An international Conference, a scholarly Journal, a book Series, and an online knowledge Community.
This month we have three featured interviews from CreativeMornings, Design Museum and CreativeXperts Design Interviews…
A selection of projects by Japanese architects SANAA, named 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates.
For more of the selection at dezeen.com…
From dezeen.com…
Neville Brody has been named as the new Head of the Department of Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art, taking up the position on 1 January 2011. He will be succeeding Professor Dan Fern, who retires at the end of the academic year.
An internationally renowned designer, typographer, art director, brand strategist and consultant, Neville Brody has outstanding credentials in the world of graphic design. He currently holds a visiting professorship in the Faculty of Design at the London College of Communications, where he is an alumnus.
Neville Brody’s appointment will help the Royal College of Art explore new challenges and directions in the rapidly-moving world of communications. The move signals the College’s intention to maintain its vitality and relevance both within the discipline, and beyond.
“Neville Brody is both an eloquent advocate and a superb practitioner,“ said Dr Paul Thompson, Rector of the Royal College of Art. “His design talent traverses so many different media – traditional print and typography through to online and motion graphics, and packaging. He is one of the most influential designers of his generation and perfectly captures the interdisciplinary ethos of the Department of Communication Art & Design.” More…
From Dezeen….
London designer Min-Kyu Choi was awarded the Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award 2010 for his Folding Plug at a ceremony at the Design Museum in London. Min-Kyu Choi’s inspiration came from having to carry around the world’s largest plug (UK pin plug) with the MacBook Air, the world’s thinnest laptop. In creating a plug which could fold flat for easy transportation, Choi received much praise on showcasing the plug at the Royal College of Art’s graduate show in 2009, with a brilliant and seemingly obvious improvement to a product that had changed little since its inception in 1946.
Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum comments ‘It’s great to see such a practical but elegant demonstration of what design can do to make everyday life so much better. Min-Kyu Choi is a designer just setting out on his career and he clearly has a great future ahead of him.’ More…
From dezeen.com…
Chicago office Krueck & Sexton have completed the restoration of two apartment towers in Chicago by German-American architect Mies van der Rohe. More…
By Rowan Moore at The Observer…
Debra Dupar, pregnant with her fifth child, is sitting outside her new house. She is washed by the noon sun of an early spring day, nursing a pinkish-red drink and chatting to her friends. A short way off a camera crew is setting up, assessing shots, squinting at the light, chatting to potential interviewees. They are working for Spike Lee, who is making a documentary about the place where Debra lives.
A guided tour of about a dozen people tramps along the vestigial street, marked out by some sinewy evergreen oaks, or “live oaks” as they are called here. Two men, self-consciously dressed – architects, probably – get out of a maroon taxi, scan the scene, sweep it with camcorders, say to each other: “OK, I’m good”, get back in the taxi and go, all in about 60 seconds. And then the man from the London Observer wants to look inside Debra’s house. More…
London curator Alex Newson walks through this year’s Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition on show at the museum until 6 June 2010. In the podcast Newson talks about some of his favourite projects from the exhibition, including BMW’s GINA concept car, a Folding Plug by Min-Kyu Choi and Thomas Heatherwick’s bench Extrusions.
For the podcast and photographs…
Blaine Brownell at The New York Times…
COME April, the first tenants may finally be able to move into Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, now the tallest building in the world. Despite a series of setbacks since its ostensible opening two months ago, including the closing of the observation deck, the tower has already prompted an exuberant proliferation of record-breaking statistics: it soars more than half a mile high, stands twice the height of the Empire State Building, boasts views that reach 60 miles, etc. But all the hoopla misses two other symbolic milestones that should enliven the history books. Namely, the Burj Khalifa is primarily residential and its structural frame is reinforced concrete.
Why are these two facts so important? The pursuit of maximum altitude is a major technological undertaking, requiring extraordinary economic investment, significant innovations in materials and a high tolerance for risk; as we survey the monuments of architectural history, tall structures provide remarkable insights about the aspirations of the societies that created them.
