An international Conference, a scholarly Journal, a book Series, and an online knowledge Community.
From Dezeen…
Dezeen teamed up with Design Association in Japan to give designers free exhibition space at the Environmental Design and Art Container Exhibition in Tokyo from 29 October to 3 November this year.
Each of the 18 winners will be given a free 20ft container space at the Environmental Container Exhibition at Jingu-Gaien in central Tokyo, plus an installation and construction budget of up to 300,000 Yen for international winners and 200,000 for Japanese winners. More…
The fifth issue of Volume 4 of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is now available.
Volume 4, Number 5 contains:
Continue reading ‘Design Journal, Volume 4, Number 5 now available’
As part of the process of publishing Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.
In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.
If you would like to referee papers submitted to the Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal, please email journals@designprinciplesandpractices.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.
We are accepting book proposals for the imprint On Design.
Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.
Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.
If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.
We are accepting submissions for the 2011 volume of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal.
Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is a site of discussion exploring the meaning and purpose of ‘design’, as well as speaking in grounded ways about the task of design and the use of designed artefacts. The resulting conversations weave between the theoretical and the empirical, research and application, market pragmatics and social idealism.
In professional and disciplinary terms, the journal traverses a broad sweep to construct a transdisciplinary dialogue which encompasses the perspectives and practices of: anthropology, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, business, cognitive science, communication studies, computer science, cultural studies, design studies, education, e-learning, engineering, ergonomics, fashion, graphic design, history, information systems, industrial design, industrial engineering, instructional design, interior design, interaction design, interface design, journalism, landscape architecture, law, linguistics and semiotics, management, media and entertainment, psychology, sociology, software engineering, technical communication, telecommunications, urban planning and visual design.
The journal is relevant for academics in the design and applied sciences, professions, social sciences and humanities, research students, design practitioners, industry-based designers, professionals and managers, public administrators and trainers and industry consultants.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
Paper submission guidelines and timelines are available online.
To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Design Conference in Chicago, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
Join our Design Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.
For information on sharing your photos with Flickr, please read more here.
The fourth issue of Volume 4 of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is now available.
Volume 4, Number 4 contains:
Continue reading ‘Design Journal, Volume 4, Number 4 now available’
From Joan Dejean at The New York Times…
What exactly is a living room? Is it a formal room for special occasions, or a casual space for everyday life? The meaning has been unclear ever since the late 17th century, when architects first considered what “living” in the home meant.
In 1691, in the first edition of what was to become a hugely influential architectural manual, “Lessons of Architecture,” Charles Augustin d’Aviler drew a distinction between formal display spaces and a new kind of room, spaces that were “less grand.” D’Aviler used an unusual phrase to describe these new rooms: “le plus habité” — literally the most lived in. This marked the first time that an architect discussed the notion of living rooms, rooms intended for everyday life.
Before this, anyone who could afford an architect-designed residence wanted it to serve as proof of status and wealth; almost all rooms were display spaces. But once d’Aviler opened the door, French architects began making rooms for specific activities of daily life integral to the design of the home: initially the bedroom, then dressing rooms and bathrooms. These “less grand” rooms were the original living rooms. More…
From n+1 magazine, originally published by Paper Monument…
“Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.” March 21 – June 20, 2010. Pacific Design Center, MOCA.
“Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas.” September 18, 2008 – January 4, 2009. SFMOMA.
Las Vegas was once assessed as “the grand proletarian cultural locomotive.” It is unlikely that anyone would venture such an appraisal today, even if a demographically more precise “bourgeoisie” now stood in for the proles. But this was not a farfetched metaphor at the time of coinage: Las Vegas was originally a railway town, and in 1968 it still had a public station. Californians, always the city’s chief patrons, could arrive via locomotive in a matter of hours. Nevertheless, they usually drove. Drive-ins and -throughs were booming. Cinemas, churches, restaurants, post offices, liquor stores; never had a city catered so comprehensively to the motorist.
So when Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and their students at the Yale School of Architecture arrived in Las Vegas, much of the curiosity that drove them was automotive in nature. The group visited Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard—the Strip—to document and theorize the city’s vernacular architecture, and their findings eventually formed the counterintuitive classic, Learning from Las Vegas. “Research,” in their rigorously free-wheeling view, was often as simple as pointing a camera out of a car window. Of the many angles from which the group approached the city during their architectural census, the view from the blacktop pervades. More…
From Matt Tyrnauer at Vanity Fair…
Lever House, the first all-glass International Style office building in New York City, passes its half-century mark this year. The 24-story green glass building, which has been partially hidden by scaffolding for the past three years, has undergone a $60 million refurbishment—including a top-to-bottom restoration of its curtain wall, which, being the first of its kind, was technologically primitive and thus had decayed badly over the decades, to the point where it was literally starting to disintegrate. As one of the most acclaimed buildings of the 20th century, Lever House has often been called the Platonic building of the 1950s, a sea-foam-tinted gem which brought to a new level of refinement the Le Corbusier–Mies van der Rohe style of lightweight glass-and-steel construction. Its meticulous restoration is a cause to celebrate.
