swissmiss

Team Carsonified will be returning to New York City in two weeks to bring back The Future of Web Design. They’ve gathered an interesting list of speakers for the two days of workshops and talks. (Happy to see my studio-mate Liz Danzico being one of them!)

If you enter SWISSMISS during online ticket purchase, it will entitle you to 15% off!

See you there?

November 4th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Parsons The New School for Design
Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue, NYC

BurdaStyle.com – The road to collaborative fashion design / a talk by Nora Abousteit and Benedikta Karaisl

Nora Abousteit and Benedikta Karaisl, founders of Burdastyle.com, will share their experiences building an active, creative community based on open source sewing over the past three years. The BurdaStyle community consists of over 260,000 registered members who have uploaded almost 25,000 designs.

BurdaStyle is a collaborative, DIY fashion platform inspired by the open source philosophy of sharing intellectual property and allowing the public to adapt it to their specific needs. BurdaStyle encourages its members to remove copyright restrictions from their designs. These open source sewing patterns are then free to be used as the basis for new designs that can later be sewed and even sold by other community members. In sharing their stories, Nora and Benedikta will discuss their successes and failures in building a platform for a creative community to share instructions and techniques, in creating a balance between open collaboration and authorship, and in enabling a true, networked design process.

About the Networked Design Talks: With the rise of the Internet over the past few decades we have witnessed the rise of networked culture. The effects of this transition extend far beyond the use of tools: they change the ways we communicate with each other and the ways we manage, construct and perceive our individual and group identities. This cultural shift requires the creative industry to reexamine its use of messages, symbols and aesthetics and to study their function within a constantly changing networked environment.

AIGA/NY has been on fire recently. Their latest events have been amazing and I pretty much want to attend all of them. (Poor G is being asked a lot to watch little Ella these days.) Here are a few more upcoming events that are promising:

Knopf: Then and Now
Wendesday 21 October 2009 6:30-8:30pm

In the late 1980s, the Alfred A. Knopf design group redefined the art of American book packaging. Two decades later, the department continues to set the bar for the trade publishing industry. Knopf: Then and Now brings the legendary team of Carol Devine Carson, Barbara de Wilde, Archie Ferguson, and Chip Kidd together on stage for the first time. The quartet will give a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of their most daring cover designs, discuss the process of collaboration, and describe the challenges affecting book jacket design today.

Small Talk No.2: Hillman Curtis
Thursday 22 October 2009 6:30-8:00pm

Hillman Curtis will discuss how still images – mainly from contemporary photography – directly influence the narrative of his film work. Curtis is a designer, filmmaker, and author whose company Hillmancurtis, Inc. has designed sites for Yahoo, Adobe, The Metropolitan Opera, Aquent, the American Institute of Graphic Design, Paramount Fox Searchlight Pictures, and eMusic among others. His film work includes the popular documentary series “Artist Series”, as well as award winning short films. His commercial film work includes spots for Rolling Stone, Adobe, Sprint, Blackberry, and BMW.

Member Series: The Type Is Right
Monday 9 November 2009 6:30-8.30pm

Are you crazy for Courier? Gonzo for Garamond? Mad for Meta? Does your quick brown fox jump over your lazy dog? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then come on down to “The Type is Right,” AIGA/NY’s first-ever typographic game show at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

My friend and teaching colleague Mushon Zer-Aviv is kicking off a promising new speakers series at Parsons, The New School this coming wednesday:

“Design by committee,” “too many cooks in the kitchen,” and other epithets have been used to imply that the creative process breaks down when it involves too many people. At the same time, the software world has been completely revolutionized by open source, networked collaborative processes. It is only in graphic and interaction designs—two fields critical to software development—that the open source process has yet to overtake more conventional design methods. How does networked collaboration present challenges in the creative process? How can they be solved? Can they be solved at all? Or do designers just not work well together? Mushon will address these questions in light of his own creative work as well as research done in the Open Source Design class he teaches in Parsons’ AAS Program in Graphic Design.

Networked Design Talks: Mushon Zer-Aviv | October 14, 2009 6:30 p.m.
Can Design By Committee Work? The Case for Open Source Design

If you are not able to join us in person, please log on to: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/parsons-the-new-school-for-design for a live stream.

Learn more about the AAS Program at Parsons, The New School.

For the next two days, you will see me broadcast from Grand Rapids where I have the opportunity to partake in VELOCITY, a two day workshop made possible through CEO for Cities.

VELOCITY is a movement which strives to cultivate vital, productive and creative cities – and ultimately, to redefine the good life in America.

For two days, an impressive group of “Urban Change Agents” (Experts) and Storytellers are getting together to come up with a vision for the Good City Life. (I am honored to be one of the Urban Change Agents.)

Goal of the two day Salon are to create and tell the predictive human story of ‘how people will want to live’, illustrate the context for that lifestyle in next generation cities and provide with human-centered guidelines for making that a reality.

Since the 1940’s Americans have pursued a vision of the good life that is spacious, expansive and utterly unsustainable. We know we can’t simply tell people that their ideal American Lifestyle isn’t good for them or society and expect them to change.

We must create a new, more compelling, more desirable vision of the good life. And cities are the place to do it. Cities offer positives like walk-ability, energy efficiencey, proximity to jobs and economic opportunity, creative inspiration and life long learning. Well designed cities help eople to value and aspire to city-living not because they have to, but because they truly want to. And that is good for all of us. Vital city cores anchor their surrounding metro-areas and the nation.

The VELOCITY salon is not just an isolated event. The outcomes of the salon work will extend to the broader community through crowd-sourcing and be broadcast across media platforms including Twitter, blogs and other traditional channels, engaging citizens in creating a new reality and desire for city-living. The salon work will also be published in the VELOCITY book, distributed globally to urban leaders, as well as presented at the CEOs for Cities National Urban Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. on September 29-30 for mayors and other urban leaders to discuss how to urgently execute these ideas locally.

Here are a few of the 40 experts that I am truly excited about meeting tomorrow: Hunter Tura of 2×4, Marisa Belger (GreenDAY Blogger), Dana Cho (Designer and Architect IDEO), Zach Frechette (Editor-in-Chief GOOD Magazine), Mark Hamm (VP Innovation at FedEx), Polly Labarre (Author, Mavericks at Work, Fast Company Contributor) … and the list goes on.

Stay tuned for ‘Good Life Visions’ in the coming days. (I’ll probably be broadcasting a lot over on twitter.)

My personal highlight of today was Seth Godin. Here’s a few points he made during his entertaining and prop filled 20minute talk (he had a plastic chicken with him, really):

– You don’t need to be more creative, all of you are too creative.

– Be a person that always ends up ‘shipping’. If you are proud of what you ‘ship’ and are on time, you will be successful and you will get to do it over and over again. What you do for a living is ‘ship’ and not ‘being creative’.

– The resistance gets worse and worse the closer we get to ‘shipping’. Of course we come to the meeting before ship date as our ‘lizard brain’ says I need to speak up now. The genius part (in getting ideas realized) is to get the Lizard brain to shut up long enough to overcome resistance.

The last point he made was that if he is going to take the first two breaths (going to first steps in a project) he is going to finish it. So he has a lot of arguments and discussions with ‘lizard brain’ in the beginning. But once he decides to continue, he takes it all the way. He will ‘ship’.

You can tell that he really looks at presenting at a conference as an honor and not an obligation. Seth was a breath of fresh air and an already amazing conference. (Recent post on his site, somewhat related: Hierarchy of presentations)

I wish he would have had more time to talk. I could have listened to Seth all day.