Hasta La Ideas

SmartPlanet’s got an interview up with Pattie Moore, one of the mothers of Universal Design. Most of us that have gone through ID programs learned that way back in 1979, when product design was a lot less enlightened as a field than it is now, Moore began disguising herself as an elderly woman and traveling the country to learn firsthand about the challenges she’d face as a result of poor design. A resultant Reader’s Digest article and Today Show coverage put her three-year project on the map and added an important element to the industrial design profession, most famously encapsulated in the Smart-Design-designed Good Grips line of products for Oxo.

Today Moore runs MooreDesign Associates, and in addition to doing research and consulting, she lectures at schools all around the world.

Here’s a snippet from the interview:

What makes good functional design?

Design can’t just be about the technology, the material science, the widgets and wow factors. It has to be holistic, it has to be human, it has to speak to us. We know the perfect little black dress when we see it. Everyone’s in search of the perfect mattress and has their special favorite cup. Things become an extension of what we’re able to do.

So design is a combination of technology and know-how and sensitivity and know-why. It’s like pornography–you can’t really define it, but you know it when you see it.

Read the rest here.

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The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art—where the lucky few study tuition-free inside a bold (and LEED Platinum-certified) Thom Mayne-designed building—has a new president-elect. Jamshed Bharucha, provost and senior vice president of Tufts University, will take office as the twelfth president of Cooper Union on July 1. The cognitive neuroscientist turned academic leader (and did we mention accomplished violinist?) will succeed President George Campbell Jr., who has held the top job since 2000. “Dr. Bharucha exemplifies Peter Cooper’s mandate that ‘the object of life is to do good,’” said Mark L. Epstein, chairman of Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees, in a statement issued today announcing the appointment. “A truly innovative educator, Dr. Bharucha’s interdisciplinary work combines the science of learning with a profound commitment to the advancement of the critical and creative thinking skills necessary to solve our world’s problems with dedication, ingenuity, and cultural awareness. Dr. Bharucha is the ideal person to lead The Cooper Union to new heights.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The first thing we thought of when learning that actor/artist James Franco had teamed up with the film school Columbia College Hollywood (which isn’t associated with either of the Columbias, in Chicago or New York) to help teach a class called Master Class: Editing James Franco…with James Franco, was the name of the mid-80s band Pop Will Eat Itself, because their name seems to perfectly encapsulate so much of Franco’s work. That got us watching the video for their 1989 hit “Can U Dig It?” which is now painful to watch, but also still a lot of fun. After that distraction, we got back to the task at hand, which is to think about the actor’s new class. Better to just read the explanatory portions of the press release:

Mr. Franco’s frequent collaborator editor and Tyler Danna is teaching the course, which has been entitled Master Class: Editing James Franco…with James Franco. Mr. Franco is providing the footage – much of it from behind the scenes on short films he has directed – and the conception for the course and will speak to the students weekly via live feed (Skype) and attend class the weekly class sessions when his schedule allows. The student editors will seek to create a cinematic image of James Franco through the footage.

…As conceived by Mr. Franco and Mr. Danna, the class sessions themselves will be taped and be part of the final film created by the class or another project.

There is the potential to carry the class forward with 12 different editors in the spring quarter and beyond as the film project continues.

Now we’ve seen the future of film and film school. By 2012, every movie released will resemble what it looks like when you point a video camera at the television your camera is plugged into. Except instead of ever-swirling and moving boxes and scan lines, there will be a million heads of James Franco. Fortunately, we’ll have the Mayan apocalypse to look forward to at the end of next year.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Japan Times has got a nice profile up on designer Masatoshi Sakaegi that delves not only into his “origin story,” to borrow a phrase from the superhero world, but also provides little-known footnotes about Japan’s industrial design history. Sakaegi is currently the subject of an exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo for his ceramics work, and the article reveals how a fifty-year-old, milestone government initiative drove Sakaegi into the industry:

…In 1960, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) established the “Good Design Award,” its mission to select outstanding examples of industrial design based on their form and function. This was an important step in formalizing design as an important cultural endeavor and establishing designers as artists in their own right. [Well-known ceramicist Masahiro] Mori was one of the first to bring this kind of artistry through design to the masses in Japan, and it was the simplicity and accessibility of his designs that appealed to Sakaegi.

“I became immediately interested in industrial design when I saw Mori’s work,” says Sakaegi in a recent interview. “It was amazing to me that, even as a high school student, I could afford something so beautiful and I liked the idea of things of beauty being available to everyone.”

Read the rest here.

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For those who dream of coming to the big city…to study the big city, Parsons the New School for Design has introduced a bachelor of science in urban design. According to the school, the new undergraduate degree program is the first of its kind in the United States. “Cities have become far too complex for any one person, academic discipline, or professional practice to grasp alone,” said program director Victoria Marshall, a practicing landscape architect and founder of Newark-based design firm TILL, in a statement issued by Parsons. “Through a mix of studios, workshops, field work, and social science courses, students will critically engage with the aesthetic, cultural, ecological, and political dimensions of urban life.” The four-year program is structured around a series of projects that address the roles of design in relation to critical issues facing cities such as sustainability, global migration, and economic instability, the latter of which students will experience firsthand should they seek off-campus housing. Past your bachelor’s degree days? Parsons is also developing two new graduate programs: an MA in Theories of Urban Practice and a studio-based MS in Design and Urban Ecologies. The newest members of the Parsons faculty, designers Aseem Inam and Miguel Robles-Duran, are at work on the curricula.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.