Hasta La Ideas

Spring has come and gone and now that summer is here, we’ve long moved past the annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge shortlist and are ready to crown a winner. The prize, which hands out “a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems,” has this year been awarded to Blue Ventures, “a conservation organization that simultaneously protects marine environments while improving the standard of living in some of the world’s poorest coastal communities.” We’d try to explain exactly what it is that Blue Ventures does, which involves things like designing and implementing plans for a Marine Protected Area in the Indian Ocean, which has benefited more than 10,000 people in traditional fishing villages, but it’s probably best if we let the video they submitted for the Challenge do the talking:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After the great Home Depot hoax debacle from earlier this year, wherein we’re still removing the egg from our face and our cheeks are still slightly red, we’ve decided to approach this post very carefully. ZDNet‘s blog SEO Whistleblower blog has claimed that they’ve received a copy of the internal guide Apple passes out to its designers to promote healthy living. Included is everything from how to properly sit while working at your desk, how to exercise efficiently, and so on. All these instructions come packaged together in a very Apple-looking box designed by Carl Jeffers (you can see much more of it on his personal site as well). Being as we’re already models of health, we haven’t read through all of the many scanned pages the site has posted, but even if it is just a scam or simply a design mock-up to help show off in a portfolio, it’s nice to look at and seems to have some useful advice. And hey, fake or not, we’ve seen our fair share of designers who could do worse than heeding some of the advice therein.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We’re of two minds on the launch of the Royal Institute of British Architects‘ new design contest, the Pylon Design Competition, which is aptly named because it seeks submissions for new designs for the ubiquitous and gigantic electric pylons you see not only spread across Europe but all over the US and in nearly every other country across the world. For one, of course, we’re all for their plans to hunt for new ideas in making these mighty carriers of electricity more efficient and sustainable, while also making them more aesthetically pleasing, instead of their current form as massive, almost otherworldly frames of metal dotting the landscape and rising hundreds of feet into the air. On the other hand, having once lived in the great, desert and mountain expanse of the Southwest and now living in the great, very flat expansive of the Midwest, this writer sort of loves the old things. Sure, on paper they’re obtrusive and block natural views and some might even say they’re downright ugly. But who hasn’t spent time as a child on a long family drive counting them or imagining they’re giant, static robots just waiting to come to life? We concede that it’s far better that, at the end of this competition, the results are world-alteringly perfect and beautiful and will change the way we think about the delivery of power, but if adopted, there’s a small part of us that will miss the old monsters. So do us proud, UK designers, and come up with something good. You have until July 12th to submit your entry. Here’s the launch video:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a bizarre turn of events, it feels like we’ve suddenly been thrust into a world where the situation with John Galliano, who heads to court next month in Paris for his racial slurs and claims to love Adolph Hitler, never happened. First, and making the rounds like wildfire this week, was director Lars von Trier at Cannes, who didn’t seem to be able to control his babbling as he stumbled through an awkward few minutes of a press conference, wherein he said things like, “[Hitler] is not what you would call a good guy, but, yeah, I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit” and ended with a what-have-I-done, “Ok, I am a Nazi.” He was flanked by actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst, who both appear in his latest film, both of whom seemed understandably uncomfortable (here’s video of the scene and for more careful review, a great page full of animated gifs of Dunst’s reactions as the horror show played out). Second, the organizers behind the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia are catching some heat this week after rolling out a new campaign featuring illustrations that critics have described as “neo-Hitlerite” and “like something from a Leni Riefenstahl film” due to its use of “an Aryan-looking snowboarder and an ice-skater gazing into the middle distance.” While certainly one could argue that old fascist and communist era iconography has long been used to ironic effect (see: Shepard Fairey, the multi-million dollar industry of Che Guevara merchandise, etc.), the Guardian reports this particular instance is a bit different, in that the design firm behind the campaign, the St. Petersburg-based Doping-Pong, has used swastikas and Nazi flags in some of their work, and have frequently collaborated with the artist Katya Zashtopik, “who is known for her sympathies with the ultra-right” and who recently wished Hitler a happy birthday on her blog. The firm is now playing defense, claiming they had no intention to support Nazism through the ads, nor did they work with Zashtopik on them. They’ve also claimed that the press is itching to read more into this than is there (and upon seeing their site and the context for which things are used, particularly the Guardian‘s aforementioned, seemingly very devious claim that they’ve used “a swastika as one of its online ‘banners’” we’re inclined to agree with their defense to some extent, because once you see what they’ve done, it makes more sense than just that one, evil-sounding sentence). But in the end, it’s all up for you to decide: Did von Trier just get tongue tied or did he spill a bit more than he should have? And is this campaign a nod to Nazism or just the media trying to dig a story out that might not really be there?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As we reported yesterday, after struggling for years under a mountain of debt, the American Folk Art Museum has been forced to sell their building to the neighboring MoMA, moving to a much smaller space across town and likely losing a majority of their staff along the away. So what ultimately did the museum in? According to New York‘s Jerry Saltz, architecture is to blame. The critic writes that, as soon as their building opened in 2001, “it was immediately clear to many that the building was not only ugly and confining, it was also all but useless for showing art — especially art as visionary as this museum’s.” Saltz’ comments created a bit of an internal battle inside of the magazine, with its architecture critic penning a response entitled “Jerry Saltz Has It All Wrong About the American Folk Art Museum.”

Elsewhere in lousy museum news (though this is also kind of secretly impressive in the way all true crime art heists are), despite “1,600 antitheft alarms and 3,700 closed-circuit television cameras,” a group of thieves stole more than $1.5 million worth of antique jewelry boxes from inside Beijing’s Forbidden City. The pieces were there as part of a visiting exhibit and the theft was discovered after a man was spotted fleeing the scene. “Staff at the palace museum were reported to have found a large hole in the back wall of the exhibition space. Entering through the hole, they found the exhibition cabinets pried open.”

Finally, if you read one thing today (beside, of course, this post you’re reading right now), make it Eric Wilson‘s wonderful review in the NY Times of Lady Gaga‘s first “fashion and art” column for the magazine V. However, those who critiqued our post last year about the musician’s desire to have “an All Gaga exhibit in the Louvre,” of which there were many (and of which confused us mightily), might want to avoid reading it, as Wilson gets a touch sarcastic and snarky in spots.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.