Hasta La Ideas

The next speaker in the David H. Liu Lecture Series in Design at Stanford is Dr. Jon Cagan.

Dr. Cagan is the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s graduate program in Product Development and a distinguished professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering. Cagan has written two fantastic books on the topic of product development: Creating Breakthrough Products and The Design of Things to Come. Both books skillfully navigate the arc from the fuzzy front end of product development all the way up to program approval. The texts also bridge the chasm between qualitative and quantitative values in a way that is actually understandable. His Liu Lecture will be about the emerging research in the creative Design process and the role of emotion in product usage.

The talk will be at 8:00pm on Monday, May 4th, 2009. It will be in Braun Hall (Building 320) in Room 105. Hope to see you there!

Here’s the abstract:

Emerging research is uncovering the cognitive basis of creative design and the emotional basis of product usage. This talk will present studies in both of these areas. From the perspective of how designers create innovative solutions, we will look at a series of cognitive studies that uncover how designers utilize both useful and misleading information while carrying open goals of unsolved design problems. From the perspective of the person using the product, emotion plays a critical role. We will examine new methods to capture aesthetic preferences and agent-based computational tools that use those preferences to guide generation of preferred design forms.

The Spring 2009 Industrial Design Graduate Thesis Presentations will be taking place on Friday, May 1st and Saturday, May 2nd, 12:30 pm-5:00pm on the 4th floor of Pratt Studios at the Brooklyn campus. A gallery reception will follow the presentations on both days. More info at the site.

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Register by April 24 for this competition, and then enter an idea by May 1, 2009. Winning entries will be publicly displayed and presented to city officials. All disciplines are encouraged to submit “highly creative entries”, and submissions should take the form of a brief description, plus four 11×17 inch (300 dpi) images to be submitted online. The entry fee is $30.

From the competition website:

This international ideas competition solicits bold visions that describe how the Bronx and the Grand Concourse can evolve in coming decades to cope with pressing needs for housing, green space, and transportation. Now is the time to make sure that the Bronx’s omnipresent dynamism, occasional radicalism and enduring creativity find expression in the public realm.

Winning proposals will be exhibited at The Bronx Museum of the Arts starting in November 2009. A companion exhibition will take place in Manhattan at the Center for Architecture during November. Honorable mentions will be on display at the exhibition and on this website.

7 finalists will be awarded a $1,000 cash stipend to further develop their proposal for inclusion in the exhibition Intersections: Grand Concourse at 100 — Future at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, opening Nov. 1, 2009. A first prize of $5,000 will be awarded to one of the seven finalists once the exhibit is on view.

Honorable Mentions will be awarded to up to 50 submissions, and will be displayed digitally during the exhibit in the Museum’s North Wing Lobby and also displayed in an online gallery on this website.

A project of the Bronx Museum in conjunction with the Design Trust for Public Space.

http://grandconcourse100.org/

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Design event rule of thumb: if you learn that charisma-oozing branding whiz Brian Collins is going to be somewhere—particularly somewhere proximal to a stage and/or microphone—just go! And so it shall be on the evening of Tuesday, May 5, when Collins moderates Creative Storytelling: Innovative Design in Advertising & Branding at New York City’s Tribeca Cinemas Gallery. The mediabistro-sponsored panel discussion features non-traditional marketing guru Sebastien Agneessens (Formavision), multitalented creative director Jason Koxvold (PerfectFools), Mr. Multiplatform Dan LaCivita (Firstborn Multimedia), and Vivian Rosenthal (Tronic Studio), a creative force behind campaigns for Target and Diesel. Collins will extract from them the secrets to creating compelling stories, solving business problems, and connecting clients to customers through innovative advertising, branding, and interactive design. Click here to learn more.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

If you missed John Thackara’s presentation at Parsons last night, you’ll have another chance this afternoon (Tuesday) when he takes part in a panel at Parsons School for Design Strategy from 2:30 to 4:30PM. The topic will be, “How can exhibitions best facilitate social learning toward more sustainable futures? Is it too fixed a medium, too superficial, or too abstract? What can it lead to? How does it compare to books, conferences, demo projects, competitions, campaigns, or (digital) networks?” The discussion will focus around John’s work with the DOTT Festival and EcoCity Lab, and guests will be Aaron Levy (Slought Foundation and co-curator of Into the Open), Maura Lout (Curator of “Growing and Greening New York”), Manuel Toscano (Zago), Debra Johnson (Pratt Design Incubator), Allan Chochinov (Core77), and Parsons Dean of Design Strategies, Joel Towers.

66 Fifth Avenue, between 12th and 13th streets in the lobby at Kellen Gallery.

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