Archive for the ‘AIGA’ Category

Your Digital Portrait, by ‘Personas’ at MIT

written on June 4th, 2010 with no comments

With every blog post and web page, you leave online trails of information for search engines to follow later. What does the sum of this trail say about you? Is this an accurate picture or just random data?

The Sociable Media Group at MIT Media Lab wanted to explore an answer to that question with a digital exhibit using “sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity.”

Translated, this Personas project shows how the Internet sees you. It’s easy enough to use, just type in your name.

Of course curiosity got the best of me and I had to try it. Just watching the program work is rather interesting – it’s a little transparent in the sense that you see the text being processed so it’s not so much of a data black box.

While interesting, it doesn’t seem totally accurate, at least to my eyes. I am certainly reminded that information without context is just data.

Since I am at an AIGA retreat this week, I thought it would be interesting to see what the system did with a little cheat, so instead of a name I typed in “AIGA the professional association for design” and this popped up:

At a minimum, I think I’m going to hang on to this colored bar and use the “dna strip” in a personal project somewhere. That alone should make for a good story!

Making and Thinking at Make/Think, With Drinks

written on December 16th, 2009 with no comments

I had actually forgotten about this and then stumbled back upon it. From the 2009 AIGA Design Conference in Memphis, as posted by withgelatobaby. I’m about half-way through, and reminded again of what a total geek I can be sometimes! Someone get that girl another drink. ;)

What did your favorite designers make and think at AIGA’s national conference? Hear from Michael Bierut, Julie Lasky, Stefan Bucher, Chip Kidd, Bonnie Siegler, Kurt Andersen and more about what they made and thought that day (the answers may surprise you). Includes some special Make/Think choreography from Design Observer’s party at the New Daisy Theater!

Includes…michael bierut, chip kidd, stefan bucher, jamie koval, julie lasky, kurt andersen, emily carr, gaby brink, pam williams, michael vanderbyl, david gibson, david burney, ric grefe, robin tooms, steve hartman, bobby martin, liz danzico, hank richardson, zelda harrison, clement mok, michael lejeune, jim coudal, shel perkins, jim ales, petrula vrontikis, william drenttel, marc english, dan covert … and more.

Gladwell on Creativity – AIGA GAIN Conference

written on January 10th, 2009 with no comments

I’m always in the middle of reading multiple books at any given time (probably a bad habit). At the moment, two of those books are by Malcolm Gladwell – Blink and Outliers.

I was happy to see this video posted of a presentation Gladwell made at the October 2008 AIGA GAIN conference for design and business. In it, Gladwell discusses some interesting insights into the creative process, and how we, as humans, innovate.

In this are a couple of lessons:
1) The “magic” behind creativity and innovation is largely driven by devotion to practice and mastery of your skills
2) Experimentation is an evolutionary process. Most of us are “experimental innovators” who through a series of trial-and-error create something great (vs. having an effortless flash of innovation – the “conceptual innovator” as Gladwell describes).

Any of you who make your living off of your “ideas” knows how difficult it is to come up with something truly great. Gladwell’s presentation underscores the need for all of us to be constantly looking and applying what we learn in our everyday practice. Always be a student. Don’t be afraid to try (or fail).

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/video-gain-2008-gladwell

Advice for designers

written on May 23rd, 2008 with no comments

This week, Dress Code came and speak to our AIGA Houston Chapter about their new book, their work, and in general, their rather unique career paths. You can view the photos as our flickr group and a short excerpt on our youtube channel.

Now, they are opinionated guys, and gave lots of advice on what has worked for them – be persistent, be passionate and be opportunistic (not their word, mine, but that’s what they were saying).

I’ve thought about this, and I have some advice of my own. So here goes:

  1. Take every opportunity to learn. Sure, you might be able to look back and say you weren’t paid enough or given enough time, but if you didn’t learn anything from the experience, it’s your own fault. Every project has something to teach you – you just need to be willing to see it.
  2. Always do your best. Approach everything you do as if it were a golden opportunity, even the stuff you don’t enjoy. At the end of the day, you never want to say that you could have done more (if you want to sleep soundly, that is).
  3. Take risks. You know what they say “you learn more from your failures than your successes.” I’ve often found that my instincts always want the risks – it’s when I overthink things that the safe route seems like the better option. I’ve learned to trust my instincts more.
  4. Ask questions. For starters, when you’re young you are not expected to know everything, so just ASK people to share their knowledge. One of my few regrets early on in my career was being afraid to show my inexperience, so I missed out on a lot of great knowledge from those more seasoned than me. I’ve since discovered that most people enjoy sharing knowledge. Just be sure to make it a two-way street and be respectful enough to apply what they teach you.

These are rather broad categories, but if you want more, just call or email me. I’d be happy to share.
:)

AIGA Boston Design Conference

written on September 25th, 2005 with no comments
A few weeks ago I attended the AIGA National Conference in
Boston. It was the 20th national conference for AIGA and my third (I
also went to New Orleans and Las Vegas). Surrounded by approximately
2500 fellow designers you certainly do feel the sense of community
that an organization like AIGA gives you. You get a chance to connect
with people outside your immediate sphere, learn new perspectives and
renew your sense of what it means to be a designer today.
The stated theme this year was simply "design," but
there was also an underlying theme of "designer citizen"
(not sure if this was intentional or not). Milton Glaser highlighted
this eloquently through his activism ( "http://designforum.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=%5Fgetfullarticle&aid=1279239">read his speech). "http://designconference.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=descriptions#tleadership">Bill Strickland passionately showed how "art can be a
portal" to a better world. Paola Antonelli from MOMA and Ze Frank gave two contrary
takes on the perceptions and effectiveness of what it means to be
"safe".
Check out some of the conference highlights yourself, and get
inspired!
- The >resource page with podcasts, links and downloads of some of the
presentations
- The flickr sets
of posted conference pictures
- Conference blogs/reviews from Jason Kottke and Speak Up
I can’t really summarize the whole conference here, but I can say
that I left with a desire to do more. Yes, more.  More with my
career. More for our community. More for my clients. More for those
who need our help. And more for my fellow AIGA members
here in Houston. I know that a conference can’t be all things to all people, but it was definitely a valuable conference for me.