Hasta La Ideas

Admit it. Your seven-year-old nephew could out-HTML tag you any day and you think that a Cascading Style Sheet is something with a thread count. That’s where the Mediabistro mothership comes in. They’ve asked us to tell you about the upcoming weekend course in HTML Fundamentals. Over two Saturdays (October 10 and October 17) in New York City, artist, designer, and interactive developer David Tristman will teach you the basic structure of HTML and many commonly used tags as well as the role of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in HTML pages and current recommendations such as XHTML. By Sunday, you’ll be creating fully functional web pages and geeky birthday cakes like the one pictured above. Register here to get cooking with HTML.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Over at Design-Altruism-Project, David Stairs has sawed off his shotgun and taken out, well, just about all the usual suspects around design for social change. Core77 takes one of the first hits (a little obliquely though, on the shoulder, I think), and then all the king’s men fall one by one. It’s a great read, and besides the obvious schadenfreude yuks, Stairs has some fine points to make. Here’s one near the top:

For all our talk about “planning,” human beings don’t plan very well in the collective sense–civilization is just too complex. The beauty of the hives’ single-minded purpose doesn’t translate to people. As Americans we are raised to love independent choice, but this is precisely what leads to disaster when applied on a global scale. And it is no different with social design, where competition for the Internet “commons” is much more prevalent than cooperation. Add to this the fact that 98% of designers when asked say they want only to design, not plan, write grants, fund raise, correspond, or do any of the nine-hundred other nitty little things necessary to helping less fortunate people and you’re left with a large, well educated audience wearing blinders.

…and another later on:

If this blur of hysteria begins to make you feel a little woozy, join the club. I’m all about helping people, spend much time doing so, and I agree with Mariana [Amatullo] that there’s more than enough pain to go around in this world. The people trolling the net and re-posting RSS feeds for the pleasure of their Twitter “possees” are just engaging in a big circle jerk. But beyond such dim sighted initiatives something else lurks: the sudden widespread enthusiasm for social amelioration through design. It’s so terribly trendy to care, about the poor, the environment, and every form of “betterment” that I begin to assume we must be selling more design by fetishizing social relevance.

The comments are just starting to roll in, so by all means get in on the discussion. And for the record, I’m personally involved in several of the organizations and initiatives he discusses in the piece; didn’t stop me from enjoying it one bit.

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School is either back in session for most or getting to be that way soon. Homes of higher education are big places and with every new term comes some new faces, as professors and deans and various important people of important position move around a bit. Fortunately, there’s Architectural Record, who has just put up this post about who is going to be running the show at various design and architecture schools across the country, all in one helpful spot. There’s Dagmar Richter, the new head of Cornell‘s architecture program, Joel Towers taking over the design program at Parsons, and Lorne Buchman taking over at LA’s Art Center College of Design after some recent discomfort with their former leader, Richard Koshalek. The list should also serve as a bit of a downer for you, once you see the list of resume credits you need to become a dean of a big name design/architecture school — sadly, “I read UnBeige every couple of days” doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. What a world.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you missed it, be sure to grab a copy of yesterday’s NYTimes Magazine for the cover story and related pieces. “The Women’s Crusade” is a cut and paste of Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s upcoming book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” out next month, but it sure does make us look forward to that book. Check out the site here.

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So proud to announce the launch of The Prosthetics Project, the completed website for the prosthetic arm design project my SVA graduate class completed last fall. The designer of the site, Jackie Lay, did a fantastic job, and there’s a ton of great work to take a look through. Here’s the backstory from the site:

During the fall semester of 2009, 21 students embarked on a journey to conduct design work around upper limb prosthetics. Through readings, research, and an incredible group of guest critics including Aimee Mullins, Jon Kuniholm, Frank Wilson and Elliot Washor, the students attempted to put a dent in what may arguably be one of the most daunting design challenges imaginable–to design a better prosthetic arm.

The students took different approaches to the problem: some attacked it directly with mechanical improvements to existing prosthetics. Others offered devices and garments that introduced alternative modalities or provided new functionality. Some students took a more abstract approach, creating formal, often sculptural, gestures as a way to help us think about the notion of ‘prosthetic,’ while others took an extremely conceptual approach to investigating the paradigms and cultures around prosthetics and amputees.

Many of the projects were targeted at kids, arguing that there may be wider leeway in what would be deemed acceptable to the user. Some of these push the definitions of function, providing devices that are playful and life-affirming. The more sobering investigations in the group try to address the realities of arm amputees–as much as is possible by designers with both limbs.

Celine Bouchez | silver arm

James Yang | The other palm

The project was extremely demanding on the students, who were at turns humbled, discouraged, and ultimately elated with the work. As a design teacher, it was similarly humbling, since this was new territory for me as well and I was unsure how to scope and stage the project. (You can watch my reflections of the project in a talk I gave at the CompostModern conference in San Francisco a few month’s back here–lots of anecdotes and asides in that one.) In the end, the results were an inspiration–Aimee Mullins was generous enough to return for the final presentations and remarked that “there was more diverse creative thinking here in 10 weeks than there has been in the field in the past 100 years.” Quite a compliment to the students, who were proud…and ready for some sleep after many all-night charrettes.

Top image: Dohun Park

More projects after the jump:

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