Design Conversation #18: Invention

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This Wednesday I'll be hosting the monthly Baltimore Design Conversation at The Wind Up Space in Station North with the rest of the design convo gang and it promises to be a fascinating evening (City Paper picked it as one of their weekly critic's picks for events!)

The theme for the night is “invention” and we will look at how we can spark Aha! moments and create new creative connections. Invention will be explored from three angles: the brain, materials, and collaboration.




Image of Charles Limb by Marshall Clarke for Urbanite Magazine, Read an interview with Limb in Urbanite by clicking here.

Neuroscientist Charles Limb will discuss his breakthrough research on the brain as it relates to creativity and jazz.

Ellen Lupton, designer, writer, teacher, and curator of contemporary design at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and Inna Alesina, product designer and teacher, will showcase projects from their new book, Exploring Materials : Creative Design for Everyday Objects (a spread from the book is pictured above). They will encourage us to see everyday materials in new ways while expanding our materials vocabulary.



Rendering of the virtual learning environment in a Baltimore public school.

David Peloff from the Johns Hopkins Center for Emerging Technology will tell us how he collaborated with the Applied Physics Lab to bring NASA technology to the creation of a cutting-edge virtual learning environment being piloted in Baltimore public schools.

As always, this event is free and open to the public. Special thanks to the Baltimore Community Foundation for its support of these conversations and to The Wind Up Space for being our gracious host.

For those of you not yet familiar with the design conversation or D:center Baltimore:

D:center Baltimore is a new organization composed of a broad cross-section of disciplines and individuals invested in improving and encouraging design—in all its iterations—in the Baltimore region.

Each month the group hosts a Design Conversation at the Wind Up Space in Station North. The event is a casual gathering that is free and open to the public. It is supported by the Baltimore Community Foundation as well as the hard work of a core of dedicated volunteers. Each Design Conversation is curated by an individual or a team of people and is organized around a theme related to design, architecture, community building, urban planning, and city life. (For a list of upcoming themes visit the D:Center Baltimore blog)

Local and national participants are invited to address the evening’s theme in order to stimulate a dialogue among audience members. Since it launched in 2008, the Design Conversation has spurred creative projects across the city through a number of collaborations born at the event. It has also stimulated a recognition of shared interests and existing projects around the city and the country.

Tonight! Speedism at Open Space

7 pm @ Open Space
2720 Sisson Street
Baltimore, MD

Speedism is the duo Julian Friedauer (Germany) and Pieterjan Ginckels (Belgium). The partners work at the borders of architecture, architectural theory, visual arts, visual theory, urban tactics, imagineering, and scriptwriting. Tonight, they come to Baltimore for a rare performance. They will perform "Untitled States of Doom & symmetric side effects", a live photoshop journey through layers of their imagined universe. Driven by a live soundtrack, Friedauer and Ginckels will click their way into an empty place, a no-risk land.

New Web Site

Why so few blog posts these days you ask? Well, I've been busy working on a new Web site and it will be ready to share soon...

Tonight! Design Revolution in Baltimore

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TONIGHT!

DESIGN REVOLUTION: JOIN THE DEBATE

6:30 p.m.

Falvey Hall, Brown Center, 1301 W. Mount Royal Ave.

THIS EVENT IS FREE!

Debating how the issues of social justice and advocacy will impact the way artists conceive and execute their visual environment, a panel of top designers and editors looks at the future of design practice. Panelists include Emily Pilloton, founder, and Matthew Miller, project manager, of Project H Design, a non-profit dedicated to bringing product design to those who need it most; John Bielenberg, founder of Project M, an immersion program created to inspire young graphic designers, writers, photographers and other creative people to do work that can make a difference; and Julie Lasky, editor of Design Observer’s Change Observer section, which covers socially aware design. I will moderate the discussion.

This panel is a part of the Design Revolution Road Show, an initiative of Project H Design that is traveling across the United States with an exhibition of humanitarian products that empower people and improve life. The exhibition trailer will be open for viewing before and after the panel discussion. The lecture is co-sponsored by D:center Baltimore and Urbanite magazine.

Before the event, at 5:30 pm, Ellen Lupton and Inna Alesina will host a party launching their new book, Exploring Materials. Details below.

International Healthcare

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, designed by U.S. firm by HDR architects, will be an anchor project for Sowwah Island, the new central business district of Abu Dhabi when it opens in 2012.

For my latest article in Architect magazine, I take a look at the typology of international healthcare and the burst of new buildings going up in the Middle East. Take a look...


In the 1970s, when the king of Saudi Arabia needed a heart operation, he did what Middle East royals had been doing for decades: He traveled to the United States. After his successful procedure at the Cleveland Clinic, more wealthy patients from the region followed, culminating in thousands receiving care at the hospital. But starting in 2012, these patients will no longer have to pull out a passport to get Western medical treatment. The Cleveland Clinic joins other major U.S. institutions, such as Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, in bringing its brand of medicine to the Middle East. When it opens in 2012, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi will be a multi-specialty hospital on a par, its owners hope, with the world’s top medical institutions.