In 1952, the last year of Harry S. Truman’s administration, when only three percent of the American public traveled by plane and only 34 percent had TV sets, Lever House looked as if it had dropped from the sky onto Park Avenue across from the Racquet and Tennis Club and the grand old Montana apartments. Its elegant glass-and-stainless-steel slabs—a horizontal one set over columns on an open ground floor, and a vertical one perched as if floating above it—were quite unlike anything New Yorkers had ever seen. By day the structure shimmered in the sunlight and reflected the brick and limestone buildings around it. By night it lit up like a taut rectangular lantern—a vision of the future on a block between 53rd and 54th Streets. For weeks after Lever House opened its doors in April, curious citizens lined up to enter its airy lobby for a closer look. The architecture critic Lewis Mumford noted that the public was acting as if the new soap-company headquarters were “the eighth wonder of the world.” More…
Want to get your 2011 publications underway now?
We are now accepting submissions for the 2011 volume of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal. The next submission deadline is Monday 13 August 2010.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
Paper submission guidelines are available online.
From Aditya Dev Sood at 3quarksdaily.com…
At my table were two diplomats and a cultural researcher. My own role was designated as ‘designer.’ We were told that there was a post-conflict situation in an African nation where the U.N. had been called in. Local institutions and forms of self-governance had been eroded during the long and bloody conflict. Child soldiers had been involved in the civil war on both sides, and the competing ends of Justice and Rehabilitation had both to be balanced. Our job was to plan the series of activities that would result in a contextually-appropriate program of activities for the U.N. teams working in the region. We had two hours.
We began by trying to itemize all the different internal and external stakeholders in the situation, from U.N. agencies to neighboring countries to international investors, and gave up once we got into double digits. Then we tried to bound the problem by trying to establish what kind of time-line and terms of reference we were working with. It seemed foolish to try to do anything in less than six weeks time, for meanwhile the country was burning, and the U.N. agencies would need a plan to start working with as soon as possible. But six weeks was also nowhere near enough time to collect meaningful cultural and socioeconomic data on twenty or thirty million people. We agreed that we would have to rely on secondary data from prior sociocultural research, while also involving regional and in-country experts. We also wanted U.N. agencies to pre-pone our terms of reference to a period well prior to the U.N. flag going up in the nation in question. More…
The third issue of Volume 4 of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is now available.
Volume 4, Number 3 contains:
Continue reading ‘Design Journal, Volume 4, Number 3 now available’
From Vanity Fair…
Beginning in 1963, when she teamed up with Bea Feitler as co–art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Ruth Ansel has been busy revolutionizing the look and feel of American magazines. Vanity Fair’s design director from 1983 to 1988, Ansel also left her visual stamp on The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and House & Garden before going on to found her own design studio, in 1992. As Oyster Press publishes Hall of Femmes: Ruth Ansel, VF.com celebrates the designer’s remarkable career with snapshots of her life and art—described by the subject herself. More…
From Martin Filler at The New York Review of Books…
Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus—the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe’s sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919. It then flourished from 1925 to 1932 in Dessau, an industrial backwater where the school’s first director, Walter Gropius, built its image-making headquarters (see illustration on page 25); and it ultimately but vainly sought refuge in cosmopolitan Berlin, where it closed in 1933, when Hitler took power. Now, nine decades after its inception and three quarters of a century after its dissolution, the Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and immense achievement than ever before. More…
From Matt Tyrnauer at VF Daily…
When Romans criticize their incomparably beautiful city, they often mutter, terzo mondo—third world—and shake their heads. The sharp contrasts of Italy’s capital are part of its wonder and joy. The primness of the seat of the Catholic Church, where timid nuns scurry about in groups of two and three, stands in stark contrast to the overt sensuality—in mood and dress—of the general populace. The city is packed with more art treasures than any other in the Western world, yet, at least by European standards, Rome is an extreme backwater in terms of anything having to do with pre-19th-century art. Last week there was a sense of renewal and redemption in the air here as a new much-awaited museum devoted to contemporary art finally opened its doors. The mammoth structure, called MAXXI—short for Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI—is designed by Zaha Hadid, and is located in Flamino, a residential and former light-industrial area near the Tiber. MAXXI’s opening week was greeted with delight by both local sophisticates and average Romans. Romans have been praying for something to reinvigorate contemporary culture in this ancient place, which has been in an innovative art drought since the golden ago of Cinecitta expired many decades ago. To make matters more frustrating, MAXXI’s arrival has been long-delayed and full of dramatic twists and turns. (It was supposed to open in 2005.) More…
The second issue of Volume 4 of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is now available.
