New York City

The best design from the Lone Star State is coming to New York City! Award-winning designers from Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio—the four Texas chapters of AIGA, the professional association for design—are represented in “The Texas Show” at the AIGA National Design Center.

The Texas Show is a biennial competition and traveling exhibition that showcases the best communication design in Texas. In addition to recognizing and discovering designers, this year’s show aims to foster community within the regional chapters of AIGA and nationally.

AIGA members are invited to preview this exhibition on Friday, August 3 from 6:00–9:00 p.m. at the AIGA National Design Center. Please present a current AIGA membership card at the door, which admits you plus a guest.

Van Alen Institute: Projects in Public Architecture announces the launch of River City: Waterfront Design for Civic Life, a series of exhibitions and related public programs that consider riverfront design as a powerful tool for urban reinvention. On view beginning July 26, 2012, with an exhibition exploring Brooklyn Bridge Park, River City investigates how innovative designs for waterfront spaces can address the paramount cultural and ecological questions of our time.

Today, across America and around the world, cities are reclaiming rivers as sites of cultural, environmental, and economic vitality. At the same time, the urgent challenges of climate change and demands for social equity have focused interest upon these complex urban landscapes. While revived waterfronts offer vast canvases for new development and recreation, converging ecological and economic forces have spurred strong debate about the river’s place in civic life. Exploring the key role design plays in addressing these challenges, River City asks:

• How can the cultural value of rivers be rediscovered and celebrated through design?
• How can innovative planning and design balance the need for working waterfronts while accommodating public open space, new housing, and ecological restoration?
• How can new riverfront infrastructure catalyze self-sustaining communities?

To engage these questions, River City’s first exhibition, Immensity and Intimacy: Brooklyn Bridge Park, explores the reborn landscape on New York City’s East River as a prototype for reimagining the urban waterfront. Informed by the magnitude of the site’s contextual scale, the park’s design, by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, engages and reshapes the urban edge as a site of richly layered cultural, ecological, and historical contexts. Through an inventive series of strategies, including sculpting the site’s complex maritime edge, reusing salvaged materials, and embedding ecology and experience, the design redefines the Brooklyn waterfront as a central place in the civic imagination.

Subsequent exhibitions in the series will examine the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul, Korea, where a long-buried urban waterway has been remade as a metropolitan-scale public space; and the Mississippi River Delta, where the leveed and channeled river is being reimagined as the heart of a self-sustaining natural system that also serves as a cultural catalyst for New Orleans and its surrounding communities.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Immensity and Intimacy: Brooklyn Bridge Park

July 25, 4-8 p.m. Member & Press Preview
July 26, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Exhibition Open through October 19
September 12, 7-9 p.m. Exhibition Party
October 4, 7 p.m. Waterfront Design Debate
Fred Kent (Project for Public Spaces)
Michael Van Valkenburgh (MVVA)
Adrian Benepe (NYC Parks Commissioner), moderator
October 10, 7 p.m. The Urban Polder: What New York’s Waterfront Can Learn from the Dutch

Architectural production in the Middle East ranges from the preservation of heritage, social housing, governmental buildings, and tourist resorts to mega theme parks, supertall towers, knowledge cities, sustainable cities, and artificial islands. CHANGE: Architecture and Engineering in the Middle East, 2000-Present shows how architects and engineers have participated in the rapid transformation of the region, translating the rich geographical, cultural, and economic resources of the Middle East into contemporary form.

MoMA’s ambitious survey of 20th century design for children is the first large-scale overview of the modernist preoccupation with children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking. The exhibition will bring together areas underrepresented in design history and often considered separately, including school architecture, clothing, playgrounds, toys and games, children’s hospitals and safety equipment, nurseries, furniture, and books.

In 1900, Swedish design reformer and social theorist Ellen Key’s book Century of the Child presaged the 20th century as a period of intensified focus and progressive thinking regarding the rights, development, and well-being of children as interests of utmost importance to all society. Taking inspiration from Key—and looking back through the 20th century 100 years after her forecast—this exhibition will examine individual and collective visions for the material world of children, from utopian dreams for the “citizens of the future” to the dark realities of political conflict and exploitation. In this period children have been central to the concerns, ambitions, and activities of modern architects and designers both famous and unsung, and working specifically for children has often provided unique freedom and creativity to the avant-garde.

The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers (formerly known as the Young Architects Forum) is an annual juried competition and series of lectures and exhibitions organized by the Architectural League and its Young Architects and Designers Committee. The Prize was established to recognize specific works of high quality and to encourage the exchange of ideas among young people who might otherwise not have a forum. Open to designers ten years or less out of school, the competition draws entrants from around North America. The lecture series and exhibition by winners of the competition provide a lively public forum for the discussion of their work and ideas. Winners' designs are also on display on the Architectural League's website and illustrated in a catalog published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Lectures:
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design
66 Fifth Avenue.

Lecture 1:
Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.
Jorge Arvizu, Ignacio del Rio, Emmanuel Ramirez, and Diego Ricalde, MMX Studio Jimenez Lai, Bureau Spectacular Sean Lally, WEATHERS / Sean Lally

Lecture 2:
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.
Seung Teak Lee and Mi Jung Lim, STPMJ Michael Szivos, SOFTlab Koji Tsutsui, Koji Tsutsui & Associates

Receptions following lectures.
1.5 CEUs

How far does the user experience extend? Where are it's outer limits, what can we influence, and how do we do it in fast-moving technology environments?

