Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE
Deadline: 18 September, 2009

A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY DESIGN STUDIO
Landscapes of Quarantine is an independent, multi-disciplinary design studio, based in New York City, consisting of eight evening workshops, from October 6 to December 5, 2009, in which up to 14 participants will gather to discuss the spatial implications of quarantine. The results of the workshop will be presented in an exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in early 2010. Quarantine is an ancient spatial practice characterized by a state of enforced immobility, decontamination, and sequestration; yet it is increasingly relevant – and difficult to monitor – in an era of global trade, bio-engineering, and mass tourism.

Studio participants will explore a wide variety of spatial and historical examples, including airport quarantine facilities, Level 5 biohazard wards, invasive species, agricultural regulations, swine-flu infected tourists confined to their hotel rooms, lawsuits over citizens’ rights to resist involuntary quarantine, horror films, World Health Organization plans for controlling the spread of pandemics, lunar soil samples, and more.

During the studio, participants will develop individual design projects in response to the problem of quarantine, with guidance and inspiration provided by readings, screenings, group discussions, and an evolving line-up of guest speakers and critics. These projects will then be eligible for inclusion in “Landscapes of Quarantine,” an exhibition hosted by Storefront in early 2010.

By the end of the studio, each participant will have produced a complete design project. This could range from the speculative (plug-in biosecurity rooms for the American suburbs) to the documentary (recording the items and animals detained for quarantine on the U.S./Mexico border), and from the fantastical (plans for extra-planetary quarantine facilities) to the instructional (a field guide to invasive species control).

Landscapes of Quarantine is looking for applicants who are intrigued by the spatial possibilities and contingencies of quarantine, and who already possess the technical skills necessary to produce an exhibition-quality final design project or installation in their chosen medium. We hope to hear from interesting people at all stages of their careers and from a variety of design backgrounds. We are particularly excited to announce that we have already confirmed a select group of talented participants from fields as diverse as architecture, illustration, gaming, photography, and sound design.

The studio is independent (there is no college credit) and it is also free (though applicants will be responsible for all costs associated with producing their final project). We will be reviewing applications on a rolling basis until Friday, September 18, 2009, or until all studio positions have been filled. To learn more, and to submit an application, please email futureplural@gmail..com with the information listed below.
1) Name
2) Email address
3) Telephone number(s)
Please indicate the best time to reach you
4) Mailing address
5) Education
- University/college name and country
- Dates attended
- Degree
6) Current affiliations and/or employment
7) 50-word (maximum) bio
Publications and/or personal blog
9) Portfolio
Attach a PDF of no more than 8 pages, or supply a link to online work
10) 300-word (maximum) statement of interest in the topic of quarantine
11) Candidate’s declaration
By submitting your application, you declare the following:
- I certify that the work submitted is entirely my own and/or my role
is clearly stated
- I declare that all the statements I have provided are correct
- I agree that, if accepted into the studio, I will participate fully,
attend all studio meetings unless previously discussed with the studio
directors, and produce a finished final design project
12) Email addresses for two references
Landscapes of Quarantine is organized by Future Plural, a project-based, independent design lab launching in 2009 from a temporary base in New York City. Future Plural is Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG: bldgblog.blogspot.com) and Nicola Twilley (Edible Geography: ediblegeography.com).

Storefront for Art and Architecture
97 Kenmare Street
New York, NY 10012
http://www.storefrontnews.org

If any of you are interested in graphic design, this is a great opportunity for you to make a difference through your design work—and get your work seen.

Details below:
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From Rosten @ CUP:

I’m writing because we recently issued our call for design
collaborators for the MPP series, and we would really love it if you
could help spread the word.

The MPP project pairs advocates and policy experts with designers and
visual artists to produce foldout posters that explain complex policy
issues. The series encourages innovative design while giving designers
the opportunity to engage important social issues deeply.

We would love it if you could pass on this opportunity to anyone you
think could be a good collaborator and bring something special to the
project.

We’re really excited about this year’s topics and advocacy partners,
it’s a great mix of very local, and very national issues spanning
labor, public space, criminal justice, electoral politics, and food
–from very nerdy to quite immediate. The groups and issues are:

+ Keeping parks public with FIERCE

+ Participating in public housing with Community Voices Heard

+ Redistricting reform with the Brennan Center for Justice

+ Navigating the juvenile justice system with the Center for Court Innovation

+ Mapping the tomato supply chain with the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers and Just Harvest USA

You can check out the full briefs on the Making Policy Public website.

The call for designers is posted here:
http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=submission-guidelines-for-designers

Thanks, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions
about anything.

