Hasta La Ideas

All photos by Catalina Kulczar-Marin

Like with any other conference aimed at sparking innovation and creativity, you’re going to leave the event with too much information to process. (Moan and groan about buzzwords all you want, but at the end of the day “inspired” is the only way to describe it.) Which, of course, were my feelings concerning PSFK 2014, a one-day conference titled “Connecting the Unexpected.” On April 11, the staff of PSFK hosted an auditorium full of marketers, designers, entrepreneurs and other creative types at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. For the sake of Internet brevity and my own sanity, I’ll break up a few of my favorite take-aways in accordance with the three speaker categories: Keynote, Spotlight and Refresh. I hope that you might find some of it—yup—inspiring.

Keynote

Marc Kushner of Architizer

The day got off to a great start. The first presenter—and possibly the most interesting to me—was Marc Kushner, CEO and co-founder of Architizer. While his message was strong on its own, it might have been the easy delivery and candid approach he took to presenting it. Nothing seemed over-rehearsed and instead of cramming a career’s worth of work into 20 minutes (speakers were allotted 10- and 20-minute presentation times), he walked us all through one design his firm HWKN took on: “Wendy,” the 2012 winner of the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. He addressed the topic of creating things with personality and pushed his message even further through presenting the thought process behind one of his own successful designs. (His words: “They tweeted at her. They added her on Facebook.”)

By taking us through the design process by means of various sketches and photographs of the finished product, Kushner successfully (at least in my instance) reminded us all that architecture is an interactive part of society. My favorite words from the entire event came from Kushner: “Math is intimidating. Architecture shouldn’t be intimidating.”

Left to right: Keith Yamashita, founder of SYPartners; Kevin Alloca, trend tracker at YouTube; and Björn Jeffrey, founder of Toca Boca

Keith Yamashita also served up a noteworthy performance and controlled his presentation (which you can view here) from his phone, which was pretty nifty. His focus was the importance of teamwork in discovering with a successful solution—design-specific or not—and took us through a few steps, or lessons: “Start from a pure place—with equal parts empathy and aspiration,” “never delegate understanding,” “virtually all acts of greatness are the work of an ensemble” and “greatness is a choice,” to name a few.

Brooklyn Boulders‘s “Cultural Chameleon” Jesse Levin shared his stories of volunteering in disaster areas and drew similarities with the atmosphere and team he has built in Brooklyn. Hiring music acts and housing graffiti artists in exchange for wall decorations are only a few things he has utilized to create a collaborative space—not to mention he’s created a co-working space inside of the Brooklyn Boulders gym, complete with standing desks and pull-up bars (no joke). While he wasn’t speaking about design per se, the notion that taking creative leaps keeps ideas fresh applies to any domain.

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Earlier this week, we had the privilege to witness the fifth anniversary of the TED Fellows program, one that traditionally kicks off the week of TED with a boom. While last year brought the greater creative community to…

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As these things go, Day One of the 2014 Design Indaba Conference was a bit behind schedule from the get-go. Experimental Jetset acknowledged as much in their regimented presentation that morning: after introducing themselves by way of banter, Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen explained that they’d be spending the rest of their 40-minutes time slot by sharing their influences from A to Z, spending one minute on each topic. Taking the notion of a timed talk to its logical extreme, the Dutch trio went so far as to include 60-second countdown timers on each slide—a nod, perhaps, to their cerebral approach to graphic design.

L: Stolk’s parents were founding members of the Provo anarchist movement (’65–’67); R: Invitation for Wim Crouwel: Architectures Typographiques

Of course, it didn’t play out that way: Stolk clocked in “Anarchy” in exactly 60 seconds, but from “The Beatles” on, it was clear that the concept was a tad overambitious. (On the other hand, when it seemed that one of them would finish earlier than the 60 seconds on a couple of the letters, he or she would knowingly stretch the explanation.) Still, anyone familiar with their work could have guessed what “H” would be: they’ve been typecast (in a manner of speaking) as strict Helveticists since their memorable turn in Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary on the ubiquitous typeface. Adherents to this day, van den Dungen duly noted that “We signed our own death sentence… in Helvetica.”

Dean Poole, on the other hand, gushed about letterforms as archetypes; the self-effacing New Zealander’s presentation which followed lunch on the third and final day of the conference, was rife on wordplay and visual puns, his understated punchlines deadpanned to a tee. Indeed, language and its mode of mechanical representation figure heavily into his work (where Sagmeister turns things into typography, Poole does the opposite) as the founder of Auckland-based studio Alt Group. Hence his rather more rapid ‘characterization’ of the letters of the alphabet—set in Futura, if I remember correctly—as ideograms, which, when juxtaposed with the Amsterdammers’ ABCs, results in a series of non sequiturs:

I didn’t catch Dean’s versions of “P” and “U” and I haven’t been able to get in touch with him; leave a comment if you happen to know what they are…

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There were just a couple of hints that Thomas Heatherwick would be making major headlines with his presentation at Design Indaba last week, but it would prove to be the highlight of the conference. Nevertheless, the unassuming Londoner scarcely betrayed his nerves as he presented a handful of completed projects and works in progress in the lead-up to the reveal.

His work, for the uninitiated, sounds farfetched or fanciful, even Borgesian at times: A corridor-less, corner-less Learning Hub in Singapore. A flaming floriform sculpture that perfectly symbolizes “E pluribus unum” (made of copper no less), which might just be the coolest Olympic cauldron design ever. A fleet of two-story buildings on wheels, from which “you can’t get a better view of London”—a.k.a. the double-decker bus. The Seed Cathedral, which looks like a giant sea creature or koosh ball or a universe that’s exploding and imploding at the same time… for which Heatherwick revealed his original inspiration.

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The fact that Jake Barton’s work has been woefully absent from these pages—just a couple of mentions in 2008 and a 2011 Core77 Design Awards Notable (and the BIG Heart)—simply means that his presentation at the 2014 Design Indaba Conference is a felicitous occasion to cover the latest from his media design practice, Local Projects.

Barton is a natural presenter—no surprise, given his background in theater—who speaks with a confident, clear cadence on and off the stage. He worked as an exhibition designer prior to attending NYU ITP, where he has taught since he graduated in 2003, and has spent the past decade or so establishing Local Projects (which he founded in 2002) as the premier shop of its kind. While they’re billed as a “media design firm for museums and public spaces, Local Projects makes cutting-edge technology accessible and meaningful to a broad audience. Specifically, Barton and his team of designers, technologists, filmmakers and developers create media-enabled experiences at the intersection of design and storytelling—from rich oral histories to simple, intuitive interactions.

The site- and exhibition-specific multimedia elements that the National Design Award-winning firm has designed go far beyond the ho-hum audio guide, offering glimpses of the potential of augmented reality, where the content is seamlessly integrated into the (largely screen-based) media. Most of us have witnessed (or at least heard an account of) a young child attempting to ‘swipe’ or otherwise manipulate a television as though it is a touchscreen; with Local Projects’ displays for the Cleveland Museum of Art, you actually can.

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