in the world they design. One of those habits is to carry a sketchbook to capture ideas and inspiration when and where they occur before they vanish in the ongoing press of information and ideas swarming in the minds of creative people.

Marc Dennis has a blog called "Creative Footprint" that explores and examines the ways in which we and other creatures leave marks on culture and community. He extols the virtues of sketchbooks and, in particular, a well-known version called "Moleskine". (right)

Marc Dennis says everyone loves to look at sketches and designers love to create them. Sketches are windows into the ways in which creative people think. Sketches are a way of planning for creative people - sometimes serving as previews of greater things to come. Sketches are ways for creative people to sort out their thoughts and ideas - like a peek inside their heads.

Moleskine is a brand of journals and sketchbooks that are ubiquitous among artists, architects, designers, art students, gallerists, poets and writers. They've been used by artists and writers who defined 20th century culture, including Hemingway, Van Gogh, Matisse and the leader of the surrealist movement André Breton. They are the quintessential sketchbook for the new millennium. To the initiated, there is simply no substitute.

Marc points out that the proper pronunciation is "mol-a-skeen'-a", a conglomeration of English, French and Italian influences. In case you're wondering, they're not made from the skin of a mole but the covers resemble it in texture and feel.

Click on the heading above to go to Dennis' blog "Creative Footprint" to see other wonderful sketches.

Nine Planning Principles for the 21st Century

City Building: Nine Planning Principles for the Twenty-First Century is a new book coming out in February, 2010. John Lund Kriken (left) and Philip Enquist, both longtime partners in the award-winning planning firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) have collaborated with writer Richard Rapaport to create City Building.

The book presents the idea that good city building is not created by complex statistics, functional problem solving, or any particular decision-making process. Successful cities instead come from people advocating easily understood human values and principles that take into account the sensory, tactile, and sustainable qualities of environment and design in relation to what is the best of human endeavor.

Without good planning cities can be places of pollution, overcrowdedness, and waste. A well-planned city can be a model of sustainable living. Good city building counters the sprawl of suburbia with concentrated land use, replaces globalized design with regionally appropriate building types, and allows for livable, desirable neighborhoods.

This guide to city building is proactive, green-focused, and user-friendly. It is organized into three parts:
Part one examines the past and defines the current practice of city building, addressing its shortcomings and proposing a comprehensive framework for rethinking the approach to cities in the future.
Part two translates this framework into nine best-practice principles that are common to successful, livable, urban environments: sustainability, accessibility, diversity, open space, compatibility, incentives, adaptability, density, and identity. These principles are illustrated in a global portfolio of city building projects, designed by SOM, that show how best practices have been applied successfully.
Part three makes the case that, far from being the problem, cities, properly organized, can be a mechanism for sensible, sustainable uses of increasingly scarce resources. The book concludes with a call for a national planning process and a comprehensive framework for settlement.

So here is something to think about. What if the 9 planning principles that work for something as complex as cities also worked for planning education? How do principles like sustainability, accessibility, diversity, open space, compatibility, incentives, adaptability, density, and identity translate into education? Do principles like "adaptability" or "accessibility" in city planning have counterparts in educational planning to create better curriculum and instruction? Check out City Building and see what you think.

Herman Miller Designs at The Henry Ford Museum

The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan has an exhibit called Good Design: Stories from Herman Miller from February 6-April 25, 2010. Herman Miller, Inc. is a world famous design distributor that revolutionized the way we work because they focused on designs for the workplace.

Based in tiny Zeeland, Michigan, the company gave the world some of the most iconic objects of the century including Charles and Ray Eames’s molded plywood Lounge Chair, George Nelson’s Marshmallow Sofa and Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick’s Aeron Chair (left). Those works – and dozens of others – are at the heart of the exhibit at The Henry Ford. For these legendary designers, it wasn’t enough for furniture to be beautiful. It had to be practical. It had to make the workplace a better place.

Work by Herman Miller designers such as Gilbert Rohde, George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames have long been integrated into the furniture exhibit at The Henry Ford. This exhibition focuses on a number of perspectives on the Herman Miller achievement — an achievement rooted in a combination of extraordinary vision and practical realization. The company’s commitment to addressing real design problems — always with an insistence on achievable, affordable and durable solutions — continues to this day.

The Henry Ford is the lead institution in The Herman Miller Consortium, a group of 13 art and historical institutions that share approximately 800 artifacts collected by Herman Miller Inc.

Click on the heading above to learn more about The Herman Miller Consortium.

Use Tree Houses to Help Students Get into Architecture

I don't know what it is about tree houses that captures the imagination but they seem to bring out the creativity in designers. Students might be inspired to be a bit freer with their designs if a project in architecture was to design and build a model of a tree house. The popularity of the movie Avatar is also a good motivation for thinking of designing in trees.

Getting some branches to stand in for trees provides a structure for the students to design around. Cut 10-12 inch sections of branches that look like small trees and attach them to a platform. Have the students design models out of wood and other materials appropriate for a tree house (probably no brick or steel designs although who knows).

As in any design project, the designs should obey laws of gravity, tensile strength, compression, etc. or else they remain in the realm of fantasy illustration. Good design is imagination tempered by an understanding of physics. The Floating Mountains of Pandora in Avatar are a good design project for movie designing and sci-fi illustration but a bit far-fetched for an architecture project.

A quick search online will turn up hundreds of inspirational designs under the key word "tree house."

Will Individual Flying Machines Ever Be Practical?

Are you one of those who feel the promises of technology have failed you because there is not yet a flying car like the Jetsons promised. Well, it is possible that private flying machines may become reality soon.

A proven producer of space-age technology, NASA, is developing a personal flying machine called Puffin that is just large enough for one person. The "plane" takes off vertically, powered by a pair of electric motors and then levels out to fly up to 300 miles per hour. You'll fly horizontally like Superman. The electric motors make the machine almost silent unlike the roaring engines we have seen in "jet-pack" versions of personal flight.

So, imagine they really produce such a device and call our bluff. Are we brave enough to actually fly around by ourselves? Most people are afraid to ride a motorcycle. This would be like a flying motorcycle that can go three times faster. A flock of birds might be hazardous to our health. Still, motorcycle riders tend to avoid hitting deer or other things that wander onto the road, enough to not discourage them from enjoying the wind in their hair. I guess flying machines are going to appeal to people who like hang-gliding, skateboarding, snowboarding and other common activities that require dexterity and skill.

This is clearly, like the automobile, a technology that will require the design of an entire system of protocols, rules, regulations and licensing. It would make commuting much more interesting. The real design challenge may be in designing the infrastructure rather than designing the machine itself.

Can your students draw an "interstate highway system" for individual flying machines? Will it look something like the chaos of flying cars and taxis in "The Fifth Element"? Click on the heading above to see what I mean. Still want to fly?

Everyone Has a Point of View

The latest issue of The Journal of Media Literacy (left) is out and the cover features documentary film maker Ken Burns. An article inside contrasts the PBS television documentary style of Ken Burns with the movie theater documentary style of Michael Moore (right).

Education walks a tight line between being safe and non-controversial and being interesting enough to actually get students to pay attention. We like the polite, quiet style of people like Ken Burns and fear the independent, aggressive style of people like Michael Moore. Educators like the non-profit world of Public Television and disdain the commercial world of network television and the movie industry. We like to focus on "serious" content and complain about the commercial ads (or other sources of revenue) required to bring the content to us. We favor small, niche points of view and denigrate anything that is valued by mass culture and popular media. Can we really teach media literacy if we don't like mass media? Can we offer anything to students if we don't like the media they consume or produce?

The people who edit and write The Journal of Media Literacy, a publication of The National Telemedia Council, for example, are volunteers who don't get reimbursed for their work. There is some sort of pride in the fact that there are no ads or endorsements by businesses or other commercial interests in the publication. They feel "pure". As a result, the journal has a limited audience and doesn't have the same public exposure as the typical news stand publications full of ads.

How can education, schools, and scholarly endeavors survive in a culture of commerce? Will it always be the case that education has to stand with empty hands held out for some kindly contribution from taxpayers or foundations, while the commercial enterprises, who work no harder, longer, or smarter, enjoy year-end bonuses many times larger than a teacher's entire salary?

Click on the heading above to connect to The Journal of Media Literacy at the National Telemedia Council website. They will accept contributions and subscribers (if they aren't tainted by commercialism).

Why Don't We Ride Our Bicycles More Often?

For most trips I take during the day that are too far to walk and too close to drive, a bicycle would be a good solution. I seem to always come up with an excuse for not using a bicycle however - the weather is too bad, my hair will get messed up, I'm worried about safety, I feel exposed, etc., etc.

Michael Scholey tried to take all of these excuses, and more, into account and designed a bicycle that just might get slackers like me to forego the car a bit more often. It has two front wheels that tilt to allow banking in corners but have self righting springs to allow feet-up stops. The two front wheels provide increased cornering and braking stability and allow a 6 ½ ft turning radius.

Scholey calls his creation the Emcycle and has tried to overcome the limitations of weather by including a roof and Velcro-detachable side panels. Basically you feel safer in this cocoon and can pedal or take electrical assiatnce to get you to your destination.

It is classified in Europe as a bicycle with electric front wheel drive, variable assist up to 1000 watts, up to 40mph and 40 mile assisted range, overnight plug in home recharge and regenerative braking. There are separate batteries for drive functions and additional equipment.

Features include:
A single person commuter vehicle for a driver and up to 75 lbs of luggage.
Fully enclosed body.
Two lockable doors. Front and lockable rear luggage compartments.
30mph crash tested; Roll over protection, Airbag, 3 point seat belt.
Head and brake lights, seat belt, airbag, radio / MP3 player plug in, storage space (approx 6 shopping bags in total using front and rear) comfortable seating.
Adjustable full seat.
Adjustable handlebar/instrument pod.
Ignition key to lock steering column and parking brake.
Lockable glove box.
Windscreen wiper and washer.
Front and rear LED lights. Separate LED headlight. Headlight flasher. LED direction indicators with self canceling. LED brake lights.
Horn/bell.
Full instrumentation – Speed, miles/kilometers, trip miles/kilometers.
Battery charge gauge, electricity usage gauge, warning lights for all functions, 4 way emergency flasher.
Flow through filtered ventilation and heater.
Suspension; Disc brakes; Reverse gear.
Two side rear view mirrors.
Size:
24” wide X 73” tall X 80” long. Pedals power the rear wheel through a driver operated infinitely variable constant velocity transmission. Height and bright colors make it conspicuous to other road users. 80lbs. ‘No air – no puncture’ foam filled tires.

It will be available at around $2500 – $4500 and the plan is to get the vehicle into production in England by 2011 in time for the London Olympics.

