They have received good reception online at blogs like Co.Design and there was a good reception at CITE showroom in SoHo.

One Japanese company Koyo Ibushi uses clay that can be used for tiles, counter tops, pottery, or created into sculpture.

It’s a chic and dark aesthetic, like [...]]]> At ICFF even though there was carbon fiber and metals of different alloys, the two most impressive materials were the use of tin and the use of clay.

One Japanese company Koyo Ibushi uses clay that can be used for tiles, counter tops, pottery, or created into sculpture.

It’s a chic and dark aesthetic, like carbon fiber but changes with the presence of water. They bake the clay for four days to achieve that look.

I inquired about it’s durability and they said that if it wears away or chips, it still keeps that dark look because it’s not a finish, but more of a cure.

Nagae, also from Japan

This is a case where the chef can use the tableware to inform how the food is created.


You only really need a small collection of this tableware and can have sets pre-adjusted to each course.
It’s not just modular (in that you could create custom cuts and combine them) but they are malleable.
Then I imagine all the restaurant patrons playing with the tableware.

Art Center’s work was very skillfully designed and crafted to the point where it’s ready for the showroom. Upon asking an Art Center student if a collection of chairs was his piece he replied “Yes, it’s a school project.”

I like how these chairs are separate but allow you to interact with the person sitting next to you. Almost as social as a couch, but independent like a chair.
That’s something important to note. People adjust chairs when they sit down, one of the main reasons is for a feeling of independence. Few airports, parks or other public places take note of this.

Parson’s school project for Metropolitan’s booth uses yarn. To create the booth out of the shape and color of Metropolitan’s 30th anniversary logo.
I feel a heavier use of yarn in some spots could give the contour booth more of a presence so the viewer feels like they are looking at something not just between the space of the yarn. But, it’s still much better than one of the booths that felt like a prison. We walked in and didn’t know there was more than one exit.

Germany’s design booth was quite poorly put together. They showcased a bench that you could not yet sit on. It was a bench created for transportation hubs like airports and bus stations. As one research documentary phrased it, benches are best use to “accent architecture photographs.”

Weirdly enough, the catalog for the bench was sealed in an envelope. Not surprisingly, the catalog only featured four photos of people – the owners and probably the designers. Only one of the photos features people sitting in the benches.

Germany did show a myoelectrically controlled hand prosthesis, which intrigued me. But I don’t know why the part where the prosthesis joins the elbow is blue. It’s as if to say “this is where manufactured ends and skin begins,” as if we wouldn’t know that. Some hand prosthesis models are made of carbon fiber, black metal or red metal. I agree that having a fake skin tone is might not be the way to go, but why show where there is there difference instead of just showing what is?

Worst of all the hand was displayed on the wall being held up by a plastic cable. A sort of insensitive way represent something that is supposed to take place of what a human lost. There was light in terms of design for healthcare.

Futrus, the booth with what I find to be the most impressive offering doesn’t have a unique point featuring carbon fiber or laser cut patterns but just solid top. Well solid top and knocked-out corners. With a non-porous top they can create patient rooms that are resistant to virus, bacteria, mold, stains and scratches.

There are more curves instead of corners as to not trap dirt. I asked about the seams on the handles and between panels, they said they seal the corners to also be anti-microbial.

Futrus said that there aren’t other companies offering this service. Some companies offer a bespoke sink or countertop, but not full rooms.

Since Futrus can panels with color or faux-wood finish.

Another reason they are impressive is because they explicitly target both the healthcare industry for institutional contracts as well as a retail distribution for their consumer line of furniture.

Molo environments are intriguing in that they can be packed flat and then expanded for create micro-environments. My friend said they were used in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to create networked hospital rooms. I can envision Molo and Futrus working together. Molo exteriors with Futrus tabletops and equipment. Then burning the Molo tents afterwards to be super safe.

Other cool things:
Human form – corrugated cardboard

Moleskine brand extensions –

Moleskine rep said the brand-name is of unspecified origin so it can be pronounced anyway.