READ MORE HERE.

Elle Decor Goes to Baltimore

The March issue of Elle Decor includes a travel piece on Baltimore written by Jill Gerston (and including a quote from yours truly). Gerston highlights lots of good architecture and design resources, like Patrick Sutton and Housewerks. Check it out.

Design Convo #15

The line-up for next week's Design Convo in Baltimore is just stellar.

Geoff Stack and Julie Gabrielli will be leading the conversation, which has the theme Sustainability: diversity, interdependence, self-organization. We’ll explore how these concepts can apply to design work in Baltimore and beyond.

After a brief introduction, there will be three short presentations:

• Julie Gabrielli of GOforChange will talk about the diversity of the UMD LEAFhouse project team. (I wrote about this project for The New York Times Magazine)
• Pavlina Ilieva of PI.KL Studio will discuss the aspects of self organization in the Commonwealth project she completed with partner Kuo Pao Lian.
  
• Dana Bourland will cover the interdependent parts of her work with the Enterprise Community Partners

After, there will be about 60 minutes of facilitated small group dialogue with plenty of time to share thoughts and new ideas.

The 411:

Wednesday, February 3rd

6:30 pm. At the Windup Space, 12 W. North Avenue, Baltimore.

Free to all. Cash bar.

Brought to you by D:center Baltimore.

(We will be encouraging folks to find ways to support Architecture for Humanity’s efforts in Haiti at this event. If you cannot make it, please check out A4H at this link.)

Letterpress Design Competition

Holy crap this is cool...

Gilah Press + Design in Baltimore is hosting Ready, Set, Fly! a design competition that could result in your artwork being tranformed into a limited edition letterpress print. Ten submissions will be selected for inclusion in a limited edition box set.

The theme for the competition is "fly" and can be interpreted however you like. Designs will be judged based on concept, design, illustration, and typography. Gilah will then host a show featuring the new work and the box sets will be available for purchase.

To submit your work for consideration, go here. The deadline is February 12.

And to learn more about the fantastic work being done at Gilah, check out this blog post from when I toured their studio space last month.


A Heidelberg letterpress in the Gilah Press + Design studio in Hampden.

Detroit's New Taubman Center

Middle school students at the new Henry Ford Academy in the Taubman Center in Detroit. All photos by Nathan Kirkman for Metropolis.

In November of 2009, I went back to Detroit after being in the Motor City for Project M (and starting a big debate with this blog post.) While in town during the Project M trip, I got a late night tour of the then-under construction Argonaut building . Once home to General Motors design group, the building was being renovated by the College for Creative Studies into an interdisciplinary design eduction and innovation hub, with activities ranging from a design-focused charter school to professional space for start-up designers. I saw the building in action this fall and wrote about its transformation—and the evolution of design education —for this month's issue of Metropolis magazine. See the excerpt and link to the full article below.


Inside the new Taubman Center in Detroit.

Back to the Future

A school dedicated to design-based learning opens in the very building where GM's legendary Harley Earl became the father of the modern car.

It’s an overcast day in early November, and the students of the Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies (HFA) seem especially charged. Deshon Mumford, a ninth grader, leads a tour of his new school and explains that some of the excitement may be because he and his classmates just picked their official mascot. The sixth-to-twelfth-grade public charter school opened eight weeks earlier with students from neighborhoods across the city of Detroit as the inaugural class, and now they are helping to establish traditions. Nominations were taken, votes counted, and from here forward the students of HFA will be known as the Mustangs. Deshon, a bright kid who likes to write poetry, says it wasn’t his first choice, but he appreciates the process. “We all got a vote,” he says. READ MORE.

Writing for the Web

I recognize the irony in using a photo of a vintage typewriter for this post, but it's so much nicer than a shot of a keyboard...

I'll be teaching an evening Odyssey course through Johns Hopkins University this winter titled: Writing for the Web: A Primer for Getting Published.

There are increasingly more opportunities to get published online as print magazines fold and Web-only presences emerge. Writing for the Web and submitting online to publications is not the same as writing and submitting to print publications. Knowing the difference is important. In this course, we will talk about where publishing is going and how the online community will affect writing opportunities. This class is one part writing—how to make your prose sing for an online audience—and one part practical—how to get published or self-publish via a blog. It's a workshop for those who want to get published for fun or for profit.

This continuing education class is open to anyone. Click here to be redirected to the Odyssey home page and then click on the image of their Spring 2010 course catalog for more information and registration forms.

The basic 411:

Class takes place on the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University
$180 (12 hours) 6 sessions.
Tuesdays, February 16 - March 30, with no class on March 9.