The Language of School Design: Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools

K-12 design educators might be interested in the completely revised 2nd Edition of The Language of School Design: Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools (left), by Prakash Nair (right), Randall Fielding and Dr. Jeffery Lackney. There are 100 more pages and dozens of new illustrations of innovative schools added to the 1st edition. With dozens of favorable reviews and thousands of copies sold, The Language of School Design is a useful resource for School Planners, Architects, Educators and Administrators.

The Language of School Design is a seminal work because it defines a new graphic vocabulary that synthesizes learning research with best practice in school planning and design. But it is more than a book about ideas. It is also a practical tool and resource for all school stakeholders involved in planning, designing and constructing new and renovated schools and evaluating the educational adequacy of existing school facilities.

K-12 design educators can use the book as a resource to help students do a school design project of their own. Who better than students to provide innovative ideas for what schools should be like in the 21st century?

Click on the heading above to go to the Fielding/Nair website.

Comic Books Require Extreme Drawing Skills

Comic book artists and animators are among the most skillful at figure drawing (foreshortening) and backgrounds (3 point perspective). These are skills little required in many areas of fine art today that favor abstraction but are essential to make it into drawing comics or animation. The type of figure drawing expected is basically Florentine Renaissance style drawing that is little taught today.

Students interested in working in comics or animation should be provided useful instruction in drawing solidly constructed people, objects and buildings in consistent proportion. I once heard a student proudly tell Jim Lee, the famous comic artist, that he draws for 2 hours every night. Lee told the student that wasn't enough. He said you couldn't break into the comics world unless you draw for as many as 6 hours a day.

The drawing instruction has to be of the right type. It needs to help students accurately and interestingly represent people in action, objects like cars and furniture, and environments like buildings and rooms in 3 point perspective. Dave Master, formerly with Warner Brothers, said it used to make him cry to see a talented student who wanted desperately to work in the animation field and had taken art classes for years but came to him with an art portfolio that didn't demonstrate the level of drawing skills needed to even get an entry level job in the animation world.

Students should see the quality of work done by serious comic artists by going to comic book conventions like Wizard World and Comic-Con held every year in cities like Chicago, New York, San Diego, Austin, Toronto, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and others where hundreds of hopeful comic artists display and demonstrate their skills at "Artist's Alley".

Animators and comic book artists take drawing seriously. Click on the image at left to see a larger version to examine the understanding of anatomy and the buildings in the background drawn in 3 pt. perspective.

100 Best Type Faces of All Time

Now here's a daunting proposal - of the thousands of typefaces that have been created - decide which are the best 100 type faces of all time? That's just what one web site claims to do.

Click on the heading above to see the complete list.

The text isn't in English but each typeface, its creator and the date are provided along with images and information for every one of the 100 typefaces. Just click on each face to follow up on any that interest you.

You can agree or disagree with reasons for liking a particular typeface (right) but it's just fun to learn a bit about things we see around us every day and probably don't even notice. And, if your the type who even has a favorite typeface you will probably want to get a T-shirt (left) featuring some of the sans serif typefaces.

I find that I use a couple of typefaces until I'm sick of them (or the times change) and then move on to some new favorites.

Science Illustration is Part of Visual Literacy

The flip side of Art and Visual Culture is Visual Science and Communication. Scientific illustrators visually represent aspects of science, particularly observations of the natural world. The emphasis in scientific illustration is on accuracy and utility, rather than on aesthetics, although scientific illustrators are skilled artists and often known for aesthetic values as well as their interest in, and knowledge of, science.

Scientific illustration was an important part of scientific communication prior to photography. Since the development of photography, scientific illustration is particularly useful for selective renderings rather than lifelike accuracy. For instance, illustrations of stellar phenomena that are not visible to the human eye; or medical illustrations, which highlight particular parts of a system.

One of the most prestigious programs in scientific illustration in the nation, the Science Illustration Certificate at California State University, Monterey Bay, prepares students who are sought after by renowned institutions and publications around the world.

Graduates’ work can be found at museums and science centers such as the Smithsonian Institution, New York’s American Museum of Natural History, California Science Center and the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History; in top science magazines such as National Geographic, Scientific American, American Scientist, Nature, Natural History and Audubon; at zoos, aquaria, and botanical gardens such as the National Zoo, Washington, D.C., the Monterey Bay Aquarium; Kew Botanical Gardens, U.K.; as well as U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and hundreds of equally respected organizations.

Click on the heading above to check out Scientific Illustration at California State University - Monterey Bay.

New York to Replace Construction Scaffolding with New Design

The "temporary" scaffolding put up over sidewalks during construction projects are call "sidewalk sheds". Sidewalk sheds are installed to protect pedestrians from construction or building maintenance work. They are usually ugly (left) and not so temporary. There are approximately 6,000 sidewalk sheds in New York City, representing more than 1 million linear feet.

New York City had a design contest to see if something could be done about the aesthetic and functional aspects of these sheds that seem to be everywhere and often stay up for a year or more. An international competition – the “urbanSHED International Design Competition” – was held to challenge the design community to create a new standard of sidewalk shed.

Mayor Bloomberg just announced the winning selection. The competition winner, “Urban Umbrella,” (right) was developed by Young-Hwan Choi, a 28-year-old student from the University of Pennsylvania. The winning design was selected from 164 designs submitted by architects, engineers, designers and students from 28 countries around the world.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Department of Buildings Commissioner Robert D. LiMandri and President of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects Anthony Schirripa, AIA, unveiled a new design for sidewalk sheds – the wood and steel structures built to protect pedestrians walking alongside buildings under construction.

The design of the City’s sidewalk sheds has remained primarily unchanged since the 1950s and the new design will improve quality of life, reduce construction impacts on businesses, increase pedestrian safety and increase available space for pedestrians on sidewalks.

The “Urban Umbrella” design will:
�� Improve neighborhood quality of life with improved aesthetics and more air and natural light reaching the sidewalk;
�� Reduce construction impacts on businesses and building owners through a less obstructive design that allow more of the building to be seen;
�� Increase safety through a modern design that eliminates cross-bracing and exposed bolts; and
�� Reduce the amount of obstructions on sidewalks, increasing space on the sidewalk to allow for more pedestrian traffic.

Fashion Week Hits New York in February

Twice a year, designers produce fashion shows in New York to show off their latest collections. The most recent show was in September 2009 for Spring 2010 and the next show is in February. The Fashion Week fall shows are held the preceding winter (February). The spring shows are held the preceding late summer (September).

Currently, the shows are sponsored by Mercedes-Benz so they are referred to as Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. in the past, they've been referred to by other sponsors such as Olympus Fashion Week. The attendees (right) are often as famous as the designers like Ralph Lauren, Donna Karen, Diane von Furstenburg and Oscar de la Renta.

In New York City's Bryant Park (42nd and Sixth), the 8-acre park is converted to a temporary fashion arena with tents. The Fashion Week tents are huge, air-conditioned and contain several venues for the designers to show their collections. The individual venues -- ranging up to almost 12,000 square feet -- come complete with runway, seating for attendees, backstage areas, lighting and sound. Some fashion designers choose to have their collections shown in showrooms or other off-site venues during the week.

Fashion shows are attended by journalists, editors, buyers, celebrities and social types. The Fashion Week shows are invitation-only and each fashion designer is responsible for the guest list. Journalists must seek accreditation prior to the event.

Fashion Week is an opportunity for American (and a few international) designers, ranging from Oscar de la Renta to Zac Posen, to show off their upcoming collections. The fashion shows are often entertaining, accompanied by loud, mood-setting music and changing lighting. The press writes about and photographs the runway collections for newspapers, magazines, internet and television so the general public can see what is going on in fashion.

Entertainment Design Catching on in China as well as Hollywood

Last December (2009), for the first time in Singapore, four master designers from Hollywood showcased their portfolios from major blockbuster films & theme parks at the Entertainment Designers Showcase at the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore. In addition, they did live demonstrations of the various tools and techniques they use.

Click on the heading above and scroll down to a nice video done before the event.

Hollywood, of course, is the World center for entertainment design and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena offers the first degree program in Entertainment Design.

In The Future... is a book that showcases the first student work created in the new Entertainment Design program at the prestigious Art Center College of Design. Entertainment design requires strong industrial design, architectural and illustration skills, as the designers create characters, environments, vehicles and props. Examples of class work from such courses as Originality in Design, Character Design, Architectural Design, Visual Development and Color Theory are presented. This collection of sketches, renderings, and models created by the inaugural class of entertainment design students is a "must-have" for any fan of entertainment design and for those who have enjoyed the first Art Center student book, The Skillful Huntsman.

In another book, the second volume of Concept Design, published by Scott Robertson's Design Studio Press, seventeen guest artists are featured along with the original seven Los Angeles Entertainment Designers from Concept Design 1 to show us worlds, vehicles, monsters and creations beyond the wildest imagination. Concept Design 2 takes us on a journey into the minds of the talented and successful concept design professionals who create for the sake of creation.

In the fall of 2001, seven concept designers began work on Concept Design 1, which became the first book published by Design Studio Press. Since that time, they have continued to explore their personal artwork, which fills this new book.

With credits on feature films such as Star Wars: Episodes I, II and III, War of the Worlds, Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, Spider-Man, X-Men United, Alien vs. Predator, Minority Report, and Terminator 2 & 3, prominent entertainment concept designers created Concept Design 2.

Game Developers Gather in San Francisco

Game Design is beginning to be taught in universities and even some high schools. Game Design is clearly one of the fastest growing fields in design and many students dream of graduating from playing games to creating their own.

The Game Developers Conference® (GDC) is the world’s largest professionals-only game industry event. Presented every spring in San Francisco, it is the essential forum for learning, inspiration, and networking for the creators of computer, console, handheld, mobile, and online games.

The GDC attracts over 17,000 attendees, and is the primary forum where programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals, business decision-makers and others involved in the development of interactive games gather to exchange ideas and shape the future of the industry.

The conference features over 400 lectures, panels, tutorials and round-table discussions on a selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts. In addition, the GDC expo showcases the most relevant game development tools, platforms and services helping to drive the industry forward. The conference also features the twelfth annual Independent Games Festival, where new, unpublished games compete for the attention of the publishing community, and the tenth annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the premier accolades for peer-recognition in the digital games industry.

While most students or teachers won't be able to make it to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, there is much to be learned by checking out their website, seeing who the keynote speakers are, and looking at the topics being discussed. Click on the heading above to go to the GDC website.

Annie Awards Honor Best Animation

The 37th Annual Annie Awards, animation's highest honor, will be awarded in Los Angeles in February. This is an annual opportunity to highlight animation in your design class.

For the past 37 years, The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood has produced The Annie Awards. The Annies have grown from a small gathering of "old timers" at the bar of the Sportsman's Lodge to being animation's highest honor, a high profile event widely seen as a precursor to the Oscar picks. This year's Annie honorees include Tim Burton, Bruce Timm and Jeffrey Katzenberg; and the host for the evening is William Shatner. The ceremony takes place at Royce Hall, UCLA on Saturday February 6th.

