Details at www.boisbuchet.org

Saturday, June 15th
In her acclaimed Design the Life You Love workshops,  award-winning designer, Ayse Birsel, shares her design experience and creative process, Deconstruction: Reconstruction™, to teach you how to think about life with playfulness, imagination and optimism.

Life, like a design problem, is full of constraints such as time, money, age, location, and circumstance. You cannot have everything. If you want more, you have to be creative about how to make what you need and what you want co-exist.

This requires design thinking.Using metaphors, models and visualizations, you will draw from concepts in fields as diverse as fashion, design, art, and gastronomy—looking to the work of thinkers like Issey Miyake, Ferran Adria, James Dyson and Steve Jobs—as food for thought.

For more information, please contact Leah Caplan at leah@birselplusseck.com or you can register at Eventbrite: http://designthelifeyoulovebyaysebirsel.eventbrite.com.

You are invited to the 2013 D-Crit Conference, moderated by NPR’s “The Takeaway” host John Hockenberry, and featuring graduating students of the SVA MFA in Design Criticism, on May 11, 2013 at the SVA Theatre in New York City. The event is free and open to the public but you must register to save your seat.

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, will deliver the keynote lecture, launching an afternoon of rich, polyphonic exchange between the D-Crit Class of 2013 and a headlining roster of design curators, practitioners, theorists, critics, educators, and planners. D-Crit students will be presenting their thesis research in counterpoint with: Walker Arts Center curator of Architecture and Design Andrew Blauvelt; British interaction design firm Dunne & Raby co-founder Fiona Raby; architect and theorist Mark Foster Gage; director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City Toni Griffin; and architect and activist Michael Sorkin.

Topics to be addressed include: the persistence of segregation in today’s built environment; the problems inherent in exhibiting graphic design; the spectacular framing of nature in the urban environment; product design’s social and participatory dimension; and how some emerging architects are using literal representation in new ways.

This will be the fourth D-Crit conference organized by, and featuring, graduating D-Crit students. Join us for a fast-paced afternoon of heady ideas and practical insight about the subjects and strategies giving shape to design criticism today, and help us to celebrate a new generation of design critics, editors, journalists, authors, curators, researchers, and educators. Thanks to supporting partners like MailChimp, this event is free and open to the public.

D-Crit Conference Moderator:

Founding host of the public radio program “The Takeaway,” John Hockenberry has worked in network television, documentary films, new media, and is the author of the novel River out of Eden as well as the journalist memoir Moving Violations, a National Book Critic’s Circle Award finalist. He has been host or correspondent for a half dozen network programs, including “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition,” and “Talk of the Nation” on NPR; “Day One” and “Good Morning America Sunday” at ABC News; and “Edgewise”, “Hockenberry” and “Dateline NBC” at NBC News. Holder of four Emmy awards and four Peabody awards for journalism, Hockenberry is also a celebrated speaker at the TED conference and, as a high profile advocate for social justice and the rights of the disabled, he has argued for disability rights at the United Nations and at the White House.

D-Crit Conference Keynote Speaker:

Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art where, since 1994, she has curated groundbreaking exhibitions such as “Design and the Elastic Mind,” “Humble Masterpieces,” “Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design,” “SAFE: Design Takes on Risk,” and “Workspheres.” For these accomplishments she received the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Design Mind Award, a senior fellowship from the Royal College of Art, London, and an honorary doctorate from Kingston University. Antonelli teaches “Design Exhibition and Collection Curation” at the SVA MFA in Design Criticism.

D-Crit Conference Speakers:

Andrew Blauvelt is curator of Architecture and Design and chief of communications and audience engagement at the Walker Art Center. Blauvelt has organized several major touring exhibitions for the Walker, including: “Graphic Design: Now in Production” with the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” with the Carnegie Museum of Art, and “Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life.” He is currently working on an exhibition that explores the elevated pedestrian walkway in various global “skyway” cities. Blauvelt writes and lectures about design and culture for various publications including DesignObserver.

Mark Foster Gage’s work ranges from architectural projects and products to interdisciplinary collaborations, most recently with fashion designer Nicola Formichetti on an outfit for Lady Gaga and a series of concept stores that recently opened in New York City, Hong Kong, and Beijing. Gage has taught at Yale since 2001 and has written on architecture and design in such journals as Journal of Architectural Education, Architectural Design, and Perspecta. He was the guest co-editor of Log #17, which focused on the relationship between material, media, and affect. Gage’s most recent books are: Composites, Software and Surfaces: Towards a High Performance Architecture and Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts for Architecture and Design.

Toni L. Griffin was recently named Professor and Director of the J. Max Bond Center for Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. She also runs the firm Urban Planning and Design for the American City, whose clients include the cities of Newark, NJ and Detroit, MI. Prior to returning to private practice, Griffin was the director of community development for the City of Newark, where she was responsible for creating a centralized division of planning and urban design, and before that she served as vice president and director of design for the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation in Washington, D.C., and held the position of deputy director for Revitalization Planning and Neighborhood Planning in the D.C. Office of Planning.

