Learning from St Louis

Image courtesy of CityRiverArch.org

Turnstone has recently been interviewed about the role of storytelling in placemaking, for PBS’s current affairs show, Stay Tuned, on KETC, Channel 9, out of St Louis, Missouri.

This week’s episode, broadcast on 4/4/2013, was about the St Louis Gateway Arch Grounds 2015 renovation project, specifically the vote that narrowly passed to support a controversial earmarked “Arch tax” increase, to be levied locally to support the renovation of the famous St Louis monument and its surrounding grounds (technically a National Park).

Stay Tuned presenter, Casey Nolan, asked me about what it takes to get a city behind a redesign of public space, what other international precedents there are that St Louis could follow and what steps it takes to win public hearts and minds around big ideas for shared spaces. There’s a good background panel discussion at the top of the show, then Turnstone talks sense from around minute 16. Click the clip above to watch the full show.

Oh IXD, Oh Sandy

Back in Fall 2012, I taught this class on the Design of Systems to the first year Interaction Design MFA graduate students at the School of Visual Arts.

I was channeling, but not explicit enough about, the work of Durrell Bishop, and my work about his work – unpacking his brilliantly simple and complex notion that digital products should now embody the systems of our using them, since they no longer have to take the shape of the sum of the mechanical parts they contain. Shh, and think about that for a minute.

Annnyway, we did have guest lectures from Barry Richards of Rockwell Group, the designers of the Imagination Playground, that UNICEF just launched in Haiti; Chelsea Mauldin, my erstwhile Design Trust collaborator and now Director of the Public Policy Lab; Nick Abadzis, comic book artist extraordinaire; and Noel Wilson, intrepid industrial designer with Engineers Without Borders spin-off, Catapult Design out of San Francisco. We also got ourselves properly paranoid reading Andrew Blum’s Tubes, and tiptoeing through Trevor Paglen’s incredible photography of undocumented military and industrial installations, right before Creative Time launched his Last Pictures exhibit. We even had a field trip to IKEA. It was not a boring syllabus.

Then Superstorm Sandy became not only the disruptive force that diverted us from showing up in Week 6, and from starting then completing the deep and wide class blog, but also became the focus of the final projects. Those are summarized by the students here and were critiqued by Ian Spalter of Foursquare, Scott Peterman from Parsons and Tony Moulton from Occupy Sandy.

“That was more the philosophy than the design of systems” said one student in the last class, not unhappily. Anything to make makers think and thinkers make, I say.

Graphic Novelists/Novel Graphics

Images for AIGA NY courtesy of (top) Nick Abadzis and (below) G.B.Tran

Get your Hallowe’en costume sorted early and get excited for this:
Super-honored to announce that on Tuesday Oct 30, Turnstone will be moderating a very special conversation between two titans of graphical storytelling: Eisner Award-winning Nick Abadzis (Hugo Tate, Laika) and G.B.Tran (author of Vietnamerica, one of Time Magazine’s all-time Top 10 Graphic Memoirs).

The event is organized by AIGA New York and co-hosted by MoCA, the Museum of Chinese in America, to tie in with their current exhibits, Alt.Comics/Marvels and Monsters. Alt.comics showcases an incredible, poignant, funny, beautiful array of comics by Asian American comic book artists and graphic novelists. Marvels and Monsters looks at depictions of Asians in (ahem, stereotypes perpetuated by) American comics since the 1940s.

Abadzis and Tran come together to share with a wide audience of MoCA members, comic book fans, and AIGA members their inspiration, approaches to historical and personal research and pen-to-pixel working methods. It’s my privilege to introduce them. It should be a special night.

MoCA is at 215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013 – between Howard and Grand Streets, a block north of Canal St. The event runs 630-830pm and tickets are available here. Come thru!

[Postscript: This event was cancelled due to the inauspicious arrival of Superstorm Sandy on October 29, and due to scheduling conflicts, it was not possible to reschedule later in the year, while the exhibit was still up]

On board at AIGA New York

I’ve recently accepted an invitation to join the board of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Graphics Arts (AIGA). For 30 years, the organization has been at the center of professional design practice and it’s an honor to participate at this stage. Led by Board Chair, Willy Wong and in esteemed company, I’m thankful to the team who elected us newcomers. Over the coming year, I look forward to contributing and to steering some of the ideas, issues and inspiration Turnstone has been gathering here, towards to new and familiar audiences.

