Hasta La Ideas

Though it could all turn out to be fake, as has become par for the course with supposed image leaks of the company’s future products, the rumor mill is abuzz that Apple is planning to hire Norman Foster to build for them a new headquarters. The rumor came from an unlikely source, not from the various Silicon Valley insider blogs or the local northern California papers, but the Spanish newspaper El Economista, who claim to have sources who leaked information about the top secret plan. Calling it “The City of Apple,” the paper said the company’s plan is to build Foster’s new headquarters on the land it purchased from Hewlett-Packard late last month. Though, again, like anything Apple, a place known for being able to keep a secret, it’s usually always safest to not put too much stock in anything you hear unless it’s Steve Jobs doing the talking. Here’s a bit from a Google translation of the paper’s piece:

ElEconomista has been told by sources familiar with the situation, the future headquarters of the company Steve Jobs care especially environmental issues, to the point that the entire road transport transit through a network of tunnels that will clear the surface areas green. The buildings which will house the engineers and R & D will also be multifunctional and will incorporate cutting-edge technology in materials and equipment as well as renewable energy resources.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s called Autodesk University, and a large part of the experience are the classes. Once you register for the conference, you gain access to an online catalog of dozens of courses all designed to help you create more effectively.

The sheer breadth of classes is bananas, as Autodesk offers so many different products across so many industries. I met engineers, CAD guys, architects, materials experts, German people–I realize that’s not a profession, I just forgot to ask them what they do–as well as construction-industry folks and one guy who introduced himself as “a gold mine designer. As in, I design gold mines.” (I only spoke with him briefly, and afterwards regretted not asking him “Why do people always get trapped in coal mines and never gold mines?”)

The broad range of attendees can admittedly make smalltalk tough; at one lunch I shared a table with an extremely cute female who told me she worked for a uranium mining company. I spent most of the meal moving my salad around while trying to think of polite questions to ask about uranium.

Anyways, back to the classes. I tried to locate every class I could that pertained to industrial designers and stuck my head in as many as I could.

Some were lectures, like the one run by Germany-based Creative Solutions expert Michal Jelinek, who showed how to use Alias, Showcase, and Mudbox to quickly generate concept drawings and reduce what he called “mouseclick kilometers;” others were hands-on labs run by guys like Autodesk’s SketchBook Senior Product Manager Christopher Cheung (more on him later) and industrial designer Kyle Runciman, inviting you to follow along with them while they deftly executed drawings in SketchBook Designer and showed you shortcuts and tricks. Others were hands-on tutorials like the ones run by Tech Evangelist Shaan Hurley, who showed how to run AutoCAD on a Mac. Hurley offered these classes in two flavors: For those with AutoCAD experience but no Mac experience, and vice versa.

The hands-on labs and tutorials were pretty wicked because the classrooms come loaded with top-of-the-line machines. The Mac classes I sat in on had G5 towers, iMacs and 17-inch MacBook Pros you could choose from, all with high-end Wacom tablets and Magic Trackpads. Pretty bad-ass. (From what I understand, the PC-based labs come with high-end Dell and HP machines.)

The classes also come with printed handouts and downloadable PDFs that you’ll save as valuable references for later. As a registered conference attendee I had access to all of these online, and I’m sorry I can’t make them available for download here–a lot of the packets had proprietary information in them, for example excerpts from professional training manuals and “Learn Autodesk”-style books, sometimes with the authors even popping up in the classes.

Despite the broad range of attendees, I found plenty of classes beyond the drawing/rendering ones to interest the ID’er, for those of you who are weighing whether to attend next year. Some examples:

– Using Autodesk Inventor to Create Precision Sheet Metal Parts
– Digital Prototyping: A Case Study of Plastic Parts Design
– Injection Molding Warpage Prediction and Mold Correction
– Photo-Based Reality Capture: Turn Photographs into 3D Models
– Cross-Product Workflow for Industrial and Product Design
– Mudbox: Textures for Architecture and Design
– Brave New Mobile World: Creativity and Design on the Go
– Sustainable Design Techniques in Digital Prototyping

The list goes on and on.