Sincerely,
Rosten

Rosten Woo
Executive Director
the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
at the Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street #B402B
Brooklyn, NY 11215
(718) 596–7721
www.anothercupdevelopment.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but the ads for non-profits have gotten a lot more prime real estate—and in general, a lot higher in quality. Here’s a great example of innovative and affordable advertising for Salvation Army.

fbFund [Incubator] Resident Designer Summer Position

Founders Fund and Facebook are looking for a slick designer with Facebook Platform experience that can effectively support fbFund teams as they design and launch applications. You will wear multiple hats and be more than sprinkles on top.

Responsibilities

•    Create presentations and application flows that clearly communicate ideas, initiatives, etc.
•    Design content for fbFund teams including logos and banners
•    Meticulously oversee relationships and projects with outside creative vendors
•    Support marketing, business development, and sales with web/print solutions

Requirements

•    Strong portfolio featuring web and print design
•    Expertise in XHTML, CSS, Javascript
•    Expertise in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Powerpoint/Keynote
•    Ability to handle the pressure and fluidity of a start-up environment
•    Ability to present your designs and sell your solutions to various stakeholders
•    Deep understanding of the social networking space and the frontiers of design standards
•    BS or BFA in design or related field
•    Active in the design community a plus
•    Experience with user testing and complicated workflow design a plus
•    Knowledge of PHP, Javascript, Flash and Unix a plus
•    Knowledge of other media software packages a big plus – web, video editing, audio editing, etc

Contact: Becky Morrow becky@techventure.com and (if contacting between 7/10-7/19) Fadi Bishara- fadi@techventure.com

Cole Rise is a Co-founder and designer at Particle.  Last fall I’d attended an IxDA event hosted at Particle’s headquarters in the SoMa district, San Francisco, and became excited to hear  that they were focusing on building small and simple applications for the web.  Months later I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview Cole on the day that Particle deployed several sleek web applications–Roboto, P0P, Crusher, and Smirk.  Particle is funded by Tennman Digital, but that’s only part of the story.  I talked with Mr. Rise about his migration from start-up, to design firm, to corporate, and back again, all-the-while gathering valuable insights pertaining to scope, creative work environments and the importance of listening to your users.

Tim: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?  You studied film at school, but have gravitated towards design and front-end development for the web.

Cole: I’ve always been around computers.  My dad worked in computers and my mom was an artist.  We had internet connection when I was in the seventh grade.  I got an early start making websites.  When everyone else my age was going to baseball camp and to the beach, I was the was the one up in the attic learning HTML and memorizing ports.  Back then it was cool to be a hacker, and my best friend and I decided that we wanted to be hackers, so we studied up.  We were both making websites and trying to get into other peoples computers to discover what insecurities we could find on the internet.  We both had websites of our own.  He got me into Flash, when it first came out in 1999.  One day we had an idea to start charging people for what we were doing.  At 16 we started a web design company, called Liquid Silver Technologies, which carried us onto college.  The money that we made from that allowed me to buy my first digital camera.  Initially I wanted by become a Cinematographer–I wanted nothing to do with the internet.  The web always stayed a hobby, and my real job was supposed be something in film.

Tim: At what point did you move out to the San Francisco area?

Cole: I started a company with my in Boston with my college roommate called Silo Media.  The idea behind it was kind of like what Particle is doing now.  It was a think-tank, where people people just came up with good ideas and launched them.  The company was an umbrella for all the little things that we were trying to do.  I was studying film and shooting with a little Bolex camera.  I realized that the film industry was extremely bureaucratic.  If I ever wanted to get anywhere, it would take me thirty years to have a name for myself, because it’s all about your portfolio and what projects you’ve worked on and who you know.  Luck had it, in the Silo Media context, we’d been thinking about a couple ideas and we applied to Y-Combinator for summer founders program the first year it was around–we had heard about it on Slashdot.  We talked to them and we got pretty close, but we never got the interview, and decided to try again in the winter.  That’s when we came up with Flagr–the social bookmarking game.  We got funding, and in January, Y-Combinator told us to move out [ to San Francisco].  I dropped of school and ended up working on Flagr for three months.  That was 2006.

Tim: Looking at your resume, you’ve worked at design studios like the Barbarian Group, startups like Flagr and big companies like Yahoo!.  Can you talk about each experience?

Cole: Barbarian group was somewhere I worked in college.  I was twenty, and they hired me after seeing my photography on Flickr, oddly enough.  The president, Ben, was interested in my work, and I’d been wanting to work there for a while.  I was very lucky.

"Endless," a photograph by Cole Rise

Tim: When looking at some of your photography on Flickr, I noticed the birds flying off in the distance.  I’d seen similar elements in the work of Barbarian designer, Robert Hodgin.