Services are Everywhere: Turnstone at AIGA National Design Conference

Turnstone joined Zipcar and Facebook to introduce “Services Are Everywhere” to the annual AIGA National Design Conference in Phoenix, AZ this Fall: The all-women panel kicked off four sessions on service design, moderated by innovation consultancy, Continuum. Click the clip here to watch this recently released, short’n'sweet film of the presenters’ perspectives, from Disney, Facebook, the Mayo Clinic, My Police, Sony, Turnstone, Zipcar and others.

Turnstone in words and pictures

Turnstone has returned to its drawing roots this year, inspired by collaborations with Ludic Group, the international innovation consultancy. By invitation, Rachel takes visual notes for corporate-level strategy meetings. Sample concept drawings and diagrams from closed client sessions can’t be shared, but more illustrative images are here on the Turnstone web site. Rachel also presented at  LaydeezDoComics in London in December 2011.

In September, QR This, Turnstone’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s interactive media exhibit, Talk to Me, appeared in the Architect’s Newspaper.

Turnstone in collaboration

In 2011, Turnstone participated in Amplify Brooklyn, run in November by the DESIS Lab at Parsons, the New School for Design, as part of their Open Design for Organizational Innovation initiative, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The one-day workshop brought together designers, social scientists and practitioners to use fieldwork and other design methods to address the organizational challenges of a non-profit organization in North Brooklyn. Here’s a short film about the workshop, Open Design for Organizational Innovation from Parsons Desis Lab on Vimeo:

In the spring, Turnstone also joined a team of architects and designers from Italy, Portugal and Hungary to submit a proposal to EUROPAN 11, a competition for regenerating a section of the town of Szeged, Hungary. Of 70 entrants, ours was a finalist, commended for its strategy, though none of the projects, not even the winner, will be realized. The EU has more pressing matters to attend to…?

Turnstone’s sideproject, dilys+asante, created more hit party props for the award-winning I Love Vinyl party’s second anniversary in May, as featured in Time Out in June. Even us strategists need to get hands on. And our dance on.

Turnstone remembers

Turnstone remembers two inspiring friends and coworkers, who both passed away in the past year and a half:

Angelo Kontarinis was a great friend at and after our time working together at IBM, and Sylvia Harris, among many other things, a collaborator, champion for women in business, designers of color, decent design for citizens, and personally, she was a fairy godmother to the Taxi07: Roads Forward project. Both were great designers and, above all, really good people, both missed.

The Sylvia Harris Citizen Design Award has been established to support projects that inform and inspire the public, and the dedicated designers who create them. Details about contributing funds to the Award are here.

dilys+asante at Lincoln Center’s LCDJ tomorrow!

As a sidebar to all things Turnstone:

Scratching an itch to craft something, stretching beyond strategic design briefing documents right through build to installation, Rachel is launching a co-created personal project with fellow Royal College of Art graduate, Kofi Aidoo. Tomorrow we debut as dilys+asante and present Project Auricle at Lincoln Center’s LCDJ, a party hosted on 10/29 by I Love Vinyl. To toot our own horn and spout our own blurb:

“Mixing familiar funfair delight with social media, textiles and twinkling electronics, Auricle draws in party guests to express just how much they love the tunes each DJ digs up. Throughout the night, participants can email photos of their interactions with Auricle to view and share on flickr here, on facebook and on the I Love Vinyl online family albumduring and after the show.”

More about us, I Love Vinyl and LCDJ on Lincoln Center’s web site. Thanks to Glen of Core77 and Ben of I Love Vinyl for the inspiration.

Next, we sing at Carnegie Hall…

Project: Interaction

Two great second year students, whom I had the pleasure of teaching at SVA last year, are now doing some awesome geek girl outreach. As mentioned in the SVA Interaction Design newsletter this week:

In a few weeks, two MFA Interaction Design graduate students are going back to high school! Katie Koch and Carmen Dukes, co-founders and teachers of Project: Interaction, will head out into the world to share their passion for interaction design. Katie and Carmen will work with a group of ninth and tenth grade girls at the Urban Assembly Institute for Math and Science for Young Women in a ten-week after school design education program they developed for high schoolers.

The two have been preparing for this moment for about a year, employing a user-centered approach to conduct on-site research and observation at area high schools, and interviewing teachers and designers to discover the needs of high school students.

From what they learned, they’ve developed a program that focuses on teaching creative thinking and problem solving methods—critical tools for designers—to help high schoolers address problems in their surrounding communities. The program challenges each student to rethink what she sees each day, closely observe the environment around her, and use teamwork to come up with big ideas. During the program, students will take a field trip to New York City based digital agency R/GA to experience interaction design in practice.

The program begins September 29. In the meantime, Katie and Carmen have just launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for this semester and to expand into more schools in the new year. Head over to Kickstarter to help support their project!