Hasta La Ideas

Editor: Is there a community of like-minded designers in your area? Have you ever thought about teaming up with them to set up a group show, one that you could export to another city? Well, Anonymous Designer figured he’d do just that–and here’s what he found.

Where I live in City A, there are a lot of individual designers, but not much of a design community. So ever since I graduated design school I’ve been trying to organize some group shows here to get some community going. We all want to get our work out there and explore the larger markets outside of City A, so a group show held in larger City B made sense.

So last year, me and a half-dozen other designers put together a group show and exported it to City B. It ended up being a bit of a nightmare because the curator was sort of a train wreck. But this year we decided to repeat the experience and hold another group show in City B. We figured it would be easy this time—new curator, and we had the experience, contacts and relationships from last year that taught us what we needed to do and in what order. Simple, right?

Wrong. This year turned into a clusterfuck. You festival-goers probably have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes, so here’s my list of Top Ten Problems with Organizing a Group Design Show, in order of how they unfold.

1. )Getting Funding

To set up a group design show, you need sponsorship and funding. Last year we hit up corporations, manufacturers, wealthy families that patronize the arts, anyone local who had anything to do with design. After they all said no we resorted to cold-calling everyone in our network. Here’s what we found: Everyone in City A was excited about the prospect of this group show, but except for just one production house willing to sponsor us, no one was excited enough to fork over some cash.

So this year we decided to try crowdsourcing, turning to Kickstarter for our funding. And we found that putting together a Kickstarter campaign is a real bitch! It is a process: Writing and editing the script, finding a good videographer, setting up the lighting, shooting video clips, traveling around different shops to shoot more video clips, finding a video editor, recording the voiceovers for the videos, not to mention getting all of the stuff organized for the actual campaign web page. Don’t underestimate how long it takes to try to get all of these things right.

2.) Organizing Your People
Setting up a group show involves endless emailing. You’ve got a dozen designers in the show, several organizers, sponsors, partial sponsors, and it’s a constant communications snafu. Some people weren’t CC’ed when they should’ve been, someone did a “Reply” when they should’ve done a “Reply All” so now some people only got part of the information, someone typed “can” when they meant to say “can’t,” et cetera. You are constantly glued to your phone and practically getting an electromagnetic tan from the screen.

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O almeno così pare accada a tutti i lavoratori brasiliani quando giocherà la nazionale verdeoro. Beh, a questo punto speriamo le vincano tutte!

Competition: we’ve teamed up with UK designers Dorothy to give Dezeen readers the chance to win one of five architectural prints.

The Manchester-based studio have added three new buildings to their Lost Destination print series: Birmingham Central Library, Stockwell Bus Garage and the Lecture Centre at Brunel University.

Launched in 2013, the collection highlights modernist and brutalist architecture around the country, including Preston Bus Station, Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham, Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, Fylingdales in North Yorkshire and Forton Services in Lancashire.

Dorothy was set up in 2010 and produces conceptual prints, products and artworks that are sold and exhibited internationally.

All prints are available to purchase for £35 (plus P&P) from Dorothy’s online store.

Competition closes on 22 July 2014. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Here is some more information from Dorothy:

Dorothy launches three new buildings in their Lost Destination series of prints, continuing the studio’s love affair with the “cool grey stuff” and the unique but often forgotten beauty of modernist and brutalist architecture.

The three new additions include two buildings in London Boroughs: the magnificent postwar structure of Stockwell Bus Garage which opened in 1952 (and is still a working bus depot faithfully serving London commuters); and the brutalist Lecture Centre at Brunel University (which gained notoriety as a location in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 dystopian film A Clockwork Orange).

The final addition is an iconic but controversial building in Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library (or the Ziggurat as it is affectionately known by locals), which was was once the largest regional library in Europe but is soon to be demolished despite repeated attempts by English Heritage to list the building.

The post Competition: five architectural prints
by Dorothy to be won appeared first on Dezeen.

As a pioneer and mentor in the field of design for social impact, the late Sylvia Harris was an inspiration to designers of all stripes, and her legacy lives on in with a new opportunity for design professionals looking to make a difference. To honor her work and spirit, Design Ignites Change and AIGA are pleased to present the Sylvia Harris Citizen Design Award to support like-minded designers committed to public design.

Practicing professionals from all design disciplines (graphic, product, architecture, interior, interactive, service design, etc.) are invited to apply for the $10,000 award to be used towards realizing a well-researched and considered concept for a project to encourage change in their community. All applications will be reviewed by a committee of creative professionals, business, civic and non-profit leaders. Submissions will be judged based on the overall concept, viability and potential for impact.

To find out more about Sylvia Harris and her legacy, as well as details about how to enter, check out the Design Ignites Change website. The official deadline is August 1, 2014.

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I spent two years as the secretary of an organization whose board met monthly, and during that time I thought a lot about agendas and minutes. Based on this experience, the following are suggestions for creating agendas and minutes that are organized and both easy to write and easy for others to read and use. With an agenda, your meetings will be shorter and have a defined purpose for all the attendees.

Using a template

Use a template where you can just fill in the spaces. I used Microsoft Word with a series of tables and there are also Microsoft designed ones you can customize. There are many advantages of using a template, saving time and remembering recurring agenda points among them.

Creating an agenda

Not every agenda will need these specific items, but consider including:

1. Logistics: This section often includes the meeting location along with the meeting date and time. Because WiFi access was an issue for my group, which used hotel meeting rooms, I always noted if WiFi would be available in the room. If WiFi was available, I’d also list the price.
2. Attendees: This is a simple list of people expected to be in the meeting, and their titles.
3. Meeting preparation: If meeting participants are expected to do anything before the meeting, these items can be noted in this section. In our case, there were always documents that needed to be reviewed before the meeting.
4. Agenda items: These are the points to be discussed or have action taken upon them at the meeting. Each of these items should have the name of the person leading that part of the discussion and the anticipated start time for that part of the agenda. Noting the time allotted to each item was critical to our group for ensuring we stayed on schedule. In the meeting, we sometimes chose to run overtime on one item, but we realized that meant something else would need to run shorter, or be cut entirely.
5. Open to-do items from the prior meeting: Review of these items should be an agenda item if you have any previous or unfinished business.

Email the agenda to people a number of days before the meeting, so everyone has time to prepare. Include attachments along with the agenda for items that will be distributed so that members don’t waste time reading the materials during the meeting.

Writing meeting minutes

Your minutes may include the following sections:

1. All items from the agenda, with updates: The attendee list notes who actually made it to the meeting. The agenda is adjusted to show the actual time each item started. Also, update the to-do item status (more on to-do items below).
2. Decisions that involve formal motions and votes: This includes motions and the number of people voting yes and no (as well as how many abstain). Not all decisions require an official motion and a vote, but record those that do.
3. Other decisions: This section notes anything that is decided that doesn’t need to be put forth for an official vote. I often just captured the decision itself; in some cases, it was useful to also capture the reasoning behind the decision.
4. To-do items from the current meeting: This includes the item, the owner, and the due date. To-do items without an owner and a due date tend to not get done, so be sure to clarify these points during the meeting.
5. Critical information that is shared: Relating to our group, as our annual conference was being planned, I might have noted the venue, the date, the keynote speaker, the price, and the registration period as each of these points were finalized and reported by the head of the conference committee. If something was important enough that our members would want to know about it, I captured it in this section.

One thing I did not include in my meeting minutes was all the deliberation that went on in the meeting. If someone prefers to organize minutes around agenda items, and capture more of the discussion, I’d suggest still specifically calling out the decisions and the to-dos, and making them easy to find by using something like bold text for the words “decision” and “to-do.”

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