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.

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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…

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.

For the article…

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.

For the article…

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:

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but in cyberspace it might be.

Computer science researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a system that will blend teamwork and collaboration with powerful graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional renderings of buildings, neighborhoods and potentially even entire cities.

The new system, PhotoCity, grew from the original work of a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavely, who while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington, developed a set of algorithms that generated three-dimensional models from unstructured collections of two-dimensional photos.

For the article…

I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.

For the complete essay…

From Eye blog at eyemagazine.com

Victor Margolin, Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a lucid thinker and vivid critic, shared some critical thoughts with Ksenija Berk last winter, in this two-part interview. His overview of basic ideas in design thinking brought to light some thoughts that could foster positive change in society – and in design itself, which all too often forgets its chief goal: the wellbeing of all mankind.

Professor Margolin argues that design can’t introduce positive changes into any society if we fail to create a sustainable economy on a global scale. Sustainability is a fundamental value of life, not something that can be found solely in a product; it is a total way of living.

More…

The final issue of Volume 3 of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is now available.

Volume 3, Number 6 contains:

• Designing the Holocaust at the Sites of the Shoah and Museum Stores by Cayo Gamber.
• Clean Water, Deep Learning: A Design Project about Water Quality in the Wilson River Catchment Area, Northern River of New South Wales by Leonie Lane.
• New Concept of Immateriality within the Architectural Context by Ozlem Kandemir.
• Evolutionary Performance: Passive Design for a Hotel in Central India by James Kraus.
• Artefacts: A Site for Poetic Inquiry by Stephen Wischer and Megan Gette.
• DIY and Co-creation: Representatives of a Democratizing Tendency by JanWillem Hoftijzer.
• Design, Violence and Subjectivity by Colin Davies.
• What is Good Fashion Design? The Shift in Fashion Education of the 21st Century by Noël Palomo-Lovinski and Steven Faerm.
• Evolutionary Formfinding: Conceptual Integration of Patterns and Physical Aspects by Julia Stratil.
• Complexity, Human Agents, and Architectural Design: A Computational Framework by Yin Gao and Ning Gu.
• Interactive Systems Design in Retail Environments: Dramatic Structure as Sense-making Strategy by Catherine Hu and Lawrence Lau.
• Living Upgrade by Design: A Vision for the Future by João Martins and Luis Mota.

• Integration in Architectural Design: Methods and Implementations by Ajla Aksamija.
• Semantic Interference Effects of Text and Images in Stories Presented on Web by Gopala Krishna Koduri, Amitash Ojha and Bipin Indurkhya.
• The Collaborative Redesign of Wikipedia: How Templates Transformed a Content Management System into a Social Networking Architecture by Matthijs den Besten.
• Install: Understanding, Consilience, and Communication by Román Montoto.
• How Learning from Automotive Sound Quality can Inform Urban Soundscape Design by Rebecca Cain and Paul Jennings.
• Development of a QFD Based Collaborative Design Approach to Reduce Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) by Himan Kanishka Gardiye Punchihewa and Diane Elizabeth Gyi.
• Spatiality, the Gas Turbine Jet Engine and Developmental Design by Rhodri Windsor Liscombe.
• Copy & Paste: Design in the Era of Postproduction by Lorenzo Imbesi.
• Teaching Eco-Fashion: Is Sustainable Fashion a New Paradigm? by Linda T. Lee and Rosalie Regni.
• Traces, Relics & X-rays: The Form of Absence by Paul Robinson.
• The Berlin Manifesto: Social Transformation for Sustainable Design by Patrick J. Ashton and Matthew Kubik.
• [Re]Vision: The Role of Graphic Design[ers]… by Samantha Lawrie.
• A Practice of Ephemeral Urban Design by Rochus Urban Hinkel.
• Research, Collaboration and Community in an Interactive Design Curriculum by Adream Blair-Early.
• The Governing Principle behind Design: Part I: Unifying Methodologies, Disciplines and Cultures through the Physical Principle of Least Action pp by Chris Thaxton, Wendy Winn, Jay Fenwick, Terry McClannon and Margot Olson.
• The Governing Principle behind Design: Part II: The Least Action Principle, Transparency, and Universalization by Chris Thaxton, Wendy Winn, Jay Fenwick, Terry McClannon and Margot Olson.
• The Governing Principle behind Design: Part III: Generalization of the Physical Principle of Least Action to the Design Process by Chris Thaxton.

Congratulations to Olga den Besten, John Horton, Peter Kraftl and Peter Adey, the winners of the International Award for Excellence in the area of design principles and practices for their paper Building a ‘box’: Discourses of School Design in the UK

Abstract: There is currently considerable activity in the UK directed towards the reconstruction or refurbishment of secondary and primary schools. In this context, the paper looks closely at various discourses that evolve around school architecture. The omnipresent discourses at the national level are those of and around Building Schools for the Future (BSF) - a major government school building programme. BSF is presented and perceived as an ambitious project set out to bring radical changes for the better not only to material conditions of schooling, but also to the concept of secondary education itself. However, as the “first waves” of BSF are carried out, reports are emerging in the media that express disappointment with the project. At the local level, we have found, through an in-depth ethnographic research in several British schools, an array of discourses that contribute to the complex decision-making process of creating an individual school building. Such discourses, in which school staff, pupils, architects, consultants or local authorities are engaged, carry with them very concrete implications for the design of material school spaces. For example, a discourse of heritage brought in by the architects in one of our case-studies, resulted in a particular – rectangular – shape of the future school building, which would be congruent with the industrial past of the area where the school is situated. The paper also shows how the national BSF discourses are translated to the local level.

If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.