Nicolas Roope from POKE talks about “things vs ads”

The Savannah College of Art & Design’s ID department continues to impress us with its significant ties to real-world industry and the educational opportunities this affords to its students. SCAD’s latest team-up was with heavy equipment manufacturer JCB, who collaborated with SCAD ID students on a re-design of their 3CX backhoe loader, show above.

The new 3CX features aesthetic changes to its loader arms, cab roof cap and engine hood that make it look more “rugged.”

“We gave it more of an Americas look,” said Chris Giorgianni, JCB’s general manager for product marketing. “From a look and feel aspect, it’s always been about the guts of the machine. Now it looks on the outside the way it performs.”

The relationship [between JCB and SCAD] goes back three years and started with redesigns of accessories, like in-cab cupholders, assembly line workstations and skid steer loader attachments.

The 3CX was the first product redesign on which the company and the college collaborated. And it will be the first of many, Giorgianni said, given the results.

“The construction community is pretty tight-knit, and you end up with tunnel vision,” he said. “The students challenge everything. They have virgin eyes. Every meeting we have, they mention some simple improvement that is an aha moment for us. We come away saying, ‘Why didn’t we think of that.’ “

Read more about it at Savannah Now’s source article.

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I had a friend who was a caretaker for an extremely wealthy family in Westchester, New York. The family had been rich for generations, and everything they owned was “the best” and was brand-new. One of my friends’ tasks was keeping the family’s considerable fleet of cars filled with gas, and one day when he was returning with the family SUV, he carelessly let a tree branch on the estate gouge the paint on one side. When he confessed his crime to the family patriarch, he couldn’t have been more surprised at the response: “Oh,” said Rich Dad, “that’s too bad. I guess we better get a new one.”

“Uh…what?” my friend said. The truck was less than a year old.

“We’ll get rid of the truck and get a new one. It’s no good, right?”

In short, the patriarch had been raised the same way he was raising his kids–to believe that only new, pristine things were good, and when you needed something, you went out and bought it.

In contrast, I remember Karim Rashid recounting that his father was a set designer who had built many of the things in Karim’s childhood home. He had thus had impressed upon him from a young age that if you wanted or needed something, you designed and built it. (The philosophy’s certainly served him well, as the man has something like 3,000 designs in production.)

Obviously these are not binary choices in how to raise children, but if I had kids I’d certainly lean towards the latter philosophy rather than the former, and not just out of my eternal indigence.

A good place to start might be Brooklyn-based author Heather Swain’s “Make These Toys: 101 Clever Creations Using Everyday Items,” recently covered in the New York Times:

Kids who spend hours communing with technology — plugged into televisions, computers and iPods — may benefit from some good, old-fashioned arts and crafts fun. Especially if they can then play with what they make.

…”The process of picking out the project, getting stuff together and making it” is only half of it, she says. “Then they go play with it. It’s not over. That’s what I like.”

…The toys aren’t intended to last forever. After all, they’re made from cardboard tubes and glue.

“It’s going to break. It’s going to go away,” Swain says. “But they can make it again. They can change it and innovate.”

Amen to that. If my kid scratches the family car, I won’t learn about it because he told me to get a new one; he’ll just show up to the dinner table with paint under his fingernails and a respirator-impression on his face.

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One of the most awkward social interactions I regularly experience is visiting a friend’s home and suffering the “Dude you GOTTA see this YouTube clip” moment, where I am forced to stand awkwardly behind and to the side of their chair, peer at the screen they’re clicking on, and pretend to be amused by a 90-second animation of a goddamn squirrel fighting Darth Vader or whatever.

The way we use our homes and interact with people in them is now very different than the way people used their homes 10, 20, 50 years ago. Nowadays most everyone has some form of “home office,” even if it’s just a small desk with a laptop on it, where aforementioned YouTube moments are inflicted on guests, and lately I’m seeing more homes that lack televisions altogether (as does mine).

I bring this up to ask you: Given our modern style of living, if you had to write a handbook for designing the interior of the modern-day home, what rules would you lay down?

For some inspiration, check out “Easier Living, by Design.” It’s an article by Alexandra Lange in the New York Times that covers industrial designers Mary and Russel Wright’s book from 1950, “Guide to Easier Living,” which breaks down the Wrights’ takes on what to fill your house with and how to arrange it.

Writes Lange,

…The Wrights’ work was revolutionary at the time: not only did they simplify our plates and mugs, chairs and cabinets, but they simplified the way we were to live and work in our homes. Many other designers and manufacturers created modern design for the home in the 1950s, but few showed how to use it with the detail and multimedia platform the Wrights used so effectively. Without the tools for contemporary life they and others provided, our lives today would run very differently. But have we truly achieved the easier living that the Wrights preached?

To a degree, yeah, I guess. But in everyone’s home office there should at least be a dedicated chair for YouTube-clip inflictees, so we don’t have to suffer on our feet.

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Yesterday the White House held a luncheon in celebration of the 2010 National Design Awards honorees, hosted by none other than the First Lady herself. Bill Moggridge, Director of the Cooper-Hewitt, writes in the White House blog:

…The award winners and finalists attended a special luncheon at the White House, hosted by the First Lady. It was a very festive event and the setting reinforced the tremendous amount of design talent that exists in this country. Mrs. Obama’s speech emphasized the importance of design and arts education, and celebrated the value of the work of the award winners.

Wayne Clough, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, introduced the National Design Award program and thanked the sponsors, and I showed slides of the winners and their work, naming both finalists and winners, you can see them here. I was lucky enough to sit next to the First Lady for lunch, so we talked about expanding the opportunities for high-schoolers to study design and develop their creative talents.

For those of you who don’t have time to sit through the 17+ minute video, Mrs. Obama’s speech has been transcribed here.

