Hasta La Ideas

pimg alt=”kiransethited.jpg” src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/kiransethited.jpg” width=”468″ height=”314″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” /br /
emKiran Bir Sethi, at the 2009 TED India Conference, photo by a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/drona/4094838356/”Vasudev Bhandarkar/a/em/p

pJust out on a href=”http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13508″Design Observer/a, William Drenttel’s got a fantastic profile of Kiran Bir Sethi, founder of the a href=”http://www.schoolriverside.com/”Riverside School/a and brainchild of the a href=”http://www.designforgivingcontest.com/designweek/default.html”Design for Giving Contest/a, an initiative sweeping across the globe this year. Here’s a quick excerpt:/p

blockquoteIn early 2009, Sethi launched her biggest initiative to date, a national campaign that encourages schoolchildren across India to participate in a one-week project to change some aspect of life in their own communities. With only a few months’ lead time, she bravely vowed to involve 20,000 schools and 100,000 students. In fact, 32,274 schools across India participated in the “Design for Giving School Contest”, and hundreds of thousands of school kids were involved. Participants entered as student teams represented through a classroom, grade, or school. Having been invited to “redesign” their communities, winners were chosen based on their projects’ impact according to the number of people affected, quickest impact, maximum potential for long-lasting change, easiest to replicate, and most environmentally friendly. A special Gandhi Prize was also awarded#151;all projects take place the week of October 2, the revered leader’s birthday./blockquote

pand/p

blockquoteThe thousands of projects submitted to the “Design for Giving School Contest” ranged across nine languages and diverse imperatives. Among them: /emSave Our Mangroves, Help Reach the Unreachables, Avoid Transgender Discrimination, Care for and Protect the Homeless, and Stop Child Marriages. Also proposed were Collect Plastic Bags Week, Playground for Children, Dignified Attire, and a Stop Spitting Campaign./em My favorite proposal came from a village where the crematorium was located next to the schoolyard. Children who had clear sightings of burials during recess organized to petition the town council to erect a wall blocking their view. The wall doubled as a space for posting public announcements. Per the contest’s stipulations, a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyBTVBc9Tn8″this project/a too was accomplished within a week./blockquote

pRead Bill’s complete post a href=”http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13508″here/a, and watch last year’s award ceremony below. I am privileged to be a jury member on this year’s competition, and will share some favorite projects in the fall. (TEDtalk a href=”http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_charge.html”here/a.)/p

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Une mise en image percutante par la créatrice Beth Fulton dénoncant le média TV, en s’inspirant d’un poème du scénariste et réalisateur Todd Alcott sur le monde de la télévision. Une libre interprétation à découvrir en vidéo dans la suite de l’article.

Previously on Fubiz

• Horizont – Stas Chepurnov
• Sony – Eye Candy
• TV Shows by Gavin Bond

Eames dreams. A kid-crafted version of the House of Cards, one of 52 design projects in Todd Oldham’s Kid Made Modern.

Dear UnBeige,
My six-year-old son, Alex, shows no interest in art or design. When I try to suggest museum trips or watching Ovation TV, he just shakes his head and asks to watch CSPAN. What should I do?
–Perplexed in Pasadena

Dear Perplexed,
At the risk of sounding like the slightly off-kilter (if well-meaning) woman who managed the library of our elementary school, we suspect the answer to your problem can be solved with books—one for you and one for young Alex. A great way to encourage kids to engage with the creative world is to give them a visually stimulating space of their own. Susanna Salk offers up inspiring examples in Room for Children: Stylish Spaces for Sleep and Play, new from Rizzoli. “It’s about understanding the importance of helping our children create a private world where they can discover who they are and all they were meant to be,” says Salk, who rounded up a diverse group of unique spaces designed by the likes of Kelly Wearstler, Thomas Jayne, Alessandra Branca, and Sixx Design, helmed by new Bravo-lebrities Cortney and Robert Novogratz. Meanwhile, Todd Oldham has brought his delightful DIY approach to a younger generation with Kid Made Modern (Ammo Books), a collection of crafty projects inspired by the legends of mid-century design. If the Calder-style mobile and Russel Wright-esque window decorations don’t excite, move straight to the projects dedicated to another Alex: Mr. Girard. We’ve yet to find a child who can resist his folksy charms. Harness the creative momentum for a field trip to The Huntington Library (in nearby San Marino), where “Child’s Play? Children’s Book Illustration of 19th-Century Britain” is on view through July 26.

In a creative pickle? Have a design-related conundrum that you’d like us to help solve? Drop us a line at unbeige@mediabistro.com.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

by Jose R. Mejia

What happens when you task four leading architects with redeveloping a historic Milanese neighborhood? Multiply that by €523 million and you get an equally historic seven-year endeavor, breaking records and creating an entirely new blueprint for cities of the future.

CityLife, the catch-all name for the project, will end up being Milan’s first zero-emissions neighborhood. Comprised of residences, offices and retail space, the new architectural phenomenon will include three bold skyscrapers designed by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Arata Isozaki.

At the core of the development, a centralized park—designed to operate both as a pretty public attraction and an eco-engineering feat—will purify air and normalize temperatures.

Slated to become Italy’s tallest building, Isozaki’s Il Dritto, will tower at 715 feet. His love for spartan design makes a strong statement through the simple, elegant structure.

Hadid’s tower, Lo Storto, will connect to the tube station (along with Il Dritto), housing retailers and apartments. The slick design highlights her mastery of form and curvature, seen recently in the MAXXI Art Museum. Hadid explains her process, “The dynamism of the surrounding urban fabric was the subject of our formal investigations and inspired the geometry of the project.”

Libeskind deconstructed the classic shape into Il Curvo, a strange pairing of curved, half-moon glass and sharp concrete. Both dreamy and urban, the edifice represents the metropolitan idealism of CityLife.

Intended to work as a fully-formed neighborhood from its opening in 2014, the mix of offices and residences will be complemented by several new cultural buildings, including a new Museum of Contemporary Art, tying together the starchitect-studded vision of utopian living.

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Brendon Carlin and fellow students at the Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory have generated an architectural structure by filling Lycra with liquid plaster and then letting it set. (more…)