Think back to the Middle Ages. The soaring cathedrals of Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres were awe-inspiring landmarks in stone. Gothic churches maximized the structural capacity of available materials, transforming heavy rock into delicate, lofted skeletons enclosing voluminous spaces. Pilgrims to these edifices would no doubt have been awed by their apparent defiance of gravity, and moved by the breathtaking spiritual power conveyed by the churches’ vast, light-pierced interiors. More…
By Andrew Romano at Newsweek…
Late last week, President Barack Obama announced that he would be appointing a gentleman named Edward Tufte to the independent panel that advises the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (i.e., the team of inspectors general who track how stimulus funds are spent). It wasn’t a particularly sexy announcement; no thrill went up Chris Matthews’s leg or anything. But in its own quiet way, the news was heartening for anyone who believes that government can and should communicate more clearly with the American people—especially when it comes to the much derided (and misunderstood) Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Among fans, Tufte is known as “the Da Vinci of Data.” After receiving a B.A. and M.S. in statistics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, the Beverly Hills native launched his academic career by signing on to teach courses in political economy and data analysis at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs. Over time, he became increasingly interested in information design—charts, graphs, diagrams—and in 1982 he took out a second mortgage on his home in order to self-publish his first book on the subject, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It redefined the field and was later named one of Amazon’s 100 best books of the century. More…
From GOOD…
The White House and GOOD are officially joining forces to ask: What kind of healthy kid app would you like to see developed?
As part of the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign, which hopes to eradicate childhood obesity within a generation, today Michelle Obama announced the Apps for Healthy Kids competition run the USDA. The contest will help to encourage innovative design and development, with up to $40,000 in cash prizes.
…
Apps for Healthy Kids challenges software developers, game designers, students, and other innovators to develop fun and engaging tools and games that drive children, especially “tweens” (ages 9-12)–directly or through their parents–to eat better and be more physically active. More…
From Stephen Miller in The Wall Street Journal:
Bruce Graham was the architect behind Chicago’s Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world when it was opened in 1974 and still the tallest building in the U.S.
Mr. Graham, who died Saturday at age 84, was senior design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and was involved with projects including Canary Wharf in London and King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia.
But Chicago was where Mr. Graham left his greatest mark, not only in the Sears Tower, but in the city’s second-tallest building, the John Hancock Center, two buildings that together bracket the city’s skyline—much of which he also helped design.
He also played an important role in developing a downtown master plan for Chicago.
Following in the footsteps of such giants of Chicago architecture as Daniel Burnham and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Mr. Graham was an outspoken advocate of the power of architecture to communicate messages of optimism and power.
From Edward Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman in the MITSloan Management Review:
On the (Very, Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites
The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That’s great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company’s values.
A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don’t do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That’s flabby design for flabby content. The models for presenting nonfiction should not be what your competitors are doing, but rather excellence in reporting nonfiction. And there are terrific examples out there for reporting nonfiction.
The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they’re imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It’s silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.
Winners in 7 categories, including: Architecture, Fashion, Furniture and more…
Brit Insurance Architecture Award 2010: Monterrey Housing, Mexico
Brit Insurance Furniture Award 2010: Grassworks, Netherlands
The Earth Awards recognize design that offers groundbreaking solutions to the ecological and social challenges of the 21st century. The 2009 recipient is Neri Oxman, acknowledged for her work in interdisciplinary design and design research.
From her profile at Materialecology:
Neri Oxman is an architect and researcher whose work attempts to establish new forms of experimental design and novel processes of material practice at the interface of design, computer science, material engineering and ecology. A graduate of the AA School of Architecture and previously a medical scholar at the Hebrew University and the Technion Institute of Technology, she is currently based at MIT where she is a presidential research fellow and a PhD candidate in Design Computation. Transcending disciplinary and professional boundaries, Oxman’s work pioneers Material Computation as a design paradigm beyond typological expression. She promotes the aesthetics of material formation and behavior as a scientific contribution to ecological activism.
Oxman on performance-driven design: