How do you get rid of plastic cups? Turn them into cookie cups. By Sardi Innovation for Lavazza
A cup you can eat.
Website by Martin Gauer
Take a look at this site. The screen moves with your mouse. The buttons on the cell phone light up when you tap them. The buttons on the actual hardware are also links. Pretty awesome.
“Where did all the women go?”
This is a conversation that I have with my product and graphic design friends on a frequent basis. If the ratio of design students is relatively balanced between genders, then why don’t we see more female designers in the actual workforce? Is it the lack of role models? After all, how many female designers did we see in our history books? Is it lack of self-confidence? Or is it that women have children at the height of their careers? In every design company I’ve worked at men have outnumbered women. I’m not trying to make a feminist statement, I’m just curious. So I tried to search for something that might answer my question.
…most of the designers who win commissions from those companies are male. The same applies to the AIGA’s highest profile members. The only woman except Ms. Jongerius among the 22 designers or design teams to be listed on Vitra’s Web site for designing its office furniture is Ray Eames, who died in 1988.
Why do so few women reach the top of design? The short answer is the same lack of self-belief and entitlement that dogs them in every other profession, combined with opposition from those who commission the majority of design projects, most of whom are men. The graphic designer Paula Scher once described this as the “Why did I get the woman?” syndrome.
Barron studied young artists at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the Rhode Island School of Design….In asking the students the question. Do you think of yourself as an artist? 67% of the women said no and 60% of the men said yes. When asked the question, In comparison to the work of others at the Institute, is your work particularly unique or good? 40% of the men and 17% of the women answered yes. And when asked In comparison to the work of others at the Institute, is your work inferior? the percentages were reversed: 40% of the women felt their work was inferior and 14% of the men agreed.
Barron pointed out that this revealed a difference in self-image in the women, and that these differences were not indications of the real quality of the men’s and women’s art work, indicating that “the quality of the women’s art work was equally high.” The main difference came in the intensity of the commitment of the young artists to their work. Almost all of the men said their art work was their life, was necessary for life, and was their main reason for living: “Without painting I couldn’t function.”
There are many more examples, studies and quotes, but they all center around the same themes of self-perception in some way or another.
So maybe it’s all of the above.
Maybe it’s something I’ll figure out when I turn 30, because nothing I read is satisfying my curiosity. My main priority right now is my work and my art, and I would also like to think that I have self-belief. I also know that many of my female friends feel the same. They’re finding jobs at design consultancies, healthcare start-ups, famous shoe companies, etc and are doing well in those spaces, which is why they’re also asking me “where are all the women?”
I guess we’ll have to see.
Maybe I’ll come across this blog in ten years and make an addendum to this post.
The way we are.
A lot of people ask me “why did you decide to become a vegetarian?” Being vegetarian makes eating out a little more complicated, especially when friends opt for the BBQ Burger place or KFC. Your daily protein intake decreases, and you have to look for other alternatives. So why do I do it?
The way we eat has changed more in the past few decades than in all of human history. Corporations like to place an image of a pictureque farm on a lot of our food packaging, but the truth is that our food doesn’t come from a place anywhere close to that image.
Today, our meat is created in huge factories with assembly lines and conditions that you would probably work hard to get away from. Food, Inc. shows us up close and personal what we don’t want to see (the documentary is actually pretty objective – trust me, I’ve seen the bad ones). Who wants to eat animals that have been placed in inhumane conditions? No one.
But a lot of us do it anyway. We do it for a lot of reasons. Some people really don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. Some people don’t care. And some people can’t align their lifestyles to their beliefs.
For me, it’s a matter of integrity. I have to do what I believe. And the result of that has been two years of vegetarianism. Changing my lifestyle has never been difficult for me. That’s just who I am.
But how can other people change their lifestyle to match their beliefs? It doesn’t even have to be about food. It can be about exercise, about the way they get to work in the morning, or the time they spend in front of the TV. If we all did what we thought in our head was the right thing to do, a lot of things would change for the better. So why don’t we do it?
Note to design students.
Image by Mark Skrobola
Professor Eppinger, one of the instructors of the Product Design and Development course I took at MIT asked us one day during my final semester of college to sketch a new concept that would bring new technologies and existing products together (we were given specific options, which were written on the board). Everyone – engineering, business and design students – took about five minutes to come up with something. He then asked us to show the class what we had just sketched via overhead projector.
Nearly everyone who ran up to the projector was an engineering or business student. The sketches were (from a designer’s point-of-view) poor and the ideas were vague, but they were confident about their concepts.
Very few of the design students went up to the projector. Why?
Most likely, it was because many of them didn’t feel like their ideas were presentable (along with the additional fear of public speaking). Design students spend an awful lot of time perfecting their work. The director of RISD’s Career Center even mentioned to me once that he sees lots of students perfecting their portfolio, but never really finishing it or taking a ridiculous amount of time to finally put it online. Designers prefer to show their work when it’s reached a certain stage, and five minutes isn’t that stage when there are seventy-five other people looking at it.
Therein lies a problem.