Foldable chair-

[Show as slideshow]

Why did Jason Wing go back to China?
Well Xu Bing finds it to be a massive laboratory for testing.

http://video.ft.com/v/942909968001/Xu-Bing-at-the-British-Museum

A/P/A Institute at NYU

Keynote: “Between the Diasporic and the Transnational” Dean Chan — Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia This symposium investigates the increasingly transnational nature of [...]]]>
See notes in moleskine

Why did Jason Wing go back to China?
Well Xu Bing finds it to be a massive laboratory for testing.

http://video.ft.com/v/942909968001/Xu-Bing-at-the-British-Museum

A/P/A Institute at NYU

Keynote: “Between the Diasporic and the Transnational” Dean Chan — Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia This symposium investigates the increasingly transnational nature of Asian art and the circulation of artists and art production in multiple global markets. The focus on Asian diasporic visual culture will include panels with scholars from the International Network for Diasporic Asian Art Research and the Diasporic Asian Art Network. About the Keynote: Dean Chan is a professor in the postgraduate programmes at the School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University, in Perth, Australia. He is the founding convenor of the International Network for Diasporic Asian Art Research (INDAAR), and an executive member of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network and convenor of its Visual Arts and New Media cluster. Chan is a chief investigator in an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project entitled “Being Asian in Australia and the United States” and a guest editor of a special issue of Amerasia Journal (2010) titled “Asian Australia and Asian America: Making Transnational Connections.” He has most recently been appointed as Editor of the Diasporic Asia section in Asian Studies Review, a scholarly journal published by Routledge. Response and discussion with Melissa Chiu Museum Director and Vice President of Global Art Programs, Asia Society

Panel I: Organized by the International Network for Diasporic Asian Art Research “Locating Globalism: The Diasporic Contexts of Asian Art” Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University at Montreal — “The Paradox of Diasporic Asian Art from a Global Perspective” Yu Yeon Kim, Independent Curator Jacqueline Lo, Australian National University — “The Limit of Professional Foreignness: Memory, Migrancy and the Asian Diasporic Artist” Chair: Dean Chan, Edith Cowan University

Panel II: Organized by the Diasporic Asian Art Network “Asian American Art and Global Flows” Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University and Galleries — “What Does It Mean to be a Diasporic Japanese Woman Artist Today? The Case Study of Chiharu Shiota” Laura Kina, DePaul University — “Field work and sewing signs” Chair: Alexandra Chang, A/P/A Institute at NYU — “The Art of Cosmopolitanism — A Translocal Positionality” Discussants: Margo Machida, University of Connecticut at Storrs Tom Looser, NYU East Asian Studies

Recap
A good presentation on an industrial’s stating his work history and view of environment design and interaction design and where design may be headed. He relates play to learning and design.

Opinion & Questions: Design should be validated via feedback [...]]]> Learning By Doing – Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA, Lab Chief, Rockwell Group

Recap
A good presentation on an industrial’s stating his work history and view of environment design and interaction design and where design may be headed. He relates play to learning and design.

Opinion & Questions: Design should be validated via feedback loops as should education. How does Tucker validate his design decisions, are there specific times when rockwell will revisit a client to gain insight on an intervention’s performance?

How can we break flow down?
Play and design are processes, not bulk “states”
If flow is not a bulk state, how do we access it? What does that process consist of ?
Five years ago at the Design+Management Lecture Series Tucker faced the question, “Is it ethical to do work for Coca-cola when the drink is so unhealthy.”

His answer back then was slightly better.

It was along the lines of, “I think it’s ok for people to have as a treat everyone in a while, but not something they have all the time.” This time he also noted that it is up to the individual’s self restraint.
With in five years I thought he would have a better answer.
Maybe a long the lines of:
1. I made it taste 43% better without adjusting the ingredients. We made it sweeter without adding any sugar.
2. In many countries water isn’t sanitary to drink. So coca-cola is a safe and clean alternative. In these countries the formula for the syrup is different and can contain less sugar.
3. It’s a treat that can serve as an introduction to something healthier. Coca-cola can introduce the consumers the product line of healthier drinks like Minute Maid, a brand Coca-cola owned long before the recent trend of CPG companies like Nestle and Lays trying to reposition themselves as a “health brand.”

Question & Answer from the audience.

See below for work history and chunked notes.
Thesis:
play=learning=design

Topics:
Progress
molecules – when complexity really started
iterated into plants and animals

evolution process – “learning by doing”
Bjarke Ingles – design process’ iterations evolutionary tree

Me(about Tucker & his influences)

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
-Horace Mann, address at Antioch College, 1859

“If you can’t make it more beautiful, what’s the point.”
Rowena Reed Kostellow of Pratt

started Smart Design with David Koll

opened frog design New York Harmut Esslinger

went to work with Razorfish

worked at Spring Time (with Dutch industrial designers)

started Studio Red -multidisciplinary design studio

working more with Rockwell
- Set for the Academy Awards

-jetblue JFK marketplace

-Sheraton – Lobby Project (2007)

-Venice Biennale – Hall of Fragments

-The Cosmopolitan – casino in Las Vegas

Imagination Playground

Play
The pedagogy of play
“I’m talking about learning, not education.”

history of kindergarten

concept of “gifts” or tasks for children to complete, activities, etc.

