I have just returned home and begun an intensive recovery that is befitting of the work hard / play hard ethic with which I tackled these past four days at ICOGRADA’s Design Week in Seattle. The news has been on the television all evening: looping footage of the escalating tension between Israel and the Hezbollah; of blown out Lebanese neighbourhoods and clips of Anderson Cooper chasing after the next ground zero. After dinner, we rent Syriana, remembering its scenes of a claustophobic and heavily armed Hezbollah-occupied Beirut; trying to make …

It was interesting timing when I first made contact with Catherine Morley (Cat) a few weeks back. I had submitted my site for consideration at designers-who-blog.com and received some very positive and encouraging feedback from Cat. I also became privy to her most recent project and passion: the NO!SPEC crusade.
This hit very close to home. The Canadian design community was recently looking down just such a barrel when the Design Exchange in collaboration with the Department of Canadian Heritage released a speculative national competition for the redesign of the Canadian …

While on a completely unrelated search, I stumbled upon this fascinating website titled They Still Draw Pictures. Apparently during the Spanish Civil War, the Board of Education and the Carnegie Institute of Spain collected the drawings of school children throughout the country and in the refugee camps in France as a means of documenting the experience. While the images speak entirely for themselves, they are also accompanied by a wonderful introduction by none other than Aldous Huxley. Of note, he writes:
“If we look at [the drawings] with the eyes of …

www.massivechange.com“It is not about the world of design. It is about the design of the world.”-Bruce MauThis fall, the Massive Change exhibit debuted at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In trying to answer the question “Now that we have the ability to do anything, what will we do?”, a team of designers under the guidance of Bruce Mau set about not just to warn us about the critical condition of the world today, but to demonstrate how we have the resources and technology to save ourselves. It is not so much …