Anyone who loves animation is welcome to attend the Annies, and tickets start at just $25. One of the fun things about the ceremony is that the awards are presented by the actors who provide the voices for animated characters. Image hearing people you haven't seen before who sound suspiciously like SpongeBob or Mickey Mouse.

Nominees for the Best Animated Feature are:
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs – Sony Pictures Animation
Coraline – Laika
Fantastic Mr. Fox– 20th Century Fox
The Princess and the Frog (left) – Walt Disney Animation Studios
The Secret of Kells – Cartoon Saloon
Up (right) – Pixar Animation Studios

Other award categories include:
Best Home Entertainment Production, Best Animated Short Subject, Best Animated Television Commercial, Best Animated Television Production, Best Animated Television Production for Children, Animated Effects, Character Animation, and others.

Click on the heading above to go to the Annie Awards website.

Young Architects Create Environment in Courtyard

Since 2000, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center have been running a competition under their Young Architects Program, inviting each year a group of emerging architects to experiment with new shapes and materials, resulting in a summer installation at the P.S.1.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is an exhibition space (rather than a collecting museum) in Long Island City, Queens. In 2000, P.S.1 became an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art to extend the reach of both institutions, and combine P.S.1’s contemporary mission with MoMA’s strength as one of the greatest collecting museums of modern art.

Interesting projects have come out of this competition, such as the Public Farm (PF1) by Work AC in 2008, and Afterparty by MOS last year. The winning proposal for 2010 is: Pole Dance by Brooklyn based SO-IL (Solid Object Idenburg Liu) a practice run by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu.

Conceived as a participatory environment that reframes the conceptual relationship between people and structures, Pole Dance is a system of interconnected poles and bungees whose equilibrium is open to human action and environmental factors. Throughout the courtyard, groups of 25-foot-tall poles on 12 x 12-foot grids connected by bungee cords whose elasticity will cause the poles to gently sway, creating a steady ripple throughout the courtyard space.

Click on the heading above to learn more about the Young Architects Program.

Uniting Designers in Disaster Help Haiti

Uniting Designers in Disaster is an open forum for designers of all disciplines to come together with ideas and initiatives to help address the current crisis in Haiti.

Designers play a big part in such disasters. First, there is some blame to accept because of poorly designed structures. There is much known today about how to build in earthquake zones. Designers will continue to study ways to design in earthquake areas to minimize damage, death and injury in the future.

But, more immediately, many designers are working on designs for temporary housing, methods to supply safe drinking water, medical support, energy resources, and all the other design problems that need to be solved when a disaster occurs.

Fundraising, humanitarian efforts, and other responses are immediately necessary but designers have an obligation to go beyond awareness and sympathy to actually solve some of the problems surrounding such disasters. What kinds of design activities can students engage in to address the disaster in Haiti?

The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) is an international organization for professional industrial design. Founded in 1957, Icsid currently counts over 150 members in more than 50 countries, representing an estimated 150,000 designers worldwide. Icsid members are professional associations, promotional societies, educational institutions, government bodies, corporations and institutions — all of which contribute to the development of the profession of industrial design.

Click on the heading above to go to ICSID's Uniting Designers in Disaster page.

Top Design Books for the Year

Fast Company magazine has compiled a list of what they feel are the top books about architecture and design last year. Designers probably have many of them in their collection already but there might be a few you missed.

Included are "Look Both Ways" (left) by Debbie Millman and "Design Your Life" (right) by Ellen and Julia Lupton.

Other books include "Design Revolution" by Emily Pilloton,
"The Language of Things" by Deyan Sudjic,
and "The Design of Business" by Roger Martin in which he explains why design thinking is the next competitive advantage for businesses.

Readers, of course, are starting to chime in on what is missing from the list. Were there no good books about fashion design last year, for example?

Click on the heading above to go to the Fast Company site and see all the recommended design books.

Electric Vehicle Platform Will Revolutionize Auto Design

A company you never heard of is about to revolutionize the way vehicles are designed. TREXA has revealed a new modular electric vehicle platform upon which third-party developers can design their own vehicles.

You put whatever kind of body you need on the frame - a sedan, sports car, utility vehicle, truck, or whatever you want. The TREXA EV (Electric Vehicle) Platform contains a battery, motor and drivetrain that allows designers to create their own auto body for this fully functional electric vehicle.

Where's the engine? Each wheel has its own electric motor. Where's the steering wheel? Designers can create their own "drive-by-wire" steering mechanism and place it wherever they want because it is electrical like a game controller not mechanical like a standard fixed steering wheel. Where's the hump in the middle for the transmission? The power is electrical (wires) not mechanical (gears) so there is no need for a big transmission hump running the length of the car.

The concept behind TREXA’s EV Platform is not new but TREXA may be the first to bring it to market. GM had planned a functional core “skateboard” chassis for their HyWire hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, where customers could upgrade and swap auto bodies while using the same powerhouse chassis. The big companies like GM are unable or unwilling to make the changes necessary to create the new cars. Small companies like TREXA appear to be the future for auto design.

TREXA EV’s target customers aren’t end users, however, they’re targeting third party vehicle developers who would leave the electric vehicle technical know-how to TREXA, and focus instead on styling, comfort and aerodynamics.

The TREXA EV platform is modular and tweakable, as the various performance statistics of the TREXA can be modified to fit the need of the developer’s vehicle. The standard TREXA electric vehicle will be capable of 0 to 60mph in 8 seconds with a top speed of 100mph. The standard TREXA’s range is 105 miles with a 4-hour recharge time, but each of these details can be tweaked– a larger battery can provide a larger range, while switching to a slower acceleration will conserve battery use as well.

Emily Pilloton Survives Colbert Report

Emily Pilloton has a lot of courage - Stephen Colbert from the Colbert Report can be a little intimidating (left). He was pretty kind to her though because she's pretty charming, and he seemed genuinely fascinated by some Project H initiatives.

Project H Design founder and author of Design Revolution, Emily Pilloton (right) was a guest on the Colbert Report to talk about humanitarian design. Colbert walked across the stage in a pair of Spider Boots, used by land mine detection teams to minimize the transfer of shock waves through one's body from land mines. He also modeled a pair of Adaptive Eyecare glasses for developing countries that can be adjusted to fit any prescription.

Emily rolled out a Hippo Roller designed to transport water in developing countries like South Africa. The roller allows people to transport 22 gallons of water (almost 200 pounds) with an effective weight of only about 40 pounds.

When Colbert suggested she could make a load of money selling products like these to the billions of poor people who "don't have jack", Emily drew applause from the audience by saying "We like to measure the triple bottom line - planet, people, and profit.”

Click on the heading above to see the episode with Emily Pilloton on the Colbert Report.

Emma Watson (from Harry Potter) Designing "Ethical" Clothing

Emma Watson, Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter movies (center on right), has teamed up with People Tree to design a new line of clothes which will be coming out in February. People Tree is among the first big ethical fashion designers, making clothes from organic cotton, using artisanal skills in its production and establishing relationships with Fairtrade groups around the world.

Watson (center on left) is the Creative Advisor for the sporty basics that will be aimed at the casual wear market - striped tee-shirts, tracksuit pants, skirts, shorts and hoodies. She said that she "was excited about the idea of using fashion as a tool to alleviate poverty" and knew it was something she could help make a difference doing.

Between movies she is still attending university and says "I think young people like me are becoming increasingly aware of the humanitarian issues surrounding fast fashion and want to make good choices but there aren't many options out there."

Over 500 of World's Top Corporations Win Good Design Awards

Hundreds of the world's leading corporations and design offices from 40 nations—from Shanghai to Istanbul—vied in Chicago and New York for the world's oldest and most coveted GOOD DESIGN™ Award for 2009. Good Design Awards are conferred annually by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design together with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The latest advances for design and innovation, sustainability, creativity, branding, ecologically responsible design, human factors, materials, technology, graphic arts, packaging, and universal design were submitted in a staggering number this year by the best industrial design and graphic design firms on behalf of the leading FORTUNE 500 companies.

Founded in Chicago in 1950 by architects Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., GOOD DESIGN bestows international recognition upon the world's most prominent designers and manufacturers for advancing new, visionary, and innovative product concepts, invention and originality, and for stretching the envelope beyond what is considered ordinary product and consumer design.

For 2009 and despite the economic slowdown, a record number of submissions were received by The Chicago Athenaeum ranging from a Mars Landing Rover designed for a 2030 NASA Mars Space Mission to a simple water purification system for rural South African villages.

This year, The United States ranked as the leader in the number of awards with 378 awards in all categories and Germany as second with 250. Italy took the number three position with 116 awards followed by Denmark with 46 and Switzerland with 39. Canada won 22 awards. Brazil, Belgium, and Sweden won 19 awards, while Turkey and France received 18 awards. Austria won 16 awards followed by Spain with 15; Finland and The Netherlands 12; and Norway and Japan 9 awards. Mexico won 8 awards. New Zealand received 7, while the Czech Republic and Australia took 5 awards.
Lebanon, Ireland, and Portugal received 4 awards each. The People's Republic of China were recognized with 3 awards. The jury gave two awards to Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, India, South Africa, Israel, and Liechtenstein. Peru and the Isle of Man were bestowed one award each.

Click on the heading above to see the award winners at the Athenaeum website.

Design Bootcamp at Stanford's d.school

b.school is the insiders way of saying "business school" and now, d.school means "design school." Stanford and IDEO created d.school and now a design Bootcamp to develop design innovators. For those who have been curious about what goes on at Design Thinking Bootcamp (left), the folks who put it together have provided a "bootleg" version of some of the teaching in a download called d.school Bootcamp Bootleg (right).

The d.school Bootcamp teaching team has curated a loose collection of the methods, modes and mindsets that Bootcamp students found most useful this quarter. The Bootcamp Bootleg is intended for people who've already had an introduction to design thinking, but who need some refreshers as they head out to tackle real-world challenges. The teaching team curated the collection by leveraging the work of many predecessors, drawing from material developed by d.school teaching teams and folks throughout the design world over the last five years.

The Design Thinking Bootcamp folks say, "The key to the bootleg is to take it out and make it your own. If one method isn't working for you, toss it. If it works, pass it along to another design thinker. If you find a variation that works for you, tweak it and then tell us about it. We’re excited to hear from you."

Click on the heading to get a free download of the d.school Bootcamp Bootleg.

What Type Are You?

Typefaces have different personalities and, if you have any personality, there is a typeface that represents you. That is the premise of a bit of fun by the creative personalities at Pentagram (one of the top graphic design firms in the world).

A faceless psychoanalyst (left) asks you a few key questions and, based on your answers, tells you what typeface you are (right).

