Hasta La Ideas

This past weekend was the occasion for the annual IDSA International Conference, the premier professional development and networking event for Industrial Designers practicing in the States… and, as Conference Chair Paul Hatch noted, increasingly from abroad as well. The ever-self-deprecating Founder of Teams Design MC’d the lecture sessions, as noted sketchnote-taker Craighton Berman busily filled several posterboards with his pithy yet expressive doodles. “It’s been while since I have been to an industrial design-specific conference,” he writes on his blog, “So it was interesting to step back into the industry conversation.”

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Friday morning started with Brooklyn-based Ben Hopson—who we’d recommended for gainful employment some years ago—who has established a niche in what he calls “kinetic design,” which has traditionally been the domain of engineers (as opposed to designers, who define the formal language but not necessarily the moving parts). Leading with the example of the highly articulated output paper tray of a Canon printer, Hopson demonstrated how a designer might approach the problem precisely by applying his or her sketching skills in three dimensions in order to “make sure they look like how they move and move like how they look.”

Origami is certainly a reference point, but the kinetic experiments (which Hopson teaches at Pratt) perhaps better construed as three-dimensional pop-up books. “Today, we are beginning to gesture at our artifacts,” he noted. “And they will eventually begin to gesture at us.” [Ed note: Hopson has also explored the topic at length in an essay here on Core.]

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