Etsy views every part of the experience, from complex UI to printed promotion focused on the press, to a thank you card in the mail, as part of the end-to-end experience. It's all designed and it's treated as one multi-faceted product.

Randy J. Hunt is Creative Director at Etsy, where he leads the team of designers building web products and creating off-line experiences. Hunt feels strongly that designers must be able to build what they design, a perspective that fits naturally with Etsy's culture of making. He co-founded Supermarket, a curated design marketplace. Previously, he founded Citizen Scholar Inc. and worked at Milton Glaser Inc. and Number 17. Hunt writes and lectures about design, and has been a visiting designer and critic at many colleagues and universities. In 2009 he was named a New Visual Artist by Print. Hunt received his MFA in design from the School of Visual Arts.

In 2007, Scott Wilson founded MINIMAL, a hybrid design studio that balances creating new experiences for global brands with his passion for entrepreneurial ventures. Having designed at three consultancies, four corporations, and five start-ups, Wilson consistently defies existing categories and establishes new ones, from Nike's Presto Digital Bracelet to Coalesses's SW1 Collection, the Xbox 360 + Kinect, and the Microsoft Courier, which preceded the iPad. His Tik Tok + LunaTik project, which transforms the iPod nano into a multi-touch watch, raised $1 million in thirty days via Kickstarter, turning Wilson into a posterboy for crowd funding. He will talk to Bill about his design practice and process and divulge some of the secrets behind his success.

About the series:

The Bill's Design Talks series, moderated by Cooper-Hewitt's Director, Bill Moggridge, began in Spring 2010 and has featured Chad Hurley of YouTube, Michael Bierut of Pentagram, Michael Graves, and Acumen Fund Founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz, among others. To view previous webcasts from the Bill's Designs Talks series, visit www.youtube.com/cooperhewitt.

Transforming Function features artists who—by excavating the fields of technology, science, architecture and/or design—repurpose theoretical tools, virtual platforms, and formal techniques to inform their diverse conceptual and aesthetic investigations. Our direct relationships, whether concretely or abstractly, to these fields are developed inevitably while navigating daily life in both physical and online environments. The artists in this exhibition, by creating works that reimagine purpose, urge us to develop relationships to these environments that extend beyond passive consumption. By adapting uses and subverting functions, the artists de-familiarize or reveal something new about these tools, platforms, and techniques. The artists then use them to generate a deeper understanding of the fields themselves through re-contextualization or, alternatively, exploit them to explore the complexities and construction of personal, social, and political narratives. The resulting work takes many forms, including sculpture, photography, audio, video and new media offering new perspectives and approaches to viewing, listening, experiencing, and interacting.

All of the artists in Transforming Function have participated in LMCC’s Workspace or Swing Space artist residency programs where many of these projects were conceived or developed.

Balloons are familiar and loved, but few realize that with some amateur kitchen chemistry techniques, the process for manufacturing them can be replicated on a small scale. In July 2011, product designers Caroline Linder, Lisa Smith, Michael Savona, Thomas Moran, and Steven Haulenbeek demystified and illustrated each step of this process with their on-site Balloon Factory at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Since developing Balloon Factory, the five have produced custom balloons for music events, pop-up shops, and gallery shows. This year, the handmade balloons come to New York, designed and fabricated especially for Japan Premium Beef and the Noho Design District.

The American Design Club (AmDC) presents “Raw + Unfiltered” show as part of the UNFILTERED
project from Karlsson’s Gold Vodka. This is the eighth AmDC show. Opening at Heller Gallery in con-
junction with the 2012 International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York City
May Day—Nature unfiltered is never perfect. In this spirit, a select group of designers have been tapped to
showcase new work that highlights a material or process in its most natural, unfiltered state. American Design
Club called on designers with one question: If your process became Raw + Unfiltered, what kind of object
would that yield?
The result is Raw + Unfiltered, the second initiative of Karlsson Gold vodkaʼs UNFILTERED series. In associa-
tion with Karlsson’s and the Heller Gallery, The American Design Club will present designers’ answers to this
question in a gallery show opening Sunday, May 20th at the Heller Gallery in New York City.
Forty-four pieces have been chosen for the Raw + Unfiltered show, from both established New York designers
and newcomers alike. Exhibitors include: Bec Brittain, Fort Standard, Stanley Ruiz, Grain, Evan Dublin, Me-
lissa Gamwell, Brendan Keim, Jack Craig, Cat Merrick, Ladies & Gentlemen, Michael Dreeben, Yukyeong Lee,
Eric Parker, Free Time Industries, Pete Oyler, Asher Israelow, Chris Schanck, Doug Leckie, Elizabeth Moran,
Jack Craig, Andrew Sack, Biodidactic Raw/Andie Olive, Brittany Pool, Emily Miranda, Jessica Rosenkrantz,
Jieun Yoo, Mark Dineen, Sara Ebert, Chris Schanck, Andrew Beauchamp, KNS, Jennifer Zona, Taylor Macken-
zie Veal, Daniel Moyer, Nicholas Oxley, Tim Richartz, Object Trust, Li-Rong Liao, Steven Haulenbeek, Jason
Pfaeffle, Louie Rigano, Aria McManus, and Wyatt Little. The pieces in the show run the gamut from Taylor
Mackenzie Veal’s Reed Bench, a sturdy, lightweight bench made from reeds to Michael Dreeben’s elegant,
origami inspired metal bowls. Other highlights include Fort Standard’s Spru Candelabra, the Salt Salt Shakers
from Andie Olive, Cat Merrick’s tire track relief bowls, and Brendan Keim’s striking Dim(Some) Chandelier,
among others.