Click on the heading above, type in your name and use the password "character" to find out what typeface you are.

This is a great device to use with students to help them understand that choices of typefaces are not arbitrary and tell us as much about a person or company as their choice of clothes, religion or political affiliation.

Pentagram originated in London in 1972, and opened offices in New York 1978, San Francisco in 1986, Austin in 1994, and Berlin in 2002. Check out their website and the people who make up Pentagram.

From Volkswagen to Ferrari?

The new Design Chief at the super-sports car Italian firm Ferrari is coming from designing for Volkswagen.

Ferrari named Flavio Manzoni (right) as the new chief of design even though he last served as the head of creative design of the Volkswagen Group. Mr. Manzoni, 45, will report directly to Ferrari’s chief executive, Amedeo Felisa, “and will be responsible for creating and defining the styling of Ferrari’s new cars.”

Until now, Pininfarina, the illustrious Italian company, had the responsibility of designing Ferraris. In the 1950s, the name Pininfarina on the body of a Ferrari was as important as the Ferrari name. Until now the design houses like Pininfarina were as prestigious as the manufacturers for which they designed. Manzoni ’s appointment raises the possibility that Ferrari may hire other designers or even create designs in-house.

Manzoni was born in Sardinia, Italy, was trained as an architect at the University of Florence and entered the automotive world in 1993 with Fiat. He worked at Lancia and then Seat, Volkswagen’s Spanish subsidiary. Following Walter de’Silva, the VW and Audi designer, Mr. Manzoni moved to Audi in 2006 and then later to VW, where he worked on the new Scirocco, Golf and Up concepts.

An Obsession With Fashion Leads to Fashion Designing

Sarah Jessica Parker (left), who plays fashionista Carrie Bradshaw on the popular TV series Sex and the City has become inextricably associated with high fashion because she looks so good in it. There seems to be some distorted logic that then leads her to be asked to take on the role of a real designer at the famous fashion firm Halston.

Parker is going from wearing fashions by Halston on the Sex and the City set to taking on an active design role, possibly even that of creative director, for Halston Heritage. Halston is the fashion firm that became a household name when worn by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and other jet-setters like Bianca Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor.

Designers hate it when celebrities get to become "designers" for leading brands mainly on the basis of their celebrity. I, on the other hand, shamelessly use any connection to the world of students and popular culture to make a connection to design education.

I sympathize with Neal Baer, the medical doctor who became an Executive Producer on TV shows like ER and CSI when it became clear that these shows are where most people get their information about health and medicine. As an Executive Producer he now gets to make sure that the medical information tossed around by the actors is at least somewhat accurate.

Now that I have your attention, let's talk about design education...

iPhone is Your Guide Through Design Exhibit

For museum visitors, the background information about the Design USA: Contemporary Innovation at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is provided through a specially programmed iPhone. It provides interviews, slide shows and performances of the 78 architects and designers in the exhibition. It would be hard to appreciate the exhibit without the additional information provided by the iPhone. The exhibit, including the iPhone program, was designed by a firm called 2X4.

Using an iPhone to provide the additional information about objects and designers in the exhibit is an indication of the possible future of museum exhibits. The interactivity afforded by our social-networking technology can be used to find and review information anywhere and everywhere about anything and everything.

The designers in the exhibit are all recipients of National Design Awards, which were established by the White House Millennium Council in 2000 and include architecture, product design, fashion, interior design, landscape design, corporate achievement and lifetime achievement.

Click on the heading above to see the Cooper-Hewitt's website for the exhibit.

Designer of 2010 Olympics Dies Before the Event

Designing the visual presentation of each iteration of Olympic events is a challenging task requiring the design team to maintain elements of the Olympic "look" while making each event stand out from all those that preceded it. The designs for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver (left) are getting good reviews. Ironically, the lead designer passed away before ever seeing his work at the actual event.

Leo Obstbaum (right), Design Director of the 2010 Winter Olympics, died of natural causes August 21st 2009 at the age of 40, with the Vancouver Olympics as his last project.

Olympic and Paralympic Games design has a long tradition of creativity and excellence. Each Organizing Committee tries to visually capture the Olympic and Paralympic spirit, while telling the unique story of the host region and country.

The Host Country of every Olympic and Paralympic Games tells a unique story of culture and imagination through design and artistry. The Vancouver 2010 graphic identity seeks to unify and beautify the Games with a consistent look and feel throughout all its environments and communications.

Click on the heading above to go to the 2010 Winter Olympic website.

Colbert Report to Discuss (?) Design with Emily Pilloton

Project H's founder and executive director, Emily Pilloton (right), will be the featured guest on The Colbert Report (left), Monday January 18th, 2010. Can this young design evangelist convince Stephen Colbert that design can change the world?

Emily will discuss Project H's initiatives, her new book Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, and the upcoming Design Revolution Road Show bringing the design message to cities across the country via a silver trailer.

Project H Design develops product design initiatives for Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness.

The show airs Monday at 11:30 EST, 8:30 PST on Comedy Central. More details at: www.colbertnation.com/

Click on the heading above to learn more about Project H and you'll get a sense for why Emily Pilloton has rocketed design to the top in the public imagination.

Information Architecture is the Design Challenge for the Future

How can we design a system to comprehend and manage something that has a trillion interconnected elements? Information Architecture (IA) is an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape. IA is the structural design of shared information environments.

Below are some other attempts to describe what Information Architecture is but click on the heading above to see three short videos by MAYA that, taken together, will give you a sense of this new design field and why it is important.

"Trillions" helps us see why information architecture will be increasingly important in the future. "Information" explains the special way the word is used in this context and "Architecture" simply explains how this borrowed term is used in the sense of "Information Architecture."

Historically the term "information architect" is attributed to designer and creator of the TED conference, Richard Saul Wurman. Wurman sees architecture as "used in the words architect of foreign policy. I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work--the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear."

Put another way, Information architecture is the expression of a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems. Among these activities are library systems, Content Management Systems, web development, user interactions, database development, programming, technical writing, enterprise architecture, and critical system software design.

Information architecture can refer to a structural design of shared environments, methods of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, and online communities, and ways of bringing the principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

The term information architecture describes a specialized skill set which relates to the interpretation of information and expression of distinctions between signs and systems of signs. It has some degree of origin in the library sciences. Many schools with library and information science departments teach information architecture.

In the context of information systems design information architecture refers to the analysis and design of the data stored by information systems, concentrating on entities, their attributes, and their interrelationships. It refers to the modeling of data for an individual database and to the corporate data models an enterprise uses to coordinate the definition of data in several (perhaps scores or hundreds) of distinct databases. The "canonical data model" is applied to integration technologies as a definition for specific data passed between the systems of an enterprise. At a higher level of abstraction it may also refer to the definition of data stores.

Chinese Create Over-the-Top Ice Sculptures

Northern China gets pretty cold but they take advantage of abundant ice and snow to create some of the most amazing frozen structures.

At the Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in northeastern China, the 26th annual International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival features massive buildings built of ice from the frozen surface of the nearby Songhua River, large scale snow sculptures, and ice slides.

At night, visitors who endure the bitter cold see the lights switched on, illuminating the sculptures from both inside and outside (right). This year's festival opened January 5th and will remain open until some time in February.

Click on the heading above to see several photos from just before the festival and of the opening night, posted on Boston.com.

Frog Design Says Teach Design Early in Schools

Design Mind on Good explores "Why We Should Teach Design Early". Design Mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine with new posts every Tuesday and Thursday.

According to Design Mind, "Designers, through training and experience, develop a different lens through which to see the world. They move through spaces, environments, and systems, making observations and developing insights about what works well and what doesn’t. They then use those observations and insights to create innovative solutions for everyday problems. If design is the crossroads of beauty and purpose, design thinking is the intersection of creative and analytical thinking.

But when do we learn how to think like a designer? In today’s world of standardized tests and performance-based educational funding, students are not evaluated on the way they approach a problem, but whether or not they come up with the right answer.

What happens when there are many right answers, as is often the case with non-linear design solutions? When can we start teaching students how to creatively evaluate their ideas?

Design education typically begins at the college level, but if we wait until then to teach design thinking we are missing critical points in the growth of young minds, whose ability to think creatively is boundless. Teaching high school students to think like designers would help shape the way they look at the world around them and positively affect their future endeavors.

Inspired by these notions, a team of designers from the Austin studio of frog design got together and started an initiative called “TeachDesign.” The objective of this initiative is to expose high school students to design methodologies through immersive, real-world projects that have a lasting positive impact on the participating students, school, and community."

Click on the heading above to read the entire article by Ron Stokes.

Architecture and Design Critics at Major Newspapers

A good source of information and ideas about architecture and design are the people who make their livings writing about design topics for major newspapers. Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune (left) and Inga Saffron, architecture writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, (right) provide insightful coverage of national design issues that are often controversial and newsworthy.

Other major papers have writers with similar assignments. Since many small papers, some are weeklys, don't employ writers specifically covering design, there is an opportunity for people to submit articles on design to fill the void. Part of design education can be advanced by having more people writing and reading about design in local newspapers.

Does your local paper have someone who writes about design issues? Who in your community could be encouraged to write about design issues for the local paper? Perhaps you are the best to do this.

Click on the heading above to see Blair Kamin's architecture blog for the Chicago Tribune.

Sensuous Skyscrapers

New technologies and building materials make it possible for contemporary designers to play with the traditional boxes that dominate city skylines.

Aqua (left) is the name of the world's tallest building designed by a woman-owned firm. The new Chicago skyscraper with sensuous, undulating balconies avoids the aesthetically monotonous, repetitive, right-angled designs typical of most buildings. The thin balconies bulge outward and are each slightly different than the other. This is a new vision of verticality and makes Aqua one of Chicago’s most innovative skyscrapers.

A similar project in Chongqing, China called "Urban Forest" (right) is being designed by Beijing-based firm called MAD. It uses conventional skyscraper structure, but pushes and pulls the edges of its floorplates, generating a more dynamic, sculptural form. The design envisions layers of lush vegetation, which would thrive in Chongqing's subtropical environment. The design attempts to return more nature and organic forms into our traditionally rectangular cities.

Of course, Frank Gehry's titanium clad buildings and Santiago Calatrava's bird-like designs for buildings and bridges are also part of the contemporary look where the designer is no longer constrained by the rectangular designs that have been the norm for centuries. Students might find it challenging to create designs that follow Frank Lloyd Wright's "destruction of the box" design manifesto.

Charlie Rose Show Provides Insights into Designers

Charlie Rose's interviews for his popular TV show include many designers (especially architects). These interviews are a great educational resource for teachers and students.

When the French architect Jean Nouvel, for example, was awarded the Pritzker Prize for architecture, Charlie Rose (right) brought Nouvel, along with former Pritzker winners Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano, together for a group interview before a live audience (left).