Volume 4, Number 2 contains:
Continue reading ‘Design Journal, Volume 4, Number 2 now available’
From Michael M. Grynbaum at The New York Times…
In a city of world-class art museums and an instantly recognizable skyline, no image is more closely examined than the New York City subway map, the ubiquitous blue-and-taupe rectangle scrutinized by millions.
Now the subterranean icon is poised to get a spruce-up.
Next month, the will unveil a resized, recolored and simplified edition of the well-known map, its first overhaul in more than a decade.
Manhattan will become taller, bulkier and 30 percent wider, to better display its spaghetti of subway lines. Staten Island, meanwhile, will shrink by half. The spreadsheetlike “service guide,” along the map’s bottom border, will be eliminated, and the other three boroughs will grow to fill the space. More…
The latest issue, Volume 4, Number 1, of of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal includes:
From Dezeen.com…
Italian design collective Acquacalda have designed a range of kitchen gadgets based on the laws of physics, including this device for pouring exactly equal amounts of wine into four glasses.
Called Applied Physics, the collection also includes a self-hydrating plant pot, a glass with a measuring reservoir, a bowl for weighing dry food in water and a vase that indicates the water level inside through its handle. More…
From dezeen.com…
The final design of the New Bus for London, based on the much-loved Routemaster, was today unveiled by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and London’s Transport Commissioner, Peter Hendy.
The bus will use the latest green technology. It will be 15 per cent more fuel efficient than existing hybrid buses, and 40 per cent more efficient than conventional diesel double decks and much quieter on the streets.
The pioneering design makes use of lightweight materials, with glass highlighting key features and producing a light and airy feel inside the bus. An impressive glass ‘swoop’ at the rear and offside pick out the two staircases and provide a dramatic visual effect. An asymmetric design for the front-end completes the futuristic look. More…
From Margalit Fox at The New York Times…
It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television.
It is, of course, the Anthora, the cardboard cup of Grecian design that has held New Yorkers’ securely for nearly half a century. Introduced in the 1960s, the Anthora was long made by the hundreds of millions annually, nearly every cup destined for the New York area. More…
The first issue of Volume 4 of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is now available.
Volume 4, Number 1 contains:
Continue reading ‘Design Journal, Volume 4, Number 1 now available’
From Physorg.com…
Although it looks small and unassuming, the tiny origami crane sitting in a sample dish in University of Illinois professor Jennifer Lewis’ lab heralds a new method for creating complex three-dimensional structures for biocompatible devices, microscaffolding and other microsystems. The penny-sized titanium bird began as a printed sheet of titanium hydride ink. More…
Design Conference
2-4 February 2011
Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2011 Design Conference registration options.
The 2011 Design Conference will be held at Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy from 2-4 February 2011.
The conference is a cross-disciplinary forum which brings together researchers, teachers and practitioners to discuss the nature and future of design. The resulting conversations weave between the theoretical and the empirical, research and application, market pragmatics and social idealism. More…
The Design Principles and Practices Newsletter re-launch marks the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Design Principles and Practices Community. The newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Design Principles and Practices Community.
If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to designprinciplesandpractices.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.
If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at support@designprinciplesandpractices.com.
From GOOD…
The pat social critique of architecture is doubtless as old as architecture itself: High design is nice to have, but it’s a luxury. MASS, a new Boston- and Kigali, Rwanda-based firm, aims to change the mindset that shelves ambitious building design in times of crisis. MASS co-founder Marika Clark says the revelation came three years ago, when she and fellow designers learned that NGOs often weren’t using architects for major projects in troubled areas: “[They] were building critical infrastructure work without the use of design professionals.” And at first architecture was a tough sell, even to current client Partners in Health: “PIH was very unsure of how architects could be useful at that point,” she says. Eventually, the organization came around, commissioning the project MASS now sees as its flagship, the under-construction Butaro Hospital in the Burera District. More…