Cole: On the web side of things, Robert had always been my hero.  I followed his work from back in 2001, five years before actually working at the Barbarian group. A lot of his experimental stuff is what inspired me to get into Flash initially.  I became a Flash developer, and that was my forte after that.  At Barbarian group I learned what it was like to work in an environment that was very flat–there was no boss. Everyone in a circle, sitting on beanbags, trying to come up with good ideas, trying to do something different, and that was fascinating.  These guys didn’t seem to work ever, but they got so much done.  It was such a weird, great place to work at.  The environment taught be that you can have a company that is growing in size, but keep it so relaxed, that everyone has a good time.

Yahoo! was an experience in big business.  Everyone thinks of great ideas, but they’re all bogged down, because the mass of company is so large.  You can kind of think of it like amoebas–the smaller an amoeba is, the more agile it is.  The bigger it becomes, the more convoluted the structure is.

Tim: When you were working at Yahoo! though, once product rolled out the door, was there satisfaction knowing that something was going to reached so many people?

Cole: Oh yeah.  Working with Flagr, there were about 30,000 users, but we’re talking millions with anything introduced at Yahoo!.  I worked in Mobile as a designer right before the iPhone came out, and we were working with the iPhone, so I got to play with it before it was released.  My take away from Yahoo was always listen to people.  Make sure the users are first.  You get a much more organic product.

Roboto, one of Particle's mini-projects

Tim: Does working in a startup make it easier to listen to your users?

Cole: Yes, especially when it’s only three guys in a company.  You are customer service, the guy fixing things.  You take on so many roles, that you can see all the problems.  You see what the users are doing and you can develop the product for the better.  With bigger companies, everyone has a specific role, and communication problems arise.  it’s like a game of telephone.  We say it one way, someone else understands it another way, then someone else understands it still another way, and the end product becomes completely different from what you’d intended.

Tim: In your experience with start-ups, was there anything you learned the hard way?

Cole: Scope.  It’s so easy finding yourself trying to solve the world’s problems in one application.  The users get overwhelmed when they realize that a product does everything, so then they don’t know how to use it.  The best thing you can do is just design small.  You have a big idea, but you pare it down until you have something that’s actually tangible.  One concept, one vertical, one tiny little bit that someone can easily understand, and then it can expand from there, but just start with the simplest thing.  We made that mistake [ ignoring scope ] with are first start-up, because it tried to do everything.  It was a Twitter-location-sharing-site that no one knew how to use, because it had so many features.  You look at Twitter, it’s really just about sharing your status.  Loopt is about sharing about sharing your location.  Those product work fairly well, because they are so single-minded.

Tim: The offerings Particle is working on now definitely fit that mold.  You’re motto is “Massively small products.”   Does this suggest that those products will be widely used because they are small?

Cole: The word we like using is “featureful.”  Something that isn’t a destination, but can reply to something else.  This thing works well with other things, and fits into your life very easily, as opposed to taking over how you do something.  The idea, is to just do the tasks you would normally be do, but with addition of these products, it will make things better.  Our releases, Smirk, is basically video avatars, and then we applied it something else we were working on, which became Roboto, [ "a way to publish your current status along with a video avatar, using a webcam"].  We’ve also recently come up with a “featureful” way of managing log-ins for our products, called Little Brother.  We have many different products and people need accounts to use them, so why not make a universal log-in for the all the products.  You can now log into one place, and in effect log into everything else we offer.

Tim: Any final words of advice for budding entrepreneurs in the web app space?

Cole: Funding isn’t always necessary.  If you have a good idea, just keep working on it.  The less money you spend, the better.  The lesser the means you live by, the better.  It’s not about the salary–it’s about what you’re actually making, and about how much you actually care to be there.  If I’m a stranger on a bus, and I see someone using one our products, then I feel like I’ve totally made it.

“WHAT” or “sigh” might be one’s immediate response to discovering that a project has been marked for death. It can be heart-wrenching as you watch hours, months, or even years of work get demolished, deleted, or discontinued. The self-inquiry: was there something I could have done? Some alternate turn things could have taken for all this to work? It can be difficult to watch as your baby (even if you knew it was defective) gets the axe.

Especially so for architects, where getting work is often challenging to begin with and the projects often last for ages. That’s where a support group comes in. The BBC wrote a story recently about The Rubble Club, a group designed to help architects deal with the trauma of seeing their projects get the wrecking ball.

Rubble Club Selection Criteria

They also double as a preservation group—which makes me wonder how well they really deal with the healing process—but I suppose one has to try at least to make things work. However, they’ve got quite a few touching eulogies to works past that make for a good browse. Unlike reading people obituaries, it’s considered okay to speculate openly on why the building died.