Rose tends to want to compare architecture and design to art, seemingly to validate design as worthy of discussion, but in general, he is an excellent interviewer and draws interesting insights from the architects and designers he has on his show.

Click on the heading above to listen to the interview and look through the show's archives for many other designers.

Davis Publishing Provides Design Resources

Communicating through Graphic Design: An up-to-date look at one of the fastest-growing art career areas is a high school text written by Kevin Gatta and Claire Mowbray Golding published by Davis Publishing (the folks who also publish "School Arts" magazine.)

Communicating through Graphic Design was developed to address the needs of computer-based graphic design programs, as well as more traditional approaches. This high school text, full of designs by professionals and students, first hones students’ fundamental thinking and drawing skills, emphasizing knowledge of elements and principles, planning, and sketching with traditional media. Students then move on to specific areas of design, observing and analyzing exemplary works from a variety of designers past and present, and finding their own solutions to real-world design problems.

Highlights include:
• Computer-based and traditional approaches to each studio experience
• Design challenges that reflect actual workplace practice
• Career profiles of contemporary working professionals
• Art and design historical references
• Design time line referenced to historical events

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: What Is Graphic Design?
Chapter 2: The Art of Graphic Design
Chapter 3: Visualizing and Layout
Chapter 4: Identity Design
Chapter 5: Publications Design
Chapter 6: Advertising Design
Chapter 7: Environmental and Information Design
Chapter 8: Virtual Design
Student Handbook

Kevin Gatta founded Gatta Design & Co. in 1988. He began his design career as an associate designer at Herb Lubalin Associates. He was also Senior Designer with Seymour Chwast and Alan Peckolick at The Pushpin Group, Inc., and the Pushpin affiliate David Pocknell & Co. in Essex, England.

Gatta is a full professor of the Graduate Communications Design and Packaging department at Pratt Institute, and was awarded the Institute's Distinguished Professor Award in 1997. Kevin co-authored and designed Foundations of Graphic Design (along with its teachers' edition), published by Davis Publications.

Click on the heading above to see the book at the Davis site.

Hamburg Resists the Creative Class

Hamburg, Germany has been seeking to revitalize itself by following principles outlined by Richard Florida in books like "The Rise of the Creative Class." Some interpret this as a move toward gentrification and seek to retain the gritty, seedy character favored by some artists and counter-culture creatives.

German magazine, "Der Spiegel", documents the issues around the Hamburg controversy. Click on the heading above to see the complete article.

In his theory, Florida argues that cities must reinvent themselves. In contrast to the 1990s, they should no longer attempt to attract companies, but people. More specifically, the right people -- people who invent things, who promote change and who shape a city's image. He has classified these people as the "creative class." It's a theory that has had unintentional consequences -- including bitter conflicts in places like Hamburg.

Richard Florida has become rich and famous as a result of his ideas. He is now one of the most popular speakers in North America and received a thousand requests for speaking engagements in 2009 alone. His books about the "creative class," and about why it is crucial to the survival of every city, are bestsellers, and his theory has been elevated to an axiom of modern urban development.

In Europe, hardly any other city has relied on Florida as heavily as the traditional trading city of Hamburg. A few years ago, Hamburg's science minister distributed copies of Florida's book to the city-state's administration and since then they have tried to enact many of the ideas.

Grunge versus gentrification is a continual debate in urban planning and revival. Some people like their cities to be a little messy and raw rather than clean and well-maintained. What do your students think? Can designers create a "grunge" style to replace vacant buildings without gentrifying neighborhoods?

Quake with fear, you tiny fools!

Popular literature and films reflect our deep-seated fear of technology, machines, artificial intelligence, and robots. It appears that most people, rather than looking forward to the future of technology, are afraid of what it means for humans. We have become quite comfortable being at the top of the intellectual food chain and don't look forward to any competition.

There are combinations of androids, robots, avatars, surrogates, drones, replicants, cyborgs, and many other permutations of these future humanoid intelligences. Sarcos (left) has been talking to children about technology at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh since 1997. Referred to as "social robots" they are expected to be a $15 billion industry by 2015.

Zeno (right) is an experiment in human-robot interaction that doubles as a children's toy and a research project. Hanson Robotics tests it innovations like artificial skin and social learning algorithms by providing low-cost hybrid robot toys that are really experiments testing interactions between people and machines.

Rather than fearing technology, we might be better served by directing our fears where they belong - on ourselves. Psychological projection is the unconscious act of denial of a person's own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to something in the outside world.

Avatar - Did You Notice the Papyrus Typeface?

There is a lot to look at in the hugely successful film "Avatar" by James Cameron. You might be surprised that one of the most recently controversial designs in the movie is the choice of typeface for the subtitles (when characters are speaking "Navi").

The subtitles are set in some version of a typeface called "papyrus" (right) (although even that is debated). The complaint is that, on a big budget film like "Avatar", more attention should have been paid to creating an appropriate typeface rather than using an overused typeface that appears on menus and signs all over the place. Papyrus is considered to be an over-used, and often inappropriately used, typeface that is appropriate as a display typeface (large headings) and not appropriate for text (the subtitles).

The feeling among some designers is that Cameron cared enough to create an entire language for the Navi and should have taken the same care in having an appropriate typeface designed for the subtitles rather than using an "off-the-shelf" over-used font. The choice of typefaces is as important in the design of a movie as any other aspect and shouldn't be treated like a couple trying to save money by designing their own wedding announcements.

For educational purposes, this controversy surfaces many of the attitudes that need to be addressed in design education classes. Comments that can spark some spirited discussion indicate that some people think:
People who worry about typefaces are nerds.
Type designers can be elitist snobs.
Choices of typefaces don't really influence people and aren't important.
Some typefaces, like Comic Sans and Papyrus, should be avoided by serious designers because they are too common.
People are starting to notice typefaces now and even know the names of some typefaces.

Click on the heading above to get a sense of the controversy and read the varied (and heated) discussion.

Lady Gaga to Design a Line of Polaroid Cameras

Imagine the design innovations necessary for a formerly hugely successful company like Polaroid facing the digital revolution. They have gone in the direction of creating digital cameras with built in miniature printers that spit out instant photos (left). Will there still be a market for prints in this digital age?

Their new market is the very young social-networking teenage crowd and they have taken the daring step of enlisting pop-singer Lady Gaga (right) as a creative director. This makes perfect sense to that target market because she has always been identified with her own unique fashion sense and is known by that crowd to design many of her own clothes, hair styles and overall distinctive style. Polaroid has made Lady Gaga a creative director and inventor of specialty products for the nearly 73-year-old company. She insists that she will be more of a designer and less of a spokesperson for the new line she will create.

"We won''t be selling cameras with my face on them," the 23-year-old pop starlet told Parade magazine. "I''m working on bringing the instant film camera back as part of the future."

If your students were Lady Gaga, what kind of camera would they design?
Click on the heading above if you're not sure who Lady Gaga is.

Fast Company Magazines Looks Back at Design Decade

Fast Company, the cutting-edge magazine for young business people, looks back at the first decade of the 21st century and reviews some of the top design trends in those ten years.

Some are products like the Apple iPod (left) and the Nintendo Wii, structures like the Burj Dubai, and graphics like Shepard Fairey's Obama poster. Others are design trends like Target's Design for All program that brings the work of top designers to the mass market at reasonable prices. The Cooper-Hewitt's Design for the Other 90% exhibit (right) makes the list as well as AIGA's Design for Democracy initiative to make voting easier. Smaller cars like the Mini-Cooper and the Prius are seen as a trend in the 21st century and the gestural multi-touch interface (demonstrated by Tom Cruise in "The Minority Report").

What designs do your students remember from the last 10 years? What design trends will they be looking for in the coming decade?

Click on the heading above to see the slide show at the Fast Company site.

3D Coming to TV Sooner Than Expected

Movie theaters hoped to hold onto viewers who are choosing to stay home to watch movies on TV by introducing new and improved 3D technology with amazing films like "Avatar" but competition from 3D television is coming sooner than expected.

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2010 in Las Vegas has exhibits by TV manufacturers who believe that the 3D TV will already become big this year. Panasonic plans to launch a range of new HD 3-D enabled TV’s and Sony is also working on their own version of this technology. According to TransWorldNews, HD 3D TV is seen as the first major change for flat screen TVs.

Sony, Panasonic and other TV makers know that competition for media eyes is fierce so they have to think of new technologies to keep consumers happy. 3-D seems to be the obvious answer because of the number of new 3D movies being released in theatres.

The movie that will help 3D TV sales is Avatar the latest blockbuster from James Cameron that pushes CGI boundaries to its limits.

New Life for Design for the Other 90%

The Rockefeller Foundation just awarded the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City $600,000 to make its 2007 Design for the Other 90% exhibition into an ongoing series. Many design exhibits focus on products for the wealthiest 10% of the population but, with this award, the Cooper-Hewitt will be able to highlight more of the sustainable design for the developing world like water purifying straws (left) and new ways to transport water (right).

Design for the Other 90% (2007) highlighted low-cost technology for the developing world with designs centered on sustainable solutions for people without clean water, cooking fuel, electricity or practical transportation. In 2007 the Cooper-Hewitt exhibit highlighted devices like the Solar Ear, the LifeStraw water purifier and the Portable Light.

The next version of the exhibit will be in the Fall of 2011 and will be titled “Critical Mass”. It will again focus on things like sanitation and water, climate change and urban planning. In addition to the exhibition, the field work done by the museum will be available in an online open-network database.

The Turning Point in Transportation

America may be over its insatiable love affair with the car. The automobile doesn't have the same symbolic association with freedom and independence for today's young people that it had for earlier generations. A recent study by the Earth Policy Institute revealed that, while Americans purchased 10,000,000 cars in 2009, they actually got rid of 14,000,000 cars - meaning there are 4,000,000 fewer cars on the road today than a year ago.

This decline in the US car fleet is only 2% of the total number of cars on the road but could be a sign of what is to come in terms of transportation preferences for the US. The US car fleet is currently at 246 million cars dropping down from 250 at the beginning of 2009.

2009 was the first year since WWII that the number of cars scrapped exceeded the number of cars sold, and the EPI study predicts that this trend will continue at least through 2020. This opens up opportunities to rethink traditional urban design and transportation design strategies.

The EPI attributes the decline to many factors, not just the recession, including ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people.

As our cities become denser, traffic gets worse and public transportation systems improve, people feel it is less and less necessary to have their own vehicle. In some cases it may be more of an inconvenience to deal with parking, traffic, associated fees like insurance and gasoline. Cars will still have their place in rural settings, but with four out of five Americans living in an urban setting, the trend will likely continue just as it did in Japan in the early 90’s. As Japan became more urbanized, they reached their car saturation point in 1990 and since then, their car fleet has dropped by 21%.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Features Marcel Wanders' Designs

The Philadelphia Museum of Art gained additional space (the Perelman Building) with a new wing (Collab Gallery) specifically for their design collection and special design shows. The current show is "Marcel Wanders: Daydreams" running until June 13, 2010.