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Motorcity Europe is launching a new series of automotive design workshops in August and September of this year.

2 Workshops will be available: A Two Day Intensive Weekend Seminar and a Five Day Extended Project Workshop. The Five Day Workshop will provide participants the opportunity to develop a portfolio project alongside professional designers from companies like, Kia, Jaguar, Ford, Mazda, Pinninfarina, Citroen, and more. Both Workshops are available in two levels: intermediate and advanced.

The workshops are open to students, professionals, working designers, and non-designers, with the goal of improving skills, marketability, and general automotive design knowledge base.

To register, go to Motorcity Europe’s website and download the workshop brochure for more details.

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The Austin Center for Design is a new school aiming to bridge social entrepreneurship and interaction design. Core77 asks Jon Kolko, the school’s director, to fill us in on what’s coming up for September.

Core77: We are excited about the new school you’ve started, the Austin Center for Design. Can you tell us more about it?
Jon Kolko: The Austin Center for Design [AC4D] is a school intended to teach interaction design and social entrepreneurship. I have some lofty goals for the school: to transform society through design and design education. My vision is that the hard work and dedication that designers put into making physical products, digital artifacts, and strategy work for the Fortune 500 can be redirected towards large scale social concerns, and that new business models can be created to make this redirection of talent sustainable for all involved.

C77: How would you describe the overlap/relationship between interaction design and social entrepreneurship? How do they inform and benefit one another? Why is it important to teach them together?
JK: I take a broad view of interaction design, which is the design of behavior. Interaction design is typically conflated with computing and digital design, and many interaction design solutions have a digital component. But interaction design has a strong history as a discipline focused on behavioral change. And from this perspective, it’s the perfect pairing for social entrepreneurship. This form of design is starting to get tremendous respect in business as a strategic differentiator, as interaction designers are typically good at holding complex problems in their heads and considering the repercussions of a small change in a larger system. Social entrepreneurs are thinking about new ways to drive social change while considering new business models and financial structures. In both cases, skills like facilitation, complex system modeling, and physical and digital prototyping are critical.

Kick It, designed by Stefanie Danhope-Smith, is a program to “quit smoking as easily as you started.”

C77: Can you describe the curricular structure of the school? What degrees are being offered?
JK: The program is supportive of multiple disciplines—it’s not intended only for designers, but instead for anyone that is interested in learning the process of social innovation. I’ve had a lot of interest from designers, but also with computer scientists, engineers, marketers, and artists. Students who complete the program receive a certificate in interaction design and social entrepreneurship, and my intention is to seek accreditation within five years in order to offer graduate-level design degrees.

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That’s the 47-8 Milkjug by Inga Dora Johannsdottir, a project done for her 105 Sustainability course at the Design Department of the Iceland Academy of the Arts. (The 105 Sustainability course was founded by designer Hrafnkell Birgisson and is supervised by product designer Tinna Gunnarsdottir, and aims to “stress the importance of sustainability and diversity in local areas.”) The product caught our eye, and communicating with Johannsdottir gave us a glimpse at a facet of Icelandic design education. Johannsdottir broke the course down for us and explained her project:

[In 105 Sustainability] we became acquainted with production methods and inside knowledge of selected companies mainly located in the postal code 105 Reykjavik, the same postal code our school is in.

We visited nine companies (for example, a gold- and silversmith, sowing factory, plastic factory, metal factory or cardboard factory) to get a look at the material that they have and what kind of machines they have, and how they work. Afterwards, we selected a company to work with and developed ideas for a new product in cooperation with the company, which in turn helped us making the prototype.

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A you may already know, Core-fave Jon Kolko has launched a new educational institution, the Austin Center for Design, in Austin, Texas. There’s a virtual open house coming up at the start of April, so you may want to check it out. Here’s the pitch:

The program exists to transform society through design and design education. This transformation occurs through the development of design knowledge directed towards all forms of social and humanitarian problems. The center explicitly tackles problems related to:

* Homelessness and transient housing solutions
* Healthcare access, affordability, and comprehension
* Nutrition, personal wellness, and consumption
* Education and job placement
* Poverty, as a general state of being
* Sustainability and environmental impact

The Center offers an innovative curriculum that repositions creative design education in the context of designing for the public sector. Students learn the interdisciplinary skills of creative design thinking, as applied to solving complicated problems of society and culture. These skills broadly include divergent thinking, ideation, visualization, synthesis, prototyping, and the managing of complexity and data organization. Students use these skills to develop systems, services, products, and new business models that address pressing social issues.

Jon will be running the virtual open house on April 1st, at 6:00pm central time. Visit the site for more information and to sign up, and to learn more about the school.

Congrats Jon!

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This may indeed be a close second to the dream of getting a 747 aircraft: MoMA has announced that it has acquired the @ symbol for its permanent collection. Here’s from their blog:

Contemporary art, architecture, and design can take on unexpected manifestations, from digital codes to Internet addresses and sets of instructions that can be transmitted only by the artist. The process by which such unconventional works are selected and acquired for our collection can take surprising turns as well, as can the mode in which they’re eventually appreciated by our audiences. While installations have for decades provided museums with interesting challenges involving acquisition, storage, reproducibility, authorship, maintenance, manufacture, context–even questions about the essence of a work of art in itself–MoMA curators have recently ventured further; a good example is the recent acquisition by the Department of Media and Performance Art of Tino Sehgal’s performance Kiss.

The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had”–because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @–as art objects befitting MoMA’s collection. The same criteria of quality, relevance, and overall excellence shared by all objects in MoMA’s collection also apply to these entities.

There’s a ton more to the post, including some fascinating history of the symbol. Read the whole piece here.

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