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Check out all of Core77's event coverage of Art Center's Serious Play Design Conference 2008 in one easy-to-browse place. Congrats to the organizers, and good luck with clarifying the "bi-annual" over the next two years!
Serious Play 2008: Art Center Turns on the Fun
Serious Play 2008: Hockenberry and the Space Dudes
Serious Play 2008: Play Study, Places to Play, and Playing With Paper
Serious Play 2008: Google, Second Life and *Magic*
Serious Play 2008: Opening Night Target Party
Serious Play 2008: Tuxedo Travels and Mentos With Coke
Serious Play 2008: John Maeda Rocks!
Serious Play 2008: frog's Crows and Eames' Elephants
Serious Play 2008: Paula Scher, Seriously
Serious Play 2008: How Things Work, Inside/Outside
Serious Play 2008: Bruce McCall, Aimee Mullins and Your Moment of John Oliver
For those of you not hangin' out on in California after Serious Play this weekend, stroll over to Brooklyn Designs. Hosted in Saint Anne's Warehouse, the show features the largest mix to-date of furniture, tabletop, and decorative arts. Be sure to check out Kiel Mead's unique display of jewelry and Furthurdesign's modern glass objects by William Couig (above). An added bonus this year is the new Cash n' Carry boutique - a sure-hit for those of us still searching for that perfect Mother's Day gift! - as well as the stellar group of speakers lined up to through-out the day.
All this content makes us wonder, once again, why Brooklyn Designs happens the week before ICFF? If only the visiting design world could get a glimpse of this first-hand!
Thru May 11th.
Posted by: elle* | Comments (0)
Home stretch!
"I don't know what I'm doing here," says Bruce McCall. He doesn't own a cell phone and paints on paper. But he did work in the automotive industry after a love of sports cars as a kid. And you can totally see this in his work as a painter and illustrator of probably a zillion New Yorker covers. He even had a show called "Serious Nonsense." You can divide his outlook on life into these themes: Retrofuturism, Techno-Archaeology, Faux Nostalgia, Hyperbolic Overkill, Shamelessly Cheap and Urban Absurdism. ("The brainless rich are the most fun to make fun of, so I do a lot of that.") But he's got some pretty striking design detail in there: Each features a miracle of modern technology or a marvel of industrial design, perfectly-rendered down to the bolts on the edge of his tanks (engaged in a polo game, of course).
As another person with a disability (he uses a wheelchair), John Hockenberry says that Aimee Mullins looked at her amputee status and took it not as an opportunity to lead a normal life, but as an "invitation to improve all physical appearance." You might have seen her in the Matthew Barney films slinking up the inside of the Guggenheim. In her adventures of designing the self, she saw the space between where her leg ended and the ground began as potential. Mullins' legs were amputated at the age of one and she shows the history of clunkily designed prosthetics. She first began to play with them by turning her feet around for substitute teachers (she even made one faint). Skiing, her ankles never hurt and her feet never got cold, so she could stay on the hill all day. And height? Well, she can be however tall she wants. "I'm usually 5-foot-8. But today, I'm 6-foot-1," she says. "Why be restricted to generic code when genetic code didn't show up for you?"
Plus the best ideas for her legs come from NASA engineers, Hollywood makeup artists, sculptors, so they look at it as a blank slate for innovation. Her running legs are modeled on the legs of a cheetah. And Alexander McQueen carved her a pair of exquisitely-carved wooden legs which she wore in a fashion show. And backstage Naomi Campbell wanted them. Mullins had to explain that they didn't really fit her. Now they're at the Met in the Costume Institute.
After a generous introduction by Hock (and a nice fakeout by Chee & Co.), Daily Show correspondent John Oliver quips: "If what he says is true, we're all doing to die." It's been three days of potentially-a-bit-too-Serious Playing, and thank god Oliver's brand of comedy doesn't need much explanation: "Analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog. You don't learn anything, and the frog dies." So I won't try, but I will tell you that the audience is convulsing. He may have had some points in there about using your hands, or experimenting, or not being afraid to fail. But really? He's just funny. However, he does leave us with this lesson: "If you think like a child, your problems get smaller."
However, if you think like a child, you can't slam three Googletinis at the after party. So for the next hour--at least--I'm thinking like an adult.
>>Read all Serious Play 2008 posts
Posted by: Alissa Walker | Comments (0)
David Macaulay is good at showing how things work (Cathedral, Ship, Mosque, Mill). For his newest book, The Way We Work, he wanted to show how our bodies were constructed, so it was natural for him to think of the human body as a gigantic "machine." So the body is presented like a series of rides at Six Flags. No joke! It's a universe of bodily landscapes and blueprints for life where a duodenum is two stories tall. Protein chains are stacked like Campbell soup cans. Cells are assembled like a social network diagram. Tissue making is organized into a dirty laundry room. Oxygen enters red blood cells on an assembly-line roller coaster, organs get trucked in on semis, and liquids course through the body as irrigation ditches then whitewater rafting courses.
