pI experienced an extraordinary triplet of events this past week: It started out at the Bellagio Center, the Rockefeller Foundation’s beyond-scenic lake-and-hilltop estate, then onto the annual Salone Del Mobile Furniture Fair in Milan, then through the bizarre machinations of being stuck in Europe (yes, I know, there are “worse places to be stuck than Milan”), hostage to the whims of the volcano, its ashes, and the various European airspace agencies. But for me, events happened in a different order. In what I can only describe as a bizarre bookending of things, the furniture fair was on one end, the volcano one the other, and in the middle, the Bellagio Design Symposium. Let me try to explain./p
pIt’s already been remarked that if Eyjafjallajokull didn’t exactly co-opt the fair, it at least provided its leitmotif (see Craig Berman’s picture perfect cartoons a href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/milan10/milan_design_week_2010_dont_blame_the_icelandic_designers_16407.asp”here/a and a href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/cartoons/milan_design_week_2010_the_eyjafjallajokull_chair_16418.asp”here/a). Certainly by Salone’s last couple of days, the expression on people’s faces (well, of the North Americans’ and northern Europeans’ anyway) was one of distress and fatigue; many wondered when, or if, they would be able to get home. I met several people with family back home, and even a married couple emboth/em marooned in Italy with two kids “back in the U.S. with the grandparents.” Everyone tried to keep a positive outlook (there’s the emfirst/em “moderation” from my title), but rumors of a “second eruption” and the infamous larger “sister volcano”#151;which has allegedly erupted every single time Eyja’s gone up#151;peppered every conversation. It was fascinating (and disheartening) to see the size of the story shrinking in the newspapers day by day, starting out as a huge, paper-spanning headline, then two column widths, then one, then a large box, then a small one. And it was humbling to see that this story, like all others, ran its news cycle, then faded./p
pimg alt=”bellagio_winterhouse_blog.jpg” src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/bellagio_winterhouse_blog.jpg” width=”468″ height=”231″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //p
pThe reason things flipped in my mind, I think, stems from the theme of the Bellagio event: a href=”http://winterhouse.com/bellagio/””Reasons Not to Be Pretty: Symposium on Design, Social Change and the ‘Museum’.”/a The event was produced by Winterhouse, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, and here we were to discuss the notion of design for social change, its various forms and manifestations, and how best to exhibit, acquire, and preserve its artifacts in museum and non-museum contexts. And we certainly tried to cover all that, but the concentrated discussions on design and social change#151;all the amazing examples of life-affirming, impact-making, ementerprises/em of design#151;provided the beating heart of the event, pumping oxygen (and belief) through the discursive circulatory system of the attendees and into our collective thoughts. We were immersed in the proactive, good-intensions of design (some called them “do-goody”), and by the end of the conference, we were walking around in the positive, world-changing glow of design and its seemingly-limitless powers./p
pLeaving the two-and-a-half day Bellagio event then and driving down into the Milan Furniture Fair was like walking through Platform 9frac34;’s brick wall in a Harry Potter novel. The Fair is not without its “critical design” provocations of course, but traveling out to the Fiera fairgrounds#151;as I did my first afternoon#151;shoved me through the most extraordinary shift in design matter. There was just so…much…stuff. Beautiful, well-designed, witty, often rich in content, spectacularly lit, and again, abundant, stuff. I felt an urgent necessity to reorient my compass; to try to be in the present, to switch gears from design-for-social-change to some of the other vectors of design endeavor#151;to form, to materiality, to commentary, to aesthetics and wonder and just plain silliness. But I have to say that for those first few hours, it just seemed so over-the-top. So emim/emmoderate./pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/events/everything_in_moderation_reflections_on_furniture_volcanoes_design_social_change_and_the_museum_16443.asp”(more…)/a
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Set your TiVOs, DVRs, or tune in Monday morning, April 26, to the Rachael Ray Daytime Talk Show. I’m on the episode giving advice on how to organize your closet, just in time for warmer weather.
Next week, I’ll be interviewing Oprah’s go-to organizer, the organizing star of Clean Sweep, and all-around fantastic gentleman Peter Walsh to talk with him about a new line of office organizing products he has designed for Office Max. While his publicist and I were working out the details this time for the technical side of things (we’re doing a video chat so you can hear his fabulous accent), I came up with a fun way to get you in on the fun.
Are design and advertising mortal enemies? Strange bedfellows? Distant cousins? Estranged cousins who occasionally share a bed? Find out tonight at Parsons when AIGA/NY convenes a panel to discuss this increasingly complex relationship. A trio of versatile experts will be hand: Art Directors Club president and 
