Hasta La Ideas

by Samuel Emmet Over the weekend, scores of art students and gallery-goers descended on Providence’s Rhode Island Convention Center to see the 2014 Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) Annual Graduate Thesis Exhibition. The Convention Center, a…

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The 2013 national Doodle 4 Google winner was 17-year-old Sabrina Brady from Wisconsin.

Put on your inventor’s helmets and break out the fancy Prismacolors, kids, because the Doodle 4 Google contest is back with a new doodling prompt: “If I Could Invent One Thing to Make the World a Better Place…” (Magical video glasses is probably too on the nose).

“Our theme this year is all about curiosity, possibility, and imagination,” notes Google, which has run the annual competition since 2008. Students in kindergarten through twelfth grade in U.S. schools are invited to complete that sentence in the form of a redesign of the Google logo. The winning doodle will be animated and featured, for one glorious day, on the search giant’s homepage, and the lucky doodler receives a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for his or her school. Among this year’s illustrious guest judges are artist, designer, and author Christoph Niemann (pictured) and Rhode Island School of Design interim president Rosanne Somerson, who are joined by the likes of Lemony Snicket, LEGO robotics designer Lee Magpili, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, directors of The Lego Movie. Start dreaming and doodling now, because all entries must be received by March 20.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The idea of round hanging mirrors with thick leather straps may have blossomed with modernist designer Jacques Adnet’s “Circulaire” mirror—the result of a partnership with Hermés in the 1950s—but over the past two years we’ve seen it bloom even further, becoming both a…

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The wise RISD president dispenses personalized advice in a live exhibition at London’s Riflemaker gallery

Today John Maeda, digital design guru and President of RISD, drew my destiny in the sand at the Riflemaker Gallery in London’s Soho area. Playing my part in Maeda’s four day consultancy performance piece “John Maeda is the Fortune Cookie” was a brief, but rather unforgettable experience.

There was little eye contact from Maeda as I was ushered reverently into the room by a lab-coated gallery assistant, he was busy stamping down the sand to create his newly blank canvas. His quiet presence was authoritarian, accentuating the impression of consulting an oracle. The sandpit arrangement, with him on the inside and me on the outside, created the necessary space between us. I am the outsider. The challenge? Can I break down the boundary with my presence and words?

In my allotted ten minutes I told him the fortunate story of how an outing for a cookie one afternoon last week led me to the Riflemaker gallery space and provided me with the opportunity to book a slot in his “fortune-cookie” performance. He liked the poetry of that.

While Maeda traced my story in the sand, cookie and all, I asked him “From one interdisciplinary person to another, how do you find a harmonious balance between the long + deep and the wide + shallow?”

I struck a chord. Maeda said he also experienced the discomfort of being interdisciplinary, but that he had gotten over it because he was happy in himself.

He then recounted a visual reference he once got from a Japanese designer, who contrasted the Eastern view of building a wide sturdy base with a shallow elevation (Maeda drew Mount Fuji—Hokusai style—in the sand), with Western narrow tall constructions that topple over (he then drew a vertical line that immediately resembled a skyscraper).

In summary John Maeda’s advice to me consisted of these salient points: Be confident enough to forge your own path, build a wide and sturdy base, be happy in yourself, don’t let other people take you down, move out in front of the pack, be a leader and a role model, enjoy your cookie.

I left, as Maeda hurriedly erased my sandy story with his feet, clutching a signed print out of one of his tweets (a poetic embodiment of making the digital physical). The tweet, for which I paid the princely sum of £2, says “The shortest communication path between two people is a straight talk.” Precisely.

I have begun to start a diary of my various emergent understandings of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The URL is our.risd.edu and will give me a chance to reacquaint myself with ideas that focus primarily on the…