Free-form, unprogrammed play

“Play is like a system – it has rules”
“Play is valuable”
“Playing is one of the ultimate things we can do”
“That kind of jamming is what’s known as flow.”

“Flow is like play and design, that is towards progress”

Relation of Science to Design
We’re not just a bunch of scientists, we’re artistic too,
w’er trying to make stuff that’s beautiful
and feedback with customers and users
democratic, political, iterative

“By doing that we get products, places and services and create this solar system of things. It’s a network of facets that are complex and contradictory.”

Business
“Business is really easy, it’s just like making candy, and candy is like money”
Business men have really dropped the ball.

Design For Business

[but all his examples are where the design is present - in security, design is often not visible,]

“There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them.”
-Victor Papanek

Kindness
what’s “better ” anyways?
kindness and happiness are good ways to measure design

user centered

Mentioned
erector sets, tinker toys, lincoln logs, unit blocks – longy, bricky, buttery, squary,

[Show as slideshow]

More about Rockwell Group on their website.

This lecture is part of Bruce Nussbaum’s Design At the Edge lecture series.

Opening Points
I. Dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth.
Think more broadly about what poverty means.

II. Charity and aid alone will not solve the problem of poverty.

Charities “create dependency rather than dignity.”

Q&A:

At Columbia Business School’s China Business Conference, [...]]]> Bruce Nussbaum’s lecture on Design at The Edge is one of my favorite.
I’m not enrolled in it, but still feel obligated to sit in every Monday. Last week, Bruce mentioned to me that he is writing a book on what he calls CQ, or Creative Intelligence.

At Columbia Business School’s China Business Conference, I introduced myself as someone in Service Design. A professor from Columbia respond with “Oh look at my tie.”

I may have felt somewhat like IDEO’s David Kelly when at a restaurant he introduced himself as a designer and his hostess asked “So what do you think of my curtains?” (1)

The Columbia professor did zone in on what I mean by design when he said “I’m sure there were many processes involved in creating the tie from Chinese silk, French pattern to be made in America.”

This shows the gap between D-School to B-School that I traverse and that Bruce is helping bridge.

Bruce notes that the framework of Design Thinking, that “collection of behaviors is the heart and sole of creativity. It includes being attuned to the people and culture you are immersed in and having the experience, wisdom, and knowledge to frame the real problem and–most important of all perhaps–the ability to create and enact solutions” (2)
But he poses the question in his new blog post on Fast Co Design about what creativity is and how can we measure it.

If CEO’s have used Design Thinking as a process trick, how can we help develop the ability to convey creativity without making it a process trick? Why would we put creativity on a linear scale alongside IQ and SAT scores?

I agree that Design Thinking has opened the doors for creativity to wider application, but since it was “packaged as a process” it has begun to “actually do harm.”(2) If we take creativity and boil it down to not just a package, but something on a linear scale, how do we keep it’s veracity?

IQ stands for Intellingece Quotient and therefore CQ, Creative Quotient. As quotients are the result of division, why abstract Creativity into dividable dimension? It would be a very efficient way to rate and process individuals. But since “creativity emerges from group activity,” how do we effectively measure the capability of an individual’s ability to interact in a group and frame problems?

CQ will need to contain multiple dimensions.

How do we frame the and show an individual’s “experience, wisdom,” and ability to frame?

One thing for sure is that the model of a psychologist asking pre-defined questions and timing a subject’s arrangement of colored blocks won’t serve as the way for measuring creativity.

Howard Gardner said that when in China, students tell him “Now we have 8 things to be good at,” referring to his theory of Multiple Intelligence. (3)

Bruce’s dream is that when his godchild applies to”Stanford, Cambridge, and Tsinghua universities. The admissions offices in each of these top schools asks for proof of literacies in math, literature, and creativity. They check her SAT scores, her essays, her IQ, and her CQ.” I envision the admissions office will spend more time viewing the CQ than the other deliverables. Not just because it is the most engaging, but that because it is the most complex measurement and deepest deliverable. It might be like a portfolio with statistics, visuals and maps. Everyone’s CQ will be as unique, if not more than an admissions essay.

I’m in the process of developing a deliverable to show my Creative Intelligence after a course with Carlos Teixeira and Robert Rabinovitz.

I appreciate if we could measure degrees of creativity and am excited to see how the concept of CQ forms.

Bruce at his Design At The Edge lecture series.

2. Bruce Nussbaum – “Beyond Design Thinking” Fast Company

1. IDEO’s David Kelley on “Design Thinking” Fast Company

3. Howard Gardner. Presentation, 2010.