Live stream of the 2009 Presidential Inauguration via Hulu!
Today, January 20th, 2009, our country, our culture, all people will share a global historical event! Welcome our 44th United States president, Barack Obama! Yes we can!
Some inspirational Will.I.Am videos.
What happens when you bring the whole freakin’ internet into a room to talk, drink, get happy, and call it an internet culture conference? We’ll, in truth, I’m not sure, but I’m headed down to NYC to find out at this years ROFLThing gathering!
Founded by Tim Hwang (Harvard Berkman, Creative Commons,The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches) and his rock star team of coders, shakers, and makers, RoflCon (Rolling on the Floor Laughing) kicks off this Saturday in NYC at Santos Party house. The event seems to be sold out, but throw them a note and get on the list or tip the bouncer a few bucks.
A few speakers/attendees to note:
– ObamaGirl
– Phillip Torrone at MAKE
– Bre Petits of MAKE, NYCResistor
– Jim Louderback of Revision3
– Ji Lee of Bubble Project
– Jason Bitner co-founder of FOUND Magazine
– Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch of You Suck At Photoshop.
– Vincent Connare, creator of Comic Sans Font
– Ian Spector of Chuck Norris Fact Generator
– Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere
– Alexis Ohanian co-founder of Reddit
– and anything else internet!
– The rest of the NYC RoflThing speakers+schedule here.
Over the holiday break I spent over a week in Hong Kong visiting family and the unavoidable addictive food! Yes, Hong Kong is a city of culture, shopping, people, and high quality Asian food! I thought I’d share a bit of my break with ya’ll and figured out I’d start off with one of the best things, Food in Hong Kong! Other topics will follow of course.
I’ve always spoken about how Food is very much like designing. You have to pick out your ingredients (materials), what’s in season (material cost), cook it (assemble+manufacture), use everything (be sustainable), plate it (package), eat it (consume), brand it, get a reputation, rinse and repeat. “A week eating in Hong Kong makes ya go on a 1 year diet when you return home!”
Enjoy the collection of pictures!
Continue Reading
Gary Hustwit, creator of the incredible documentary Helvetica, brings to us his journey in discovering the world of Industrial Designer in Objectified, premiering in March 2009.
“Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.
Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?”
Some appearing in the film are Paola Antonelli (MoMa), Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Naoto Fukasawa, IDEO, Jonathan Ive (apple), Marc Newson, Karim Rashid, Smart Design, and more…
This line up already tells a tale of what to expect from the film (more of a euro flavor about objects, furniture, materials, service, space, and the simple obsession with emotional design.), but I’m sure it’ll be just as good as Helvetica, and if so, bravo! I cant wait to watch it! Watch the trailer above or here.
As I return from this years holiday break I’m reminded of the everlasting question “What do you do in design?” Fields such as transportation, furniture, shoes, toys, and electronics are a bit easier to describe in a few sentences, but for those like myself that do a bit of everything both tangible, emotional, interaction, print, marketing, biz, branding, spacial, manufacturing, packaging, art, the future, the past, research, etc it’s an adventure to describe the simple question “What do you do.”
Core77 has an interesting article describing the everyday hurdle industrial designers have had defining the evolving Industrial Design discipline. Simply put, “Design is a mess”. This isn’t bad, it’s just that the term Industrial Design is still fairly new constantly defining itself, hence, we as designers today, are defining what industrial design means.
Check out the full Core77 article here, or after the jump. The Book project is by Stephanie M. Tharp and Dr. Bruce M. Tharp at DiscursiveDesign.com.
I’m off to Monterey CA for TED conference founder Richard Saul Wurman’s newer “Entertainment Gathering” Conference!
The speaker list is quite impressive with a seemingly circus like theme this year based on this cool pdf program floating around.
Some highlight speakers I’m craving to meet:
– Violin guru Joshua Bell
– X Prize founder Peter Diamandis
– Applied Minds inventor Bran Ferren
– Viral Global Dancing Matt Harding
– Egypt’s Indiana Jones Zahi Hawass
– HEROES writer Tim Kring
– Illustrator David Macaulay
– MIT MediaLab founder Nicolas Negroponte
– Technologists David Pogue
– Dirty Job’s dirty man Mike Rowe
– Mythbuster’s Adam Savage
– PIXAR co-founder Alvy Ray Smith
– Magician Jamy Ian Swiss
– Penn&Tellers Teller
– A floating Zepplin, idea makers, shakers, and creators everywhere! Plenty of surprises…
Wow! This is an awesome, AWESOME, freaking AWESOME opportunity!
Guru Seth Godin has a plan, to get a few amazing people in his office to work together for 6 months. Forget paying to get an MBA, go get an MBA-like experience for FREE!
“Here’s the program I’m interested in creating:
One hour a day of class/dialogue
Four hours a day of working on my projects
Three hours a day of working on your personal project
Five hours a day of living, noticing, doing and connecting”
Read about it here then apply!!!!! (I’d do the same, but not sure who would come work with me for free and learn, well, everything I blog which is free 🙂 )
FluidTunes from Majic Jungle Software on Vimeo.
Using cameras to navigate your interface has been around for some time, but just a refresher, here’s yet another one called FluidTunes! Only for MacOSX. Again cool, but overtime, I’m not sure if I’d use! Cool is not always usable in the long run, hence cool becomes uncool!
Welcome Back from ImprovEverywhere on Vimeo via swissmiss
ImprovEverywhere.com presents “Welcome Back” where a crew of total strangers enthusiastically welcome back total strangers at the airport terminal! I think everyone should be greeted this way!!!!
Reminds me a bit on Ben Zanders lessons on How Happy Birthday Should Always be sung; with passionate enthusiasm, waving hands while standing, vibrant smiles, and shining eyes with a community of awesome people!
Cool! I’m going to make a bunch of these and plaster them around the office, then make another batch with my own face or co-workers!
“Three papercraft scientists that I’ve just made. Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan , Charles Darwin. I strongly recommend thicker paper. Adhesive tape and glue are not necessary, but a little bit of glue is good to maintain their structure.
To download their pdfs just click on their names, to see a small preview here -the preview is in portuguese but the pdfs are in english.”
via lablogatorios
Tim Brown’s talk from “Art’s Center: Serious Play”, which I attended and blogged, is online now. Watch it above. Watch out for the finger blasters!! and yes, work should be play!
It’s that time of year again when thousands of students, high school and college, worldwide fly into Boston (nov9) for National Portfolio Day for advice, tips, and tricks. Be it drawing, sculpture, academics, photography, writing, graphics, products, architecture, film, painting, or just to find out more, it’s always a great day to see our next generation of creativity at such a young age.
I’ll be reviewing portfolios for RISD again so look out for me! If you cant make it, be sure to read my 10 tips from previous years here. Generally each person gets about 10-15 minutes dependant on the crowd, but RISD generates a huge line so get their early if ya can!
