The University of Minnesota provides quite a few great resources that are both excellent and free. Promotion however is often not excellent so events are easy to miss and are not as well attended as they should be. The Upcoming Disruptive Effects symposium is breaking that mold. The bad news is that it isn’t free – though it is still a bargain relative to the cost of many creative industry events. The good news is that Larsen is a sponsor so there are posters and a website and I know about it far enough in advance to blog about it. This symposium is worth considering since it looks like it will break another mold as well. Namely those stale presentations of the presenter’s past work in favor of a multi-disciplinary dialogue about what could be. Take a look, take a chance and take the opportunity to challenge the participants. This may be one time they’ll appreciate the disruption.
If you love elegantly restrained interface design AND believe that to describe Minnesota as “fly-over country” is to seriously overlook the first rate creative work forged in the heartland then do I have a site for you! Mnimal.com is an impressive and growing gallery of websites that attain that elusive minimalistic clarity. Thanks to curator Joshua Serbus and coordinator Andrew Hafferman for including BrainstormOverload in the collection of such impressive company.
Bill Mauldin’s cartooning career took him through World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam, winning him two Pulitzer Prizes and a Purple Heart along the way.
A selection of his work has been screen printed onto t-shirts to raise money for The Soldiers Project, which focuses on giving free psychological treatment to soldiers going to and coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Oh, and if you want to know what I imagine my dad to have looked like around 1940, I refer you to the cowlick and smirk above.
One of the hardest things about a long career in design is thinking about all the of interesting people I’ve encountered and enjoyed working with who then for one reason or another have disappeared over the horizon. I’ve moved around a fair bit so despite the best efforts of a cadre of social media that list is getting pretty long.
What fun it is then to suddenly rediscover someone and find that they are thriving and as interesting as ever. So it is with Rachel (Dunagan) Wiles who after briefly sharing a little Colle+McVoy with me has hung her own shingle intriguingly entitled Benign Objects. Rachel has been creating stationary and invitations like the two above “birdies” and “squirrels” and chronicling interesting design discoveries on her blog. Check ‘em out and drop her a line of encouragement or better yet give her a call and hire her for an assignment. That way you’ll get to enjoy her southern accent.
Shelter Architects has completed one of the first LEED Platinum residential houses in the Nation. And not just any ol’ place in the nation but right here in Minneapolis on Washburn Avenue near Theodore Worth Park. Not only is the design a nice break from the endless rows of traditional houses but the materials are up-to-date as well. The home boasts energy star lighting, no-voc finishes, recycled and fsc finish materials, and even reclaimed flooring and tile. They score on all three counts: reduce, reuse and recycle. Check out Shelter’s site for more or if you’re local make the pilgrimage one day when the weather is nice… late May perhaps.
help zeus jones & puny do some holiday good
help zeus jones, puny and box tops for education take all the students at minneapolis’s richard r green central park community school on a field trip next year.
to a lot of us, the idea of a field trip seems so basic, but please watch the seriously cute animation and you’ll understand how important it is. letting kids see what the world (or even the other side of the city or the river!) has to offer makes more of a difference than you can know. and i know. i used to teach at a school that was a lot like green.
and, as always, nice work, zj and puny!
Now You Too Can Be Cyclopathic
At last there is a tool that enables cyclists to map their route from point A to point B while preferentially factoring in bike paths and bike lanes – Cyclopath. Now I’ve been to point B quite a few times and know the way but I’ve never gotten there from point C. Cyclopath allows me to map the route, adjust it, get a sense of what I’ll be in for and print directions. You can use any address in the Twin Cities and surrounding region the map covers and even map to points of interest like parks.
Maps can be viewed as street layer or aerial photos and the system indicates distance, allows you to make and save changes to maps, share them and even lets you interpret your route using several filters of special interest to cyclists like “byway type”, rating and even by slope so you can embark on the pleasantly futile task of trying to plan a route that’s down hill both ways.
There are many more features and it seems like a pretty powerful new tool but one with a little bit of a learning curve. Fortunately the folks at Cyclopath have taken this into account as well and are offering a lecture about how to use the system. Not only are the tool and the lecture free they’ll feed you breakfast so stop by as you ride your bike in to work tomorrow (weather should be pretty nice). The lecture is Thursday, November 12 from 8:30 – 9:30 at the UofM. More info available here. Can’t make it to breakfast. View it live online at 8:40am.
Who would take on this heroic and altruistic effort you ask? Well that is the beauty of having a large land-grant, research oriented, university in your town. The University of Minnesota’s Institute for New Media Studies did all the heavy lifting. Now all you have to do is enjoy the ride.