Dustin Curtis's AA redesign

As a designer working within a larger company, I’ve noticed that one of elements that most influences design is the culture in which design is vetted, approved and pushed to production. I’ve often thought to myself that a poor product is the result of dysfunctional communication and culture around decision making.

I guess I’m not alone: Dustin Curtis, a user interface designer, after having had such a terrible time attempting to book a flight that he vowed never again to fly American Airlines. He then took it upon himself to redesign the American Airlines interface and sent it to the airline, alongside an impassioned plea for the value of customer service.

Initially, he assumed that they had a faulty design team. However, when one of the AA designers responded, it turns out the design team appeared fairly competent—but was totally submerged by inefficient bureaucracy. Dustin’s take: “Wow. That is depressing.”

So how can good design survive bad management? Is it possible? We’d love to hear from you.

AutoDesk is conducting a survey to gauge interest in a native MAC version of AutoCAD. If you are interested in encouraging this please fill out their survey at the link below and forward this e-mail to anyone else who will support it.

http://myfeedback.autodesk.com/surveynet/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=l21M672

My two cents: it’s about time! vote now for drafting and modeling convenience without Windows Vista.

Bonus** you can sign up to be a beta tester too.

Heard about Pecha Kucha from a friend the other day. Seems like they’re mostly for architecture folks (what with it being sponsored by Autodesk and all), but that said it’s a great opportunity to see what people are up to. Best of all, they happen all over the world. Providence, among others, is coming up soon. From their site:

Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.

But as we all know, give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) and you’ll be trapped for hours. The key to Pecha Kucha Night is its patented system for avoiding this fate. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

Pecha Kucha (which is Japanese for the sound of conversation) has tapped into a demand for a forum in which creative work can be easily and informally shown, without having to rent a gallery or chat up a magazine editor. This is a demand that seems to be global – as Pecha Kucha Night, without any pushing, has spread virally to over 100 cities across the world. Find a location and join the conversation.

If you are interested in starting a Pecha Kucha Night in your city, please contact : pechakucha@klein-dytham.com

Check out their current upcoming meetings around the world here.

The Center for Work, Technology, and Organization and the Stanford Liberation Technologies Program presents:

Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal: Striving for Justice After Genocide

Monday, May 11, 12:00-1:30 pm

Tresidder Oak West

RSVP by Tue, May 5 to companys@stanford.edu

Ongoing events in Congo, Darfur and Somalia underscore the persistence of genocide as a political, legal, ethical, and ultimately humanitarian problem. In 1994, the horror of genocide swept through Rwanda during a 100-day rampage that left more than 800,000 dead. In the face of such conflicts, international criminal tribunals – such as that for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia – have emerged as a global response. Still in the formative stages in terms of evolving an international system of justice, there is much to learn from these initial efforts.

In September of 2008, Batya Friedman led a 10-person team of information scientists, legal experts, and cinematographers to record the voices of those who were part of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The team conducted 49 video interviews with the judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, interpreters, court administrators, warden, and others associated with the lCTR on location in Arusha, Tanzania and Rwanda. Court personnel hold unique insight into the difficulties of attempting to achieve justice and reconciliation after genocide.

The 49 interviews, comprising 70-80 hours of high-definition video footage, are the first step in creating a multi-lifespan digital collection, open and accessible to the world. Our intention is to enable as many innovative, derivative uses as possible.

In this talk, we will show a series of videos that illustrate the breadth and depth of the collection. Joined by team cinematographer, Max Andrews, we will initiate a discussion on the challenges of designing information systems to support appropriation and use within Rwanda, within the international justice system, and for the global public, now and into the future.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Batya Friedman
Professor, Information School; Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering; and Director, Value Sensitive Design Research Lab, University of Washington

Friedman pioneered Value Sensitive Design (VSD), an approach to account for human values in the design of information systems. First developed in human-computer interaction, VSD has since been used in information management, human-robotic interaction, and urban planning. Her work has focused on the values of privacy in public, trust, freedom from bias, moral agency, environmental sustainability, and human dignity; and engaged such technologies as web browsers, urban simulation, robotics, open source tools, and ubiquitous computing. She is currently working on a method for envisioning and multi-lifespan information system design – new ideas for leveraging information systems to shape our future. Voice from the Rwanda Tribunal is an early project in this multi-lifespan information system design effort. Dr. Friedman received both her B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Max Andrews
Cinematographer and Media Technologist

Max Andrews explores new avenues of communication between people, information, and art. His work is primarily based on the evocative power of imagery. Mr. Andrews has a BFA in photography from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.