Design students collaborate with Harley-Davidson on “The Helmet Project”

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The Harley-Davidson Museum and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design are teaming up for the former’s first feature exhibition, “The Helmet Project,” which will involve the labor of over 100 art and design students:

The Helmet Project challenged students to deconstruct the conventional notion of a helmet and re-envision its function and meaning through art and design that push visual and conceptual boundaries. Students are also creating the show – from exhibit fabrication and installation to exhibition graphics and marketing.

“Harley-Davidson is renowned for its iconic motorcycle designs – both the industrial design of the motorcycle and the artistic design of distinct paint, graphics, parts and accessories,” said Fricke. “The Helmet Project was expressly developed to create an ambitious college-wide project focusing on art and design – skills that are very important to Harley-Davidson. Our rewarding partnership with MIAD has resulted in an exhibition that is informative, bold and fun and will interest fans of art and design, history, motorcycling, and pop culture.”

The exhibit opens Wednesday, October 28th. Click here for more info.

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Coming up fast: Opportunity Green, November 7-8, Los Angeles

Opportunity Green

There’s just a couple more weeks to register for the Opportunity Green Business Conference, taking place on November 7th and 8th in Los Angeles. The conference aims to inspire “a collaborative culture of new thinking” and “facilitate the movement to transform business for good” by providing “unprecedented approaches to sustainability that are bankable and exciting.”

Sounds pretty good, right?

Even better is the unbelievable speaker list, including Michael Hopkins, the editor-in-chief of the MIT Sloan Management Review; Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject; Adam Lowry, founder of Method; and Helen Walters, editor of Innovation & Design at Business Week.

To supplement the conference, Opportunity Green is running the OG|25 competition, which will highlight the best of innovative green startups. And, just added, is the Tour de OG, a 5 day bike ride directly preceding the event. The ride will raise awareness about green business, and all participants will receive organic meals, campsites and lodging, promotional bike accessories and discounted attendee registration for the conference.

More information and registration guidelines here.

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It’s National Design Week!

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The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is celebrating National Design Week by offering free admission for all museum visitors between October 18 through the 24th. In addition, they’ll be hosting a series of public programs around the National Design Awards, presented by First Lady Michelle Obama this past July.

Here’s the list of what’s up for the rest of the week:

National Design Awards Winners’ Panel
October 20, 6:30-8:30 pm
The Times Center

The 2009 National Design Award winners, including Laurene Boym, Andrew Blauvelt and Steve Duenes, participate in a panel discussion about their inspiration and drive as designers and the state of contemporary design in America. Register for the event here, or, if you can’t make it, watch the live webcast from this website.

Objectified Film Screening
October 21st, 1:30 and 3:30 pm
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

If you missed Objectified when it made its round through the box office, now’s your chance to catch this “feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them.” Register for the 1:30 here or the 3:30 here.

National Design Awards Gala & After-Party
October 22nd

Cooper-Hewitt celebrates the 2009 National Design Awards with its annual Awards ceremony and dinner held at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City. Get tickets here.

If you aren’t in New York but would like to attend some design-related events, check out Copper-Hewitt’s “Design Around America” banner for national listings.

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Boym Partners’ Timeless Objects at Wright Auction House, Chicago

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Wright Auction House continues to explore and support contemporary design by hosting the Boym Partners at their auction space in Chicago, IL from November 3rd through the 14th.

Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym, the recipients of a 2009 National Design Award, will be showing new works (unique to Wright auction house) alongside selections from Timeless Objects, their new collection of ordinary objects made “timeless” through the application of a special epoxy resin mixture, reminiscent of bronzing. The results are highly enigmatic, obscuring the origins of each object while emphasizing their form.

If you need any more convincing, check out Alice Rawsthorn’s article on the Boyms, “Seeing Design as Intellectual Rather Than Just Practical,” published a few days ago in the New York Times.

A few more shots of new additions to Timeless Objects after the jump.

Timeless Objects at Wright Auction House
4-14 November, 2009
Artist’s Reception: 3 November 2009, 6 – 9pm (RSVP)

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At New Yorkers for Children Gala, David Stark Makes It Happen with Thousands of Post-its

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(Photos: Susie Montagna)

Never underestimate the power of a Post-it. Event designer David Stark and his team used hundreds of the little yellow notes to ensure that the theme of the recent New Yorkers for Children fall gala stuck with guests. “Make It Happen” was spelled out in a sunny wall of yellow and black Post-its that welcomed attendees and flanked the dining space, while a “giving tree” in the cocktail area invited attendees to scribble their thoughts on Post-it “leaves.” More Post-its covered the reverse of the entry wall, tweaking the message to ask “How do you make it happen?” Guests arrived to their tables to find personalized Post-it pads marking their places, along with napkins embroidered with a psuedo-Post-it designed by Stark. As for those eyelet table linens, they were custom made by Ankasa in—you guessed it—Post-it yellow.

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Previously on UnBeige:

  • David Stark Creates ‘Art-Meets-Housewares’ for West Elm Store Opening
  • Up Close and Sustainable with David Stark’s Design Awards Decor

    New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

  • Vipp: Trash cans for charity

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    To celebrate their 70th anniversary, Danish product company Vipp, which produced the original steel-cylinder trash can with rubber foot pedal, has asked a ton of designers of all stripes to devise trash can designs for a charity auction done in conjunction with Design Within Reach. Proceeds will benefit DIFFA: Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS.

    The unusual line-up contains the likes of Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Yoko Ono, Yves Behar, and others. The public viewing of the resultant trash cans opens today in New York, and the designs will be auctioned off at the end of this month.

    via metropolis

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    San Francisco Confab update: One week to go, 1st workshop SOLD OUT

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    The one week that stands between now and the fourth installment of the Coroflot Creative Confab looks to be a busy one, if we extrapolate from recent trends.