Dutch designer Marcel Wanders (right) created a multimedia installation of objects selected by the designer to represent pivotal points in his revolutionary career using video images, lighting, and sound to illuminate the development of his inventive body of designs over the past twenty years. The exhibit includes his "knotted" chair (left).

Films, detailing Wanders’s design process and philosophy in projects ranging from manufactured products, hotel interiors, and design art, make their public premiere in this retrospective installation. The soundscape that accompanies the films provides Wanders’ personal views on design.

Kathryn Hiesinger curated the exhibition which was made possible by Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer, and by Target, with additional support provided by Collab, a group that supports the Museum’s modern and contemporary design collection and programs. An in-kind contribution was provided by ETC (Electronic Theatre Controls, Inc.)

Click on the heading above to go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art website.

New Issue of International Journal of Design

Volume 3, Issue 3 of the International Journal of Design is now available. All contents are freely available online. You can read, download, or forward these articles to your colleagues.

In 2007 the Taiwan-based Chinese Institute of Design published the first issue of the International Journal of Design. It is available on-line at www.ijdesign.org.

"International Journal of Design is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing research papers in all fields of design, including industrial design, visual communication design, interface design, animation and game design, architectural design, urban design, and other design related fields. It aims to provide an international forum for exchange of ideas and findings from researchers across different cultures, by encouraging research on the impacts of cultural factors on design theory and practice. It also seeks to promote transfer of knowledge between professionals in academia and industry, by emphasizing research where results are of interest or applicable to design practices.”

The journal is now indexed in the DAAI Design and Applied Arts Index and the Ergonomics Abstracts. According to Google Scholar, the 47 articles published so far have been cited more than 112 times. The journal statistics is summarized at
http://www.ijdesign.org/materials/Journal_Statistics.pdf.

Click on the heading above to see all the articles in the International Journal of Design.

It's Official - The Tallest Structure on the Planet

The tallest tower in the world, the long-awaited Burj Dubai, renamed Burj Khalifa to acknowledge a financial bailout by neighboring Abu Dhabi, officially opened on Jan. 4, 2010.

The 200-story Burj Khalifa cost $1.5 billion to build. While mainly residential, the building will have 37 floors of office and retail space.

Burj Khalifa has a height of 828 meters (2,717 feet). Designed by Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP, the structure overtook Taipei 101 as the world's tallest in February.

The first skyscraper was erected in Chicago because of the high cost of land and the shortage of space that made “building up” more practical than “building out.” A skyscraper indicates not only size but the way a building is constructed. Most buildings are held up by walls but a skyscraper is held up by a steel skeleton and the walls are not needed to support the building. The walls, often referred to as "curtain walls", can be made of material as light as glass.

Click on the heading above to see a comparison of the 10 tallest buildings in the world.

Bill Moggridge Appointed Director of Cooper-Hewitt

Through an amazingly smart choice, as of March 2010, Bill Moggridge (left) will be the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's fourth director. Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer in 1980 and co-founder of IDEO, the renowned innovation and design firm, has a global reputation as a designer, having pioneered interaction design and integrated human factors into the design of computer software and hardware.

Moggridge, 66, describes his career as having three phases, first as a designer, second as a leader of design teams and third as a communicator. For the first two decades as a designer, he developed his business internationally in 10 countries, designing high-tech products, including the Grid Compass, the first laptop computer. With the co-founding of IDEO in 1991, he turned his focus to developing practices for interdisciplinary teams and built client relationships with multinational companies. Since 2000, he has been a spokesperson for the value of design in everyday life, writing books, producing videos, giving presentations and teaching.

Moggridge was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Awards at the White House in 2009. This award is given in recognition of an individual who has made a profound, long-term contribution to contemporary design practice.

At Cooper-Hewitt, Moggridge will oversee the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. In this role, he will establish the museum as the pre-eminent national design resource, enhance its profile as one of the world’s leading authorities on the role of design in everyday life and develop and present exhibitions—both real and virtual.

Moggridge founded his design firm in London in 1969, adding a second office in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1979. In 1991, he merged his company with those of David Kelley and Mike Nuttall to form IDEO, a global design firm that has transformed design methods and culture. Today, IDEO has offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, London, Munich and Shanghai.

Moggridge is the author of Designing Interactions (right), published by MIT Press in October 2006, and named one of the 10 Best Innovation and Design Books of the year by BusinessWeek magazine. The book also includes a companion DVD and Web site (www.designinginteractions.com). He is currently working on a new book due out in fall 2010, Designing Media, which examines the connections between traditional mainstream media and the emerging digital realm.

Moggridge succeeds Paul Thompson, who was Cooper-Hewitt’s director for eight years until this past July when he left to become the rector (president) of the Royal College of Art in London. Caroline Baumann, the museum’s deputy director, has served as the acting director since July. As acting director, Baumann has spearheaded the museum’s RE:DESIGN expansion, the most ambitious project in Cooper-Hewitt’s history to revitalize the museum’s campus, bringing the capital campaign to 83 percent of the goal with more than $53 million raised to date. She also oversaw the 10th anniversary of the National Design Awards program.

Nostalgia for Books as Artifacts

Many people make New Year's resolutions to read more during the new year. This would be good because the average number of books read by people in a year is "One". My problem is the opposite. I've been advised to make a resolution to spend less on books this year.

I'm not nostalgic about the printed word. I think an e-reader makes more sense, is easier to carry, saves money, and is more environmentally sustainable. If you read about a book a week it soon becomes difficult to find a place to store them.

That's why a new hotel in Berlin caught my eye. Tom Michelberger’s new hotel is based on his declaration that “perfection does not create memories, because memories only result from movement, from a lively experience of interaction – with people, the surroundings and the atmosphere.”

Michelberger's Berlin hotel is a unique space that reflects the creativity of the city, and is infused with a rough artistic spirit rarely seen in lodging design. Tons of vintage books are used as wallpaper, decoration and lamps, and a raw but welcoming feel pervades the guest rooms and common areas. For many, the massive display of books will seem disorderly and chaotic.

It reminds me of a recent visit to an equally satisfying environment, Thomas Edison's library with three stories of books wall to wall and floor to ceiling with a small bed to take a nap between readings. My idea of heavan.

Click on the photos to see larger versions. Click on the heading above to see The Michelberger Hotel's equally funky website.

Karim Rashid Says Even Baby Bottles Need to be Designed

Superstar Designer Karim Rashid’s latest product is the mundane baby bottle. He aims to make the task of preparing a baby bottle much easier and, at the same time, make the bottle more attractive to babies.

The Iiamo Go is a self-heating bottle that allows parents to serve body temperature milk to their baby anywhere without the use of electricity for warming. The bottle uses a new patented organic cartridge made of dehydrated salt and water. Milk is warmed by a reaction that takes place when energy is released from the salt becoming re-hydrated.

Rashid wanted to modernize the bottle and bring a new emotional and aesthetic appeal to the product. The bottle is molded from 100 percent BPA-free polypropylene.

Rashid says, "Children love reflective shiny colorful surfaces and materials – I do too – maybe I am still a child. So it was time to make a baby bottle a wild interesting sculptural colorful animated object so the baby actually gets excited about being fed."

Singer Bono Seeks Return to Sexier Cars

I just visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland and watched the spectacular 3-D film of a concert by Bono (left) and U2 so I was interested to see an article about Bono's views on auto design.

Not surprisingly, Bono laments the mundane designs we now live with in typical sedans and SUVs. He points out that the cars we really remember, and are beginning to imitate, are from the 40s, 50s and 60s. Growing up in his native Ireland, one of the cars that inspired affection was the Jaguar E-type (right).

Bono suggests that the auto industry start employing more adventurous designers like furniture designer Marc Newson, Jonathan Ive from Apple, Frank Gehry, the architect, and Jeff Koons, the artist.

Click on the heading above to see the original article on Autoblog.

Redesigning the Airline Boarding Pass

Design projects can be found in the simplest and most obvious places - like an airline boarding pass. One of the tricks of design is to be aware of times in which you struggle to use something and better design could improve the experience. Since many people have recently returned from holiday travel involving airline flights this might resonate with you.

Designer Tyler Thompson noticed how difficult it is to read the common airline pass that is issued for boarding planes. He spent part of his flight time sketching out some alternative designs that would make the information easier to read (left). His article (click on the heading above) includes some of the key design parameters and the readers comments provide a lively discussion.

One reader pointed out that on the larger portion that the gate agent keeps, the passenger is most interested in the gate number but on the short piece left behind, the passenger is most interested in the seat number. This can be accommodated in the design.

Click on the heading above to see the original article and the readers' comments.

2010 - The Beginning of the Decade of Design Education

2010 marks the beginning of the decade of design education. Until the first decade in the 21st century, there was a systematic, institutional bias against visualization as a component of "serious" education. Visual learning had been ghettoized as a stand-apart "arts" class in schools for over a century. No state education agency or university included "visual communication" in its list of basic skills in general education along with oral, quantitative and written communication.

Despite the growing knowledge that the economic survival of companies, cities, and national economies is now dependent upon strong design, schools and educational institutions have steadfastly ignored over 40% of the intelligences available and necessary for human cognition. 2010 marks the beginning of a new era of education in which images, objects, environments and experiences are recognized as essential to learning as are reading, writing and mathematics.

This is the beginning of a complete transformation of education and the formulation of a third culture - Innovation and Design - to accompany "Science and Technology" and "Arts and Humanities." Until now we have worked mainly to understand our universe and the complexities of the human mind. We are now, for the first time, in a position to not only understand our universe but to change and improve it through design.

Challenges for Design Education in 2010

When the International Design Education Alliance is launched at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. on April 13, 2010 there will be many tasks to perform during the first year and decade of K-12 design education. What can you contribute to the effort to provide design education as part of general education for all students every year?

What can we do to help teachers develop the knowledge and skills needed to teach students design and design processes?
How can we get the word out to students, teachers, parents and administrators about the importance of design education?
How can we change standard school practices to allow design education to be taught to students in schools?
What barriers need to be removed to help improve education and the world through design education?

Setting Design Goals for Schools

As we think about a new year and make our resolutions, here are my hopes for design education for 2010.

Visual Literacy and Design Education will become a part of general education for all students every year.
Teachers will receive the professional development necessary to provide quality design education for students.
Students will learn about information design, product design, environment design, and experience design as part of regular instruction in schools.
Students will know the history of design including influential practitioners like Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Paul Rand, Zaha Hadid, Jane Jacobs, etc.
Students will recognize influential design icons like the Eames chair (left) and the architecture of Santiago Calatrava (right).
Students will know processes for problem-solving and creating designs such as ideation, visualization, prototyping, presentation, and implementation.
Students will develop design thinking skills to become more aware citizens and help shape the future through design.