If you don’t present your idea because you don’t think it’s presentable enough, your AMAZING idea will be bypassed for someone else’s so-so idea, because they spoke first.
In school, you’re often given an assignment in school where you can thrash out ideas by yourself first before you discuss them with anyone. You then form a way to visualize your idea and you “present” it in the sense that you already know what ideas you’re offering before you speak. You make sure everything looks perfect. Sketches and models, are they stunning? Good.
Real life involves coming up with ideas on the spot and communicating your concepts effectively to people who might not understand exactly what you do. You can’t wait until midnight when everything starts clicking. You don’t have a lot of time to digest everything.
So what do you do? You have to practice thrashing your ideas out around other people, with other people. You have to accept that not everyone is a visual person. Some people are primarily verbal and understand through words alone, which is why they feel that powerful words alone can do the trick. You have to put yourself in situations that you might fear at first but will grow accustomed to with time. You’ve GOT TO SHIP YOUR IDEA, because everyone deserves to see what awesome things you have to offer.
I say this, because it’s true. Show your work. Show it loud. The real world is at your feet.
Role Models of the Future
Image by Steve Snodgrass
A couple of months ago, I heard Kipp Bradford talk about racism within the science field at TEDxProvidence. He spoke about how he grew to love science from an early age, how his teachers actually discouraged him from taking the science route as an African American child and the lessons he learned from this experience.
The truth it that it’s not simple, because there are few role models in the science field that African American children can look up to. Bradford mentioned that black football players are often portrayed as warriors on TV while black scientists are represented by …Steve Urkel (remember him?). Everyone wants to be the popular athlethe, not the geeky nerd. That is the stereotype that’s constantly being reinforced throughout the media.
When I went back to my elementary school yearbook, I counted how many kids said they wanted to be professional athletes vs scientists or engineers when they grew up. The ratio was 3:1. Despite all the math and science classes my elementary school actually offered, sports won.
I thought about this some more and well…it made a lot more sense than I thought. Sports can provide you with concrete goals, something to reach for whether it is a championship or best time. A win can grant you with an immediate happiness. If you are the best of the best, you get fame and money. The same cannot be said for a lot of jobs people hold as adults, even though those jobs may be of greater value to society as a whole.
But it doesn’t mean that we can’t show kids how important those jobs are to everyone. We need more role models, the type of role models Kipp Bradford had as a kid (astronauts, physicists), because they can show us what we can be.
The reason why people don’t think of themselves as a teacher, doctor or scientist is because no one like them has done it before. It’s so important for people to realize this. It’s why Obama’s presidency means so much to the African American community. It’s why Jeremy Lin means so much to us Asians. It’s why Lisa Randall, the first tenured female theoretical physicist at Havard and MIT, is so important.
We need people to continue to create paths that don’t exist yet, not just for themselves, but also for the community they represent. That’s how “impossible” becomes “maybe I can.”
Bjoern Ewers
Bjoern is an art director from Berline, Germany. His work for the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker is absolutely incredible. The first set is instruments that have been turned into different objects and the second is photographs that have been taken inside instruments. Take a look!
Click this link to see the rest of his portfolio.
STIFTUNG BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER.STIFTUNG BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER. STIFTUNG BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER.
MIT/RISD Product Design and Development
We made the front page of MIT news yesterday. The product design and development class at MIT held its final presentations last Saturday. I was a part of the tablet computer backpack group the writer mentions at the beginning of the article.
Here’s the link.
Underwater Ink Photography
“Minds built to go the distance”
Image by Cristòfol Josep Bordes
Boston Globe – A Kenyan man has won the marathon every year for all but two of the last 22 years. Kenyan women have won nine of the last 13.
Their dominance has prompted a flurry of scientific studies into why Kenyans run so well. Some say it’s their diet. Others say it’s the high altitude. Still others insist it’s a genetic gift of lean bodies and wiry legs. But those theories fail to account for perhaps the most important factors: the marathoner’s brain, and his or her concept of distance itself.
In that Kenyan town, nobody ran anywhere if they could help it, even though it was the home of Cosmas Ndeti, a three-time Boston Marathon winner. But most everybody, especially children, walked long distances routinely without complaint, and shared the perception that a few miles — even five or 10 miles — wasn’t really all that far.
Perceptions matter. Experiments by Samuele Marcora, director of research at the Centre for Sports Studies at the University of Kent, suggest our physical limits are set not by our bodies but by our brains. Fatigue sets in when our anterior cingulate cortex sends a message to our muscles that the physical challenge we are undertaking is too daunting to complete. When a runner collapses in exhaustion, it’s rarely because the muscles ran out of oxygen or fuel. It’s because the anterior cingulate cortex has decided that the cost of exertion is not worth the benefit. But if the brain believes that the distance is manageable enough — and the mission important enough — we push ourselves to the max.
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What I love about this article is that it’s pointing out how our limits are defined by how far we think we can go. So many of our daily obstacles are mental challenges that we have to overcome, whether it’s going another mile, starting a new project, going for anything that seems out of reach. It’s a good reminder to keeping pushing yourself, even when you think you can’t go any further.
The Design Ocean 