The only minor gripe I had with the class set-up is that some of the descriptions were less than clear; for example I had to ask Hurley in person which Mac-AutoCAD class was which, as he was teaching two variants that had identical descriptions in the catalog.

Of five people I randomly asked–I know, I’m not winning a Pulitzer Prize for journalism here–only one reported similar confusion, an Australian engineer who said something like “the class descriptions were a bit confusing, mate.” (It’s possible I added the “mate” part in a subconscious Australianization of my memory of him, but I do clearly remember that he rode in on a kangaroo, then caught a boomerang he had hurled seconds earlier to incapacitate a wombat.)

I asked the Australian if he knows Core77’s own Glen Jackson Taylor, since they are both Australian. He assured me he grew up across the street from Glen, but in retrospect I think he was patronizing me.

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We know: there’s nothing like the term “supply chain” (along with the residual effects of Thanksgiving tryptophan and the less widely discussed wooziness associated with large annual doses of pumpkin pie) to get you clicking right back to your Cyber Monday shopping, but stay with us here. Meet the Sustainable Design Auditing Project (SDAP), a new working group that is taking on greenwashing by uniting designers, suppliers and manufacturers, academia, environmental nonprofits and other key stakeholders to develop environmental, social, and financial metrics for the graphic design supply chain. Led by Re-nourish and partner organizations including the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, SDAP will focus not on establishing standards but on developing metrics that will tackle everything from energy use and toxicity levels to labor and employment issues and profitability. The goal is to help both companies and individual make informed decisions as they navigate the increasingly murky waters of sustainability. “There’s clearly growing corporate and consumer recognition of sustainable operations as a core element of a robust bottom line over the long term,” Jess Sand, a partner at Re-nourish, tells us. “And given that up to 80% of a product’s environmental footprint occurs at the design stage, it’s essential that designers have transparent methods of measuring the on-the-ground impacts of our work.” Learn more about SDAP and sign up to get involved here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

At the very beginning of 2008, we posted a story with the title “Chelsea Art Museum Breathing Its Last Breaths?” While the struggling museum managed to fight and stay afloat throughout both that whole year and the next, it appears that it has finally succumbed to financial pressures and will be no more. Back in August, the museum closed on what they claimed was simply a temporary basis while they worked out a financial plan to help keep them going, facing debts of many millions and a development company who wanted the building back. By October, things were looking even more grim, with the property’s lender being handed the deed to the building, essentially signing the museum’s death warrant (at least in what had been its long-time home). Though ever the fighters, the museum and its founder Dorothea Keeser vowed to battle on, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the building has been sold and the museum will have one year to operate in the space, rent free, before they have to vacate and find a new home. Keeser also told the paper that “she would not open another museum in New York,” which seems to more-than-imply that the fight has officially come to an end and the museum’s sad fate has finally been accepted. Now the questions of what happens with the museum’s art collection and if it will are start anew in, say, rural Kentucky, remain. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I stopped pursuing corporate design work years ago, because the lowly rungs I occupied allowed little individual creativity. “If I got hit by a bus tomorrow,” I told friends, “and they replaced me with another designer, the work would come out exactly the same.”

I’ve used and heard the “If I got hit by a bus” metaphor for things all of my life, only recently realizing the phrase was an urbanism; outside New York’s ample opportunities for M16 Crosstown crosswalk calamity, apparently the rest of the U.S. says “If I got hit by a Mack truck.” (For you non-Americans, that’s a brand-name tractor-trailer that crawls our highways, hauling our goods and mowing down unwary pedestrians.)

The Mack truck, like Stockholm, even has its own syndrome. InformationWeek talked to Product Design Manager Christian Feldhake (of Torelli Bicycle) about the “Mack Truck Syndrome,” whereby a small firm can be crippled by the sudden loss of a single member. The solution, as Feldhake sees it, is a system called ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning. It entails a computer-based “dashboard” filled with relevant data points that anyone, theoretically, can use to step in and resume someone else’s role. It sounds more applicable to business than design. At least that’s what we designers, with our individual creative urges, hope.

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