2010 is the decade in which visual learning and design will become part of the general education curriculum for all students every year taught by qualified teachers in schools everywhere.

The Holidays are Rich with Design

The holidays are a time when professional and vernacular design is really brought to the forefront. Advertisers bring out their best graphic design, industrial designers present their best product designs, cities and homes are completely redesigned to provide the most stimulating design experiences possible, and the experience of design creates the most emotional and stimulating sensory delight the human imagination can provide.

Haddon Sundblom forever set the standard for Santa Claus with his paintings for Coca-Cola (left) and, ever since, Coke's trademark red and white colors have also been the the colors in which we expect to see Santa dressed. People drag trees inside their homes and decorate them, as well as the whole house (inside and out), with lights and carefully selected ornaments. Music, lighting, the smells of trees and food, the feel of the cold winter air, the colors and textures of new clothing, are just some of the ways we consciously try to stimulate all our senses and really feel "alive" during the holidays.

So, whatever you celebrate at this time of year, take a moment to reflect on how we create our world and make a life worth living through design.

Happy Holidays!

International Design Education Alliance to Meet in Washington, D.C.

The International Design Education Alliance (IDEA) will have its founding meeting on Tuesday, April 13, 2010. The forum will take place in the National Building Museum (right) in Washington, D.C. from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm.

The Design Education Alliance is for people who support design education as a part of general education in K-12 schools. The discussion will include participants who also provide design education outside of schools; schools for career development in design; institutions that provide outside resources to schools (like museum educators); University teacher-preparation programs, and others; but the focus of the meeting will be on design education as part of regular instruction by qualified teachers in K-12 schools.

Three areas that will be discussed include:

1. K-12 Design Education Policy - What standards, assessments, curriculum, licenses, regulations, statutes, etc. will need to be in place to ensure that every student in every school gets design education every year?

2. K-12 Teacher Preparation - What training, certification, university courses, degrees, curriculum, resources, etc. will need to be in place to provide teachers qualified to provide design education in K-12 schools?

3. K-12 Student Services - What resources, recognition, scholarships, incentives, motivation, classes, lessons, etc. will need to be provided for K-12 students to help them understand and value the importance of design education in their future success?

For further details, the meeting coordinators are Martin Rayala, Ph.D., Rayala@Kutztown.edu
and Robin Vande Zande, Ph.D., rvandeza@kent.edu

The meeting is open to anyone interested in supporting design education in K-12 schools.
Registration is $49 to cover materials, continental breakfast, lunch and other amenities.
Provide your name, affiliation, address, email, phone, etc. with your check for $49 made out to BEIG/DIG c/o Rick Knivsland
and send it to:
Rick Knivsland, Art and Design
Price Laboratory School
19th and Campus
Cedar Falls, Iowa 50613

How to Survive the 21st Century

There are many people in our schools right now who will live to see the 22nd century. For the first time in history we will have people who will have lived part of their lives in three centuries. One of the fastest growing segments of the population today is people who are over 85.

What will it take to survive the 21st century?

Living longer than 100 years will take specific knowledge, skills and dispositions. We currently know everything we need to know to live through the century - we just have to make sure we learn and apply existing knowledge. Most of the problem will be with our dispositions - we have to get ourselves to do the things we know we should do.

Health - Read Ray Kurzweil's books "The Fantastic Voyage" and "The Singularity is Near". These books provided a blueprint for extending your healthy and vital life well into the 22nd century.

Environment - We know what to do to manage global warming, clean water supplies, healthy air and many natural disasters. Very soon, cities will produce more energy than they use and decrease carbon content in the atmosphere rather than add to it.

Technology - Popular fiction and film play on our fear of machines taking over the planet and trying to eliminate people. To keep that from happening we will have to learn as much as we can about machine intelligence. The solution isn't to avoid technological advances. The solution is to have more people who understand how technology works.

War and violence - We know one thing that could imperil our chances of survival is death by the hands of other people. We know what needs to happen to keep that from happening. One thing is for each person to think like a global citizen rather than a nationalist or tribal isolationist. 150 years ago we encountered war from neighboring states. 100 years ago we encountered wars from other nations. 50 years ago we encountered wars from other continents. Today we are the ones waging wars. 50 years from now there will be no wars sanctioned by any state, nation, or continent.

Work - Loss of gainful employment, jobs being taken over by machines, elimination of the skills we trained for, and a myriad of other conditions that cause us not to be able to survive financially, are on the forefronts of our minds today. The 21st century requires new skills that weren't even imagined in the 20th century. Survival will depend on our ability and willingness to learn new skills. Since we will be living to be 120 we should expect to spend 40 of those years learning new skills, 40 working, and 40 in peaceful retirement.

How can we help the fast-growing population who are students today, but will live well over 100, to survive the 21st century?

How Media Literacy Will Transform Education

The new issue of The Journal of Media Literacy explores "School 2.0: Transforming 21st Century Education Through New Media Literacies". How will schools need to change to keep up with the growth of new media? We now have Web 2.0 - what will School 2.0 look like?

The cover (left) features Ken Burns, recognizing the release of his PBS series, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea." With today's technology, students have the ability to produce and distribute their own videos worldwide. Like Ken Burns, their productions will have a point of view, no matter how benign. Media literacy enables viewers to be more aware and responsible in their use of media.

The National Telemedia Council has published The Journal of Media Literacy continuously since 1953. Back then, the "media" included radio and the introduction of television. Today it includes personal mobile devices that enable worldwide personal text, voice, photo and video communication from wherever you are.

Marieli Rowe is the Executive Director of the National Telemedia Council. Karen Ambrosh is the President, and this issue was guest edited by Dr. Martin Rayala.

To order a copy email NTelemedia@aol.com or order online at NationalTelemediaCouncil.org.
Click on the heading above to go to the National Telemedia Council website.

Do Good Design: How Design Can Change the World

Do Good Design: How Design Can Change the World (right) is a book by David Berman (left) (foreword by Erik Spiekermann) with stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in their professional lives to create good. Do Good Design is also a website and a movement with a manifesto - "Don't just do good design, do good!" Canadian communication designer David Berman looks at two choices designers have - working to create deceptions that encourage more consumption or using their profession to change the world.

Design matters, like never before. Designers create so much of what we see, what we use, and what we experience. In this time of unprecedented environmental, social, and economic crises, designers will choose what their young profession will be about: inventing deceptions that encourage over-consumption.

Berman addresses questions like:
How did design help choose a president?
Why are people buying houses they can't afford?
Why do U.S. car makers now struggle to compete?
Why do we really have an environmental crisis?

Design matters, like never before. Designers create so much of what we see, what we use, and what we experience. In this time of unprecedented environmental, social, and economic crises, designers will choose what their young profession will be about: inventing deceptions that encourage overconsumption -- or helping repair the world.
Today, everyone is a designer. And the future of civilization is our common design project.

David Berman is the founder of David Berman Communications in Ottawa and the Ethics chair of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada,

Click on the heading above to go to Berman's "Do Good" site.

Design USA Exhibit at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

An exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City is a virtual catalog of contemporary design in America. It is a great starting point for generating lesson ideas for K-12 design education.

Design USA: Contemporary Innovation commemorates the tenth anniversary of the National Design Awards and showcases the winners recognized during the first decade. In addition to honoring Lifetime Achievement and Design Mind winners, the exhibition is organized according to five themes that are fundamental to the various disciplines: CRAFT, EXPERIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, MATERIALS, and METHOD.

The objects in the exhibition represent an exciting period of American design characterized by major shifts in the design profession with phenomenal advances in digital technology, new materials, and the advent of global partnerships.

Through the five thematic lenses, Design USA demonstrates how these developments are reshaping our definition of design, focusing on American innovation and the directions in which design is headed as we move through the new century. With a multifaceted, interactive exhibition designed by 2006 Communication Design Award winner 2×4, Design USA also marks a new chapter in the Museum’s efforts to enrich the visitors’ experience in the galleries.

In 2000, the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum founded the National Design Awards program to celebrate contemporary American design and to increase national awareness of design through education and promotion of excellence and innovation. The Awards mark important accomplishments in a variety of categories, including architecture, landscape design, interior design, product design, fashion, communication design, and more.

Click on the heading above to go to the website for Design USA.

K-12 Design Education #1 Priority of National Design Policy Initiative

At their second annual summit the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative (NDPI) held in Washington, D.C. in December 2009 the group identified K-12 design education as their #1 priority.

Of three resolutions passed by the group, #1 was Introduce into K-12 educational curriculum learning modules on design creativity and innovation.

This was the top priority proposal from the wider design community gaining 23% of the 324 votes. This proposal supports the work of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, led by Caroline Payson; the Association of Architecture Organizations' A+DEN (Architecture + Design Education Network) which includes AIA, AAF, and Chicago Arch. Foundation; initiatives in AIGA Design Educators Community, and many other K-12 design education initiatives.

The National Design Policy Initiative (NDPI), founded in 2008 by Dori Tunstall, was developed to raise the visibility of design as "paramount to US economic competitiveness...and democratic governance." The NDPI annual Summit gathers designers, government officials, design education accreditation agencies and professional organizations to begin a national conversation about the development of a policy structure that would support and benefit from design's value. The project proposes structural changes that address contemporary shortcomings of American design infrastructure.

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

Christmas Lighting Display from Holdman Company

Do you enjoy driving around to see the various light displays on houses for the holiday? In some neighborhoods there is a friendly competition to see who can have the best lighting display. Imagine if the house next door was owned by the company that creates lighting displays. What do you think their lighting display would look like? You're not even close.

The Holdman Company creates computerized lighting displays, usually for commercial companies. At this house in Utah they do a special Christmas display with 45,000 lights and 176 channels of computer control. The lights are controlled by computers and synchronized to a variety of holiday songs.

Click on the heading above to see a short video of some really over-the-top lighting design.

Avatar Delivers for Designers

Box Office figures won't tell an accurate story about the opening weekend of Avatar because of the huge storm that hit the Northeast. We had 24 inches of snow in one day in Philadelphia (what we usually get in a whole winter).

Avatar pulled in $27 million on its opening day (before the storm) but the film cost between $225-250 million to produce. I don't think James Cameron has any reason to worry.

Avatar is one film you have to see in the theater and shell out the extra money for the 3-D experience. There are four ways to see the film - the traditional film format; in 3D; in HD Digital 3D; and in Imax Digital HD 3D. See it in the best format available in your town. It will be hard to go back to watching traditional movies after seeing the new digital 3D format.

