Hasta La Ideas

Can’s Best Friend. Koons meets canned goods in this entry by Gensler and WSP Flack + Kurtz.

Ever dreamed of recreating a Richard Serra sculpture with tomatoes from the pantry? Erecting a monumental tribute to Alexander McQueen’s armadillo heel using only canned peas and elbow grease? What about constructing a truly giant giant panda that can feed hundreds? Teams from top architecture and engineering firms will prove that they can do it, and for a good cause. The international charity competition that is Canstruction returns to New York City this month and with it the opportunity for teams of architects, engineers, and students they mentor to design and build giant structures made entirely from unopened cans of food—all of which are ultimately donated to City Harvest.

For its twenty-first go-round in Gotham, Canstruction has lined up 26 teams representing the likes of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Arup, Gensler, and HOK. Their carefully stacked creations will be judged in categories that include Best Use of Labels, Best Meal, Structural Ingenuity, and Most Cans. The works will be on view at Brookfield Place from October 31 through November 13. Visitors are encouraged to bring non-perishable foods that will be donated along with the cans used in the competition to City Harvest.

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It’s National Design Week, and tonight the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum will celebrate the winners of the 2013 National Design Awards with a ceremony and dinner at Pier Sixty in New York. Special guests including Tom Wolfe, Al Gore, and Kurt Andersen will be on hand to present the winners with their coveted glass asterisks, while the delightful Todd Oldham will announce the winner of this year’s People’s Design Award. We sent writer Nancy Lazarus to the National Design Awards Winners’ Panel, held at Parsons The New School for Design.

Richard Saul Wurman (center) moderates a discussion among NDA winners. Pictured from left, Tiya Gordon, Paula Scher, Gadi Amit, and Mike Femia. (Photos: Angela Jimenez)

Four of this year’s National Design Award winners appeared at a Tuesday evening panel moderated by Richard Saul Wurman, TED founder and 2012 lifetime achievement award winner. Topics encompassed winners’ early career experiences, current projects, and the award’s impact. Below are selected comments from each winning designer or firm.

Paula Scher, principal at Pentagram (communications design):
• “It’s a big deal that the U.S. government honors design, and it’s important to society. If the accolade is a seal of approval, that’s fantastic, but the next day, business is still business.”
• “At Pentagram we’re independent minded designers, there are no strategists. We establish direct client relationships using analogies and entertainment.”
• “With my hobby, large-scale paintings of maps, I use information to create the spirit of a place. It’s the antidote to my design life where I create corporate communications identities.”
• “During my earlier experience creating graphic design for music covers/albums, I learned about the relationship with the public. My work at Pentagram is still largely connected to entertainment, and much of the identity work is focused on making design accessible.”
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Syracuse, New York-based artist Carrie Mae Weems is among the 24 new fellows of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Announced today, the 2013 cohort of MacArthur Fellows—selected for “their creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future”—also includes choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, writer Donald Antrim, and audio savior Carl Haber, an experimental physicist developing new technologies for preserving inaccessible and deteriorating sound recordings. Each fellow will receive $500,000 in no-strings-attached support over the next five years. The MacArthur Foundation has previously bestowed its unrestricted largess upon fellows such as architect Jeanne Gang, typographer Matthew Carter, filmmaker Errol Morris, artist Tara Donovan, and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton. Click below to watch the foundation’s video of Weems at work:
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Would-be entrepreneurs, the time is now to throw your newfangled, solar-powered, air-purifying, self-cleansing hat into the ring for the James Dyson Award, a competition open to students studying product design, industrial design, and engineering at the university level (or recent graduates) in 18 countries, including the United States and Canada. Entries close August 1.

“We’re looking for people who rather than accept a problem, go further to design a simple and effective solution,” says Dyson. Last year’s big winner was Royal College of Art grad Dan Watson‘s SafetyNet, a device to increase the sustainability of fishing. As for this year’s competition, there’s buzz brewing around bike safety. Nathan Wills from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena has a new take on the bicycle helmet in the Torch T1, an LED-embedded cranium protector that is visible from 360 degrees. Another illuminating project comes from a group of Stanford students, who turned to Kickstarter to help develop Revolights, LED rings that mount directly to each wheel.

Illustration of James Dyson and his trusty Air Multiplier by Adrian Tomine for The New Yorker.

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The competition that spotted Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore, and Mike Mills when they were but wee design/art powerhouses-to-be is back. Behold Young Guns 11, the Art Directors Club’s international, cross-disciplinary, portfolio-based competition to identify the young creative vanguard. By “young,” they mean 30 or under, and by “creatives,” they mean those doing great things in graphic design, photography, illustration, advertising and art direction, environmental design, film, animation, video, interactive design, object design, and/or typography.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.