IDSA Northeast Conference
Photo by Isaac Blankensmith
As I attempted to navigate through a crowded Salon last Friday night, I overheard snippets of conversation, ranging from ideation, to systems thinking to user experience. Not your typical bar-side discourse. However, I knew that I was in design geek heaven when I heard a guy standing behind me adamantly say, “now that’s why I love designing wheelchairs.”
The event, Creatives and Cocktails, was part of Design4 2011, the Industrial Design Society of America’s (IDSA) Northeast Conference, which was held at RISD last Friday and Saturday. The excitement that I witnessed at Salon, was carried through the entire two day event, which was packed with workshops, lectures and social activities from 8am to 10pm.
The premise of the conference was contained in a simple question: What are people today designing for? Inspired by designer’s motivations to create, the conference was divided into four sections: Design4 Humans, Design4 Business Growth, Design4 Social Good and Design4 a Healthy Planet.
Throughout the weekend I was struck by the common sentiment repeated over and over, either explicitly or implicitly, that design can create widespread meaningful change.
In the social sphere, Timothy Prestero, CEO of Design that Matters, told us about Project Firefly, one of DtM’s recent projects. Firefly is a low cost phototherapy device designed to treat infants with jaundice in Vietnam. Also speaking in the field of design for social good, was Jason Severs, principal designer of frog Design. Severs described frog’s collaborative project with UNICEF in Zambia to create a safety net of services around mothers and their children vulnerable to HIV.
While Prestero and Severs both discussed design work abroad, RISD alum, Sami Nerenberg, spoke about Design for America, which seeks to encourage design for social entrepreneurship on a local scale, starting at the University. Design for America is a design initiative, founded at Northwestern University, to encourage students to partner with local organizations and “figure out together how to use design to create change.”
RISD President John Maeda also proposed that education can be designed in the keynote presentation he gave on Friday, in which he invited eight RISD students on stage to discuss their individual learning experiences. As the students on the panel discussed, Maeda took the position of note taker, typing out key phrases to be projected on the screen behind him.
The focus on students in Maeda’s keynote, became a theme for the conference as a whole. As speakers prepared for their presentations, the IDSA MC repeatedly shouted out school names such as Syracuse, Mass Art, Wentworth Institute and University of Bridgeport. As the students responded riotously and Syracuse even performed a wave, it became clear that students represented a substantial portion of the audience.
The presentations from the student merit award winners were also inspirational. For example, Syracuse senior, Matt Kalish, arrived in Chile shortly after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake. In response to the disaster, Kalish collaborated with two Chileans to develop a concept for a food storage system that would operate without electricity. In the design, food compartments are surrounded with layers of wet sand and as the water evaporated the food was cooled. On a less serious note, Kalish also introduced us to “Inebri + Aided,” a business that Kalish started in a week to deliver “aid” to hung over college students in the form of breakfast, Advil and a puke bucket.
Mass Art senior, Dennis Minton, showcased his degree project which focuses on making hospitals, and radiology equipment in particular, approachable from a child’s point of view. RISD’s merit award winner, Jackson Seidenberg, also presented a few projects including a redesigned crankable flashlight and an easy to operate, alarm clock designed specifically for college students.
Many speakers at the conference suggested a changing landscape for designers because of the rise in digital technology. The designer is becoming more of an author, generating ideas rather than simply giving form to other people’s concepts. I was excited to hear the changing field of design and the four themes so clearly reflected in the student winners’ diverse work.
Industrial Design professor, Charlie Cannon, said that we face a perfect storm with deep and myriad problems. And designers are equipped, through working in interdisciplinary teams, to make meaningful change.
During the conference, speakers suggested that designers today can do anything. I found Cannon’s more tempered wisdom to be inspirational: “I don’t know if we can do anything. What we have to do is do what we can and do it better.”
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