Hasta La Ideas

Becky Bermont, Vice President, Media + Partners at the Rhode Island School of Design, explores in her latest column for the Harvard Business Publishing blog the foundational tools that designers employ to do their work and wonders what kind of applicability those have to business.

“I see now that designers are people who can make information emotional and visceral, who can make a bigger impact by thoughtfully marrying form and content. They are “experience perfectionists,” the ones who always ask about the space a meeting will occur in so they can arrange the room and have music or images playing when people walk in. They are obsessed with materials; they can have a completely literate and thoughtful conversation about the width of a rubber band being used as a book binding, and how it will change the way the book is perceived.”

>> Read article

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If you like strategic design thinking with a healthy dose of green, check out the new CATALYST Strategic Design Review, produced by the graduate Design Management Program at Pratt Institute (chaired by the amazing Mary McBride) and edited by Erin Weber. Here’s the pitch:

CATALYST is designed to spark conversation about the role of strategic design in shaping successful business. Its intent is to provide an opportunity for design leaders and innovators to share theory and best practices for a future that’s economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.

The inaugural issue explores New York City “as an incubator for strategic design,” and takes on issues of redesigning urban school systems, green architecture, and the High Line (opened yesterday!). Core77’s Allan Chochinov has a (reprinted) piece in it as well, and don’t miss the “9 Things to Know About Pro Bono.”

Check out the publication here (online only), and explore additional topics on the CATALYST blog.

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“You have pushed yourself through a system that wasn’t designed to help you.” Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson addresses the graduating class at RISD.

Via Joanne Kaliontzis and Design Observer

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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. This weekend 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 night, you’ll be creating fully functional web pages and geeky birthday cakes like the one pictured above. Register here to get cooking with HTML.

If one of your hobbies is to crash graduations, then you were likely aware that the Rhode Island School of Design had theirs this past Saturday. As we’ve heard, it’s always a good time, marked with good guest speakers and interesting tours of final projects. This year, Jonathan Ive received an honorary diploma, as did Flickr‘s Caterina Fake, artist Betty Woodman, and former school president Roger Mandle, with Ken Robinson delivering the commencement. So not a bad line-up in the slightest (sure beats this writer’s speakers, who we don’t even remember in the slightest, but we bet they encourages us to, at some point, “look around us” while also recommending we “think about the future”). Also, the RISD students have a great knack for cleverly altering their graduation gowns, which we’ve long been a fan of (and was the lead focus of the Providence Journal‘s “RISD Graduates 655 in Colorful Ceremony” yet they decided to run a photo of parents taking pictures — instead, we recommend looking on Flickr, where there are limited shots now, but sure to be more once all the graduates get over their celebratory hangovers around Tuesday or Wednesday). Congrats to all.