In the midst of the second worst storm in recorded Philadelphia history, we made it to the theatre to see Avatar. Here are some random thoughts:

What makes digital animation believable? - The expressiveness of the mouths not the eyes (these characters have anime eyes.)
The movie is about the process of making the movie - learning to make avatars move convincingly.
This one isn't about humans against machines - it is about humans against nature.
A common theme - egghead scientists against good old American soldiers and businessmen.
The American story is that our heroes aren't very rational but they have "heart" (Captain Kirk versus Mr. Spock)
The Navi have cat-like features, vocalizations and mannerisms although their culture is Native American.
The fall of the big tree is reminiscent of the fall of the Twin Towers,
Humans used to be people of the earth - now they are the evil "sky-people".
Transitioning back and forth between the people and their avatars - they are more impressive as Navi.
Many of us would like to have a different body if we had the chance.
The lighted plants and forest scenes - I see a theme park in the making.
The audience applauded at the end of the movie.

AIGA-NYC Presents Panel of Top Design Bloggers

AIGA-NYC featured "Design Blogging is Changing Everything" as their Fresh Dialogue 25 December meeting at the Tishman Auditorium in lower Manhattan.

Every day, hour, and minute, design blogs present an unprecedented and ever-expanding diversity of design. AIGA-NY brought together four design blog luminaries (left) followed by a discussion of how design blogs are changing design, investigating the unintended consequences of self-publishing, and what blogging can achieve for its readers, writers, and the design community at large.

The event featured presentations by Khoi Vinh/subtraction.com, Josh Rubin/CoolHunting.com, Tina Roth Eisenberg/swiss-miss.com, Allan Chochinov/Core77.com with a discussion moderated by Alice Twemlow, chair of the SVA design criticism MFA Program and contributing editor at DesignObserver.com

Moderator Alice Twemlow (right) (a non-blogger) is a writer, critic and educator whose work focuses on graphic design. Twemlow earned an MA in design history from a joint program of the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She has been a guest critic at the Yale University School of Art and at RISD. In 2006 the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York named Twemlow the chair of its new Master of Fine Arts in Design Criticism.

Alice Twemlow writes for Eye, Design Issues, I.D., Print, New York Magazine and The Architect’s Newspaper. Twemlow is also a contributor to the online publication: Voice: AIGA Journal of Design and DesignObserver.com.

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

Core77 is Big Business

Some blogs, like Swiss Miss, are small, one-person labors of love but others, like Core77 (left), are big business with large staffs and many writers.

Allan Chochinov (right) is a partner of Core77, a New York-based design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts. He is the editor-in-chief of Core77.com, the widely read design website, Coroflot.com design job and portfolio site, and DesignDirectory.com design firm database.

He has been named on numerous design and utility patents, and has received awards from I.D. Magazine, Communication Arts, The Art Directors Club and The One Club. He teaches in the graduate departments of Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and writes and lectures widely on the impact of design on contemporary culture.

Click on the heading above to experience Core77.

Swiss Miss is a Site Everyone Loves

The writer of Swiss Miss is one of the nicest people you would ever meet and it comes through in her popular blog. Her readers love her and her personable style. She is it, there is no staff and no cadre of reporters.

Tina Roth Eisenberg grew up in mountainous Switzerland, influenced by renowned Swiss design and a lot of fresh air. Tina is often referred to as swissmiss, her popular design blog and design studio.

Swissmiss broadcasts with an European viewpoint and a love for clear, Swiss functional design. She has worked at several prominent NYC design firms, including Thinkmap, Inc., where she helped design the award-winning Visual Thesaurus. Tina is the founder and creative director of swissmiss studio, located in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Click on the heading above to check out Swiss Miss.

Cool Hunting is a Catalog of Interesting Things

Josh Rubin scours the internet and other sources looking for interesting stuff to put on his blog, Cool Hunting.

Rubin believes that there are no new ideas, just great executions. As an interaction designer he's always looking for both creative inspiration and an understanding of the way people do things. In 2003 he decided to start a catalog of what he found and haphazardly named it Cool Hunting.

Outside of being a ruggedly handsome editor, Josh also consults on strategy, content and design for select clients including Apple, Adobe, Vodafone, Nike, Microsoft and MTV. Josh helped to found the digital consultancy Bond Art + Science, was a Lead User Interface Designer at Motorola, a Design Director at Razorfish, in charge of product development at Upoc Networks and an intern at IDEO. He has a BA in Communications and Cognitive Science from Hampshire College and a Master's in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU.

Click on the heading above to check out Cool Hunting.

Subtraction.com is a Website for Insiders

Khoi Vinh (left) is the design director for NYTimes.com, where he leads the in-house design team in user experience innovation. He is also the author of the popular design weblog Subtraction.com (right), where he writes extensively on design, technology and user experience matters of all kinds.

Subtraction.com is full of information and ideas but Vinh is not a fan of focusing much on himself. Vinh is not as personally visible in his writing as some bloggers like to be. His focus is on lots of interesting content and meaningful ideas.

Previously, Vinh was the co-founder of the award-winning New York design studio Behavior, LLC. He studied communication design at Otis School of Art and Design in Los Angeles and practiced branding and graphic design in print for several years in Washington, D.C., before moving to New York.

Click on the heading above to go to Subtraction.com.

Debbie Millman Tapes TV Version of "Design Matters"

Debbie Millman, celebrating her impressive 100th online blog interview with influential designers, also launched the first set of video interviews for the pilot of her television version of "Design Matters" with a taping before a live audience at the School of Visual Arts Theatre in lower Manhattan.

Her first two guests for the TV version of "Design Matters" were, appropriately, her first two guests for the online audio interviews several years ago - Milton Glaser and Stephan Sagmeister. You can't get much bigger guests than that.

Millman understands television. She is herself an attractive blonde and chose for her first two guests, not only world-class designers, but tall charismatic men. It fits a television formula, but it works.

The Design Matters TV show is not a "Wayne's World" community access program. This is real TV along the lines of "Inside the Actor's Studio". There is a large crew - producer (Hillman Curtis), director, stage manager, two teleprompters, audio technicians, lighting, projection, key grip, 4 cameras, a rotary track for the 2 cameras on stage (visible in the photo on left), a makeup artist, etc.

The design world waits to find out whether the pilot will get picked up.

Click on the heading above to follow Millman's blog.

Milton Glaser is One of the World's Greatest Living Designers

Any history of graphic design would have to include the long and influential career of Milton Glaser (right). He is most popularly known for his iconic Bob Dylan poster (left) and the ubiquitous "I (heart) NY" logo.

Appropriately, Glaser was Debbie Millman's first guest at the pilot taping for her "Design Matters" TV show. At 80 years of age, Glaser still has the magnetism and charm of a superstar designer. He makes good TV and had great chemistry with host Debbie Millman.

Glaser told the TV audience about the second version of his famous "I (heart) NY" logo that he did after the 9/11 tragedy. The heart, in the new version, has a smudge at the lower left side (symbolizing the location where the twin towers of the World Trade Center had been.)

After the taping of his interview, audience members gathered around Glaser for autographs and photos (right) until he finally had to escape into the cold New York night outside the School of the Visual Arts Theater in lower Manhattan. Interestingly, the theater exterior itself was designed by Glaser.

Click on the heading above to go to Glaser's website.

Stephan Sagmeister Says He's Not Nostalgic

Stephan Sagmeister (right) is one of the top graphic designers in the world. He enjoys the mobility that comes with fame and the ability to travel around the world to speak, consult and design. He gets to pick and choose projects that interest him.

Sagmeister was one of the guests on Debbie Millman's pilot TV show "Design Matters" taped in New York in December. He talked about making the notorious AIGA poster in which he had the information for the event scratched into his skin (left). (Yes, that's not Photoshopped - they are actual scars that have since faded away.) His latest book is "Things I Have Learned" (left).

During the taping of the TV pilot, Sagmeister said he is not a very nostalgic person. Printed magazines, for example, are on the way out, but even though he is a graphic designer, he finds no reason to mourn their loss. His attitude is things change - new visual forms are developed - get over it and move on.

He tried an experiment with his design firm in the past where they tried to be a "style-less" design firm that, rather than having an identifiable style, would create a new style for each new project. He said it wasn't a successful strategy. He found that, as eclectic and unique his style is, they do have a style and it is better to go with that rather than adapt completely for each client.

Sagmeister was also one of Debbie's first guests on her popular online blog version of Design Matters so, while we wait to see the outcome of the TV version of the show, you can hear their earlier audio interview online.

Click on the heading above to go to Sagmeister's website.

Isn't Television a Visual Medium?

It has always been curious to me that more art teachers don't recognize television as a visual medium. Many schools now have their own television studios right in the school but art teachers are seldom involved with any productions they do.

I can see that setting up a television studio is an expensive proposition that might keep an art teacher from including TV production in their program but what about schools that already have the equipment available in a dedicated studio?

Even without a studio to do actual productions there is a great deal students can learn about television. Composing an image, lighting, chiaroscuro, color, foreground, middle ground, background, costuming, makeup, set design and many other aspects of television are directly applicable to an art and design curriculum.

Watching real television being made shows how carefully every visual detail is considered. Shots are meticulously composed with extreme attention to elements that are too bright or too dark. Backgrounds are carefully examined for stray shadows, distracting lights or disruptive lines. Framing of images is exactingly controlled within the aspect ratio demanded by the medium for a headshot, a two-shot or a 3-shot (right). Lighting is carefully controlled to separate people from the background and provide modeling to the face with backlights and side lights. Makeup is applied to cut down shiny spots on the nose and forehead.

Television producers are applying design learning in complex and exacting ways. Design educators can help improve the quality of the visual design of school television productions by applying what we know about composition, light, color, perspective, etc.

Visioneer Design Challenge Receives Grant

The Wisconsin Art Education Association (WAEA) has been conducting a statewide design competition for middle and high school students called "Visioneer Design Challenge" for four years. In this program, professional designers and community design-related companies and leaders partner to help art teachers and students learn design strategies. Professional designers create and judge the events. Teachers and students learn together. Students take charge of their learning and preparation.

WAEA recently received a Gifted And Talented grant from the Wisconisn Department of Public Instruction to further prepare art teachers to identify and provide opportunities in art and design for students. The grant will allow WAEA to provide three in-service sessions in which substitute pay, food and transportation will be provided for 20 participating art teachers.

a. January 11 at Edgewood College, Madison, the initial in-service will focus on identifying students who are gifted and talented, creating a profile of these students, and how to work with them in the Art and Design areas once they are identified.

b. April 23 is the Visioneer Design Challenge program at University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Peck School of Art (left), where art teachers will observe and document what students are doing, how they are solving problems, and their energies and attitudes concerning learning new methods in art.

c. In May a follow-up session will be held at CESA's in each region. At this meeting teachers will assess what they have learned about students and their learning- what worked, what didn't and how to improve this process.

To learn more about the Visioneer Design Challenge program and its offerings, go to www.wiarted.org or click on the heading above. You can create a Visioneer Design Challenge for your city or state.