    The morning workshops, for one, have filled up with astonishing speed; encouraging, since this is the first time we’ve expanded the schedule beyond the afternoon-panel-plus-reception of Confabs past. On the other hand, it means that if you wanted to attend the “Creating an Online Presence Worth Hiring” workshop, you are outta luck: it’s full. Sorry.

    If you’re looking to learn about the other end of the hiring see-saw though, there’s still room in Terra Dehnert and Corey O’Brien‘s “Subtle Art of Creative Hiring” workshop, and it’s an impressive one. The two Aquent account managers have conducted over a thousand interviews with designers between the two of them, and drawn on this experience to create an exceptional workshop. Expect some extremely actionable insights on how to go about your own creative hiring process, and plenty of real world examples and hands-on exercises. Especially recommended for small business and studio owners eager to get some innovators on their team, but not sure where to start.

    The afternoon panel discussion lineup continues to be spectacular, with creative hiring experts Emily Delmont of Google Creative Lab, John Foster of IDEO, Kate Gilman of 24 Seven, and Steve Johnson of LinkedIn.

    The list of Sponsoring Employers and Recruiters isn’t too bad either:

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    Registration is limited to 200, and well on its way to filling up.

    Coroflot’s Creative Employment Confab
    Wednesday, October 21, 2pm – 6pm (workshops: 10am – noon)
    The Autodesk Gallery
    One Market Street, San Francisco, CA

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    Mealing: Marti Guixe in NYC, November 14th

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    We’ve written about Marti Guixé time and time again, so we’re excited to announce that he will be in the area on November 14th, hosting a meal at Performa 09, the new visualt arts/perfomance biennial in NYC.

    The interactive performance will take the form of a three-hour long “meal-in-motion,” where “participants will be given ceramic glasses with ‘edible microsnacks’ adhered to their surface and instructions for eating them while performing small gestures that will require each person to interact with their fellow diners.”

    If you’re a fan of his Gin and Tonic Fog party, Food Facility, or Meta-territorial Cuisine Cookbook, this is not to be missed.

    More information about Performa 09’s scheduled food performances (including a pasta sauna) at Eat Me Daily.

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    Mealing by Marti Guixé
    Performa Hub
    41 Cooper Square
    Saturday, November 14 6:00pm
    Tickets: $25

    Thanks, Zach!

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    So-called Real Life Launch Party at the Glenbow


    Two new exhibitions are opening this Saturday at the Glenbow. “Real Life” features the uncannily life-like sculptures of Ron Mueck paired with video by Israeli artist Buy Ben-Ner. Ben-Ner’s video Stealing Beauty (stills shown above) was shot, guerilla-style, entirely on location in IKEA show rooms in New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Notice the price hang tags. The second exhibition features “Haida Manga” artwork: a hybrid expression of culture and comics.

    From the Glenbow: “We will be celebrating the much anticipated opening of 2 fall contemporary art exhibitions: Real Life: Ron Mueck and Guy Ben-Ner as well as the Haida Manga art of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. In addition you can meet Glenbow’s artists-in-residence, local filmmaker Sandi Somers who will debut her 1 minute video and kick off our video challenge and Calgary-based musician Kris Demeanor who will perform new work made in response to Ron Mueck’s hyper-realistic sculptures. And to top it all off – in case you have any fascinating questions about our new 800 pound baby – curator Jonathan Shaughnessy from the National Gallery of Canada will be giving a gallery tour of the Real Life exhibition.”

    The launch party takes place this Saturday at 7:00 as is pay-what-you-can at the door. Please RSVP to Allison at the Glenbow (rsvp@glenbow.org) by Thursday, October 15 at noon.

    Unclutter Your Life in One Week and a special bonus

    Yesterday morning, my UPS delivery woman crushed my productivity when she brought me advance copies of my book:

    I couldn’t stop staring at the books in the box. I was transfixed. I may have even cried a little — okay, more than a little. Writing a book has been at the top of my life’s to-do list since the first time I ever made a life to-do list. And writing this specific book has been a goal since I began my personal uncluttering adventure. Seeing the finished book in print and being able to hold it in my hands was one of the most incredible moments of my life.

    Unclutter Your Life in One Week would not be possible without you, Unclutterer.com readers. In fact, you’re the first people thanked in the acknowledgments section of the book. As a sign of my appreciation, I want to offer you all something in return. I wish that I could give you a discount on the book, but the publishers and retailers have a tight lock on that part of the process. So, here is a special bonus that I can give without ruffling any feathers:

    If you order Unclutter Your Life in One Week online before it is available in stores November 3, I will e-mail you PDF copies of the worksheets in the book as a free, special bonus. Simply fill out the special bonus form to redeem your PDFs. For those of you who have already ordered the book, feel welcome to fill out the form to get your copies.

    All PDFs will be e-mailed to you on November 3. The PDFs are copies of worksheets in the book so that you don’t have to recreate them on your computer to use them — I’ve done the work for you already.

    I have decided to do this promotion on the honor system. I am trusting you and taking your word for it that you ordered the book. And, along those same lines of the honor system, I’m also requesting that no one posts these PDFs online after you receive them. I want to offer something special just for Unclutterer readers, so I hope that you respect my requests.

    This is a limited offer and it will disappear the night of November 2 from the website.

    Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some of the book’s content on the site, answering your questions about the book (for example: yes, my publisher has assured me that there will be an e-book available for pre-order and yes, it is being translated into French), and letting you know where and when I’ll be talking about and signing copies of the book. Thank you, again, for being such wonderful readers and making all of this possible.

    (Thanks also to Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution for the special bonus idea.)