My personal favorite is a bolus (remember that word?) of broccoli being photographed by tourists from a walkway as it plunges down the thorax. And of course it all ends with a "fantastic rectum" (Macaulay's words, not mine) where waste management trucks ship it all away. "We don't usually have the time to look at the smallest details," he says. "We get so caught up in scale we just think we can't understand something so big." But that's not true, he says. "By dismantling it we can observe why it works."
Always the overachiever, Paula Scher actually looked up what 'play' meant in the dictionary. Play equals what we usually think of, kids playing, but it also means gambling, and if you're not gambling with your work, then you're not, as they say, in the game. But being 'serious' about something, says Scher, is very different from being solemn--when you're solemn, that means you're not playing anymore.
During what she calls her youthful arrogant years, she detested Helvetica (You remember her badmouthing Helvetica, don't you? Saying it was the typeface of Vietnam?). But her hatred pushed her into a very serious "brat"-like play with all the crazy Art Deco-like type you've come to know. And this resulted in some pretty serious work. But she didn't get serious about it again for about 14 years, when she worked on the Public Theater's identity. And suddenly this amazing, very serious, very playful work emerged that shook up everything in design. But what happened? "New York ate my identity," she says. Designers everywhere ripped her off, organizations copied the look. So she had to switch it up, and all her work since then has been solemn. Solid, but solemn.
Posted by: Alissa Walker | Comments (0)"Be careful what you say at cocktail parties," says Joshua Klein from frog. In his case, he mused over a drink that someone should really teach all these crows flapping around here to do something useful. Someone else said that was a stupid idea, so that made Klein want to do it even more. Crows live everywhere that humans do for the most part, so there's a lot of them. And they're smart. Check out the video above, where crows drop shelled nuts onto the street where they're sure to get run over by a car in order to crack them. Brilliant! But what was notable to animal behavior scientists wasn't that they used car tires as nutcrackers, it was the fact that crows were actually learning from each other. This ability to learn cultural behavior is what makes crows exceptional. So Klein designed a vending machine that gave a crow a peanut when it inserted a coin into the machine. And guess what--the crows started to figure out that if they went out in the neighborhood and got more coins, they'd get more peanuts. So not only could crows be employed to pick up all the loose change on the streets, if you trained them to bring it to your house, you'd be rich. Amazing.
Then the lovely Eames Demetrios is onstage and it's a beautiful sight. He's standing before the famous Dot pattern designed by his famous grandparents, and he's also standing in front of their two red Plywood Elephants by Vitra, who are the stars of "A Gathering of Elephants" a delightful little film Demetrios made. From playing with plywood to making films, Charles and Ray never delegated the understanding to someone else so they wouldn't miss out on play. Plus--major bonus for Demetrios--"The great thing about having grandparents who made toys is that they always felt like it was important to be on the cutting edge of toy technology." When it the Super Ball came out, Charles said in an interview that it represented the greatest design of the year. And then Demetrios' brother promptly used one to break the third story window of their house. This didn't please Ray but it delighted Charles, in fact, the degree Charles valued the most was an honorary degree from clown college. Demetrios says that Charles and Ray would be very upset to see material objects used as status symbols in our current culture. The most valued things shouldn't be expensive things that are exclusive, rather they should be things anyone can do, like learning a language--something that proves the time and effort spent; devotion to a craft over the ownership of objects. He closed with a quote from a forthcoming book of Eames quotables: "At all times love and discipline have led to good times and a good life." The Eames stamps are out June 17, which is Charles' 101st birthday and the perfect day to send someone a real letter that shows both love and discipline.
>>Read all Serious Play 2008 posts
Here's an unusual design problem: how do you make a clock that only turns 30 times in 10,000 years? The Long Now Foundation, showing here at last weekend's Maker Faire, has addressed this challenge in a clever and rather beautiful way: given the weight and slowness of the clock they want to build, they're replacing ball bearings with a mesmerizing series of flexors that "pass" the clock mechanism along, rather than rolling. Lovely video, thoughtful treatment of a really abstract concept, and the website is worth a check too.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
Design Within Reach has partnered with Domino Magazine to host tonights opening night party for BKLYN Designs:
Held from May 9-11 in DUMBO, Brooklyn, BKLYN Designs, now in its sixth year, is an annual show featuring Brooklyn-based designers and manufacturers of contemporary furniture, lighting, rugs and decorative accessories as well as panel discussions and speakers, design presentations, a walking tour, and other activities throughout the weekend.The opening party will be Friday May 9, from 8-10pm at the Brooklyn Heights DWR Studio at 76 Montague Street. Free issues of Domino will be available, and there will be food, cocktails and musical stylings by the Studio's resident DJ, Nathan Ursch. Design Within Reach and Domino will give away one pair of gunmetal grey Marais AC Chairs, as seen in the May issue of Domino.
For those who would prefer not to make the 12-minute walk from DUMBO to the Heights, Con Edison is sponsoring a shuttle bus leaving from BKLYN DESIGNS at St. Ann's Warehouse, 38 Water Street, at 8 pm for the party.
Find more great design events at the Core77 Calendar.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)