Fiona Raby is a partner in the British design partnership Dunne & Raby, established in 1994. She is professor of Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and a reader in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. Dunne & Raby use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. Their work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Pompidou Centre, and the Science Museum in London. They have published two books: Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects and Hertzian Tales. A new book, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming, will be published by MIT Press in late 2013.

Michael Sorkin is an architect and urbanist whose practice spans design, criticism, and teaching. He is a contributing editor at Architectural Record and the author of numerous books including Variations on A Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse, Local Code, Wiggle, Some Assembly Required, Other Plans, The Next Jerusalem, and After The World Trade Center (edited with Sharon Zukin), among others. Sorkin is the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City, a design practice with a special interest in the city and in green architecture. In 2006, Sorkin founded Terreform, a non-profit devoted to research and intervention in urban planning and sustainability issues. Sorkin has been the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York since 2000.

The conference website, with full speaker bios, confirmed schedule, and presentation descriptions, to launch soon!

In the meantime you can follow @dcritconference on Twitter

Fabrico Próprio—now in its second, improved edition—is coming to New York City, after being launched in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The launch will take place at Manhattan’s architecture and design bookstore Van Alen Books .

Design critic (and D-Crit faculty member) Akiko Busch will introduce the book and discuss with authors Rita João, Pedro Ferreira, and (2010 graduate) Frederico Duarte the intersections between confectionery, culture, and design. New York-based Turkish designer Naz Sahin will also join the conversation.

Design The Life You Love

On Saturday, April 27, 2013, join award-winning designer and co-founder of Birsel + Seck design and innovation studio, Ayse Birsel, for her acclaimed Design The Life You Love workshop.

In the article Forget New Year’s Resolutions. This Year Use Design Tools to Redesign Your Life, Linda Tischler, senior editor of Fast Company, writes, “My New Year’s resolutions tend toward the prosaic…but thanks to Ayse Birsel, this year I’m thinking bigger…”

Today faced with complex challenges and a pace of change that is often disorienting, we need to invent our own rules. In Design the Life You Love, Ayse draws from her experience and creative process to offer design tools as our survival kit. Using metaphors, mapping and visual modeling, and drawing inspiration from art, design and fashion, the workshop provides a step-by-step guide to becoming the designer of your life with optimism, curiosity and playfulness.

We look forward to your participation.

For more information on Ayse Birsel, Birsel + Seck and the Design The Life You Love workshops, please visit dereconstruction.com
For registration, contact Leah Caplan at leah (at) birselplusseck.com.

Of the satirical 1980s magazine Spy, Dave Eggers has observed, “It might have remade New York’s cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There’s no magazine I know of that’s so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented.” The novelist and radio host (and D-Crit faculty member) Kurt Andersen, a co-founder of Spy and, until 1993, its editor-in-chief, will talk about the thrilling and terrifying creation, operation, evolution and impact of an extraordinary magazine. Kurt Andersen is the co-creator and host of the Peabody Award-winning “Studio 360,” the weekly public radio program about culture and the arts. His most recent book is the novelTrue Believers (Random House, 2012). He is also the author of the best-selling novelsHeyday (Random House, winner of the Langum Prize for the best historical fiction of 2007) and Turn of the Century (Random House, 1999). He co-founded Spy, Inside.com, and Very Short List, and served as editor-in-chief of New York magazine and editorial director forColors. He has been a columnist for New York and The New Yorker, as well as Time’s architecture and design critic, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. Andersen has served as Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design, holds an honorary doctorate from RISD, and is a faculty member of SVA MFA Design Criticism.

Each lecture is followed by a lively Q&A session and refreshments in the D-Crit Reading Room. Lectures are free and open to the public but you do need to register to reserve your space.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rick Poynor, the British critic, writes about images, and selects and edits them for magazines, books, exhibitions, and his blog at Design Observer. He is also increasingly preoccupied, as a photographer, with making images himself. Just as designers can expand their practice through writing, he argues, so can writers in visual disciplines extend their practice by learning to write with images; pictures should be much more than an afterthought. He will show and discuss his photographs, often used as a starting point for Design Observer posts, and argue that a key task now for the visually aware writer is to build a closer critical relationship between words and pictures.

Visiting Professor in Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art in London, Rick Poynor was the founding editor of Eye and a co-founder of Design Observer. He is a long-serving columnist for both Print and Eye, and has written about design and visual culture for Blueprint, Icon, Creative Review, Frieze, Financial Times, The Guardian, Adbusters, Harvard Design Magazine, and Metropolis. His books include the newly reissued critical study No More Rules (Yale University Press, 2003), the monograph Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (010 Publishers, 2008), and the essay collections Design Without Boundaries (Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1998), Obey the Giant (Birkhauser, 2001), and Designing Pornotopia (Laurence King, 2006).

Each lecture is followed by a lively Q&A session and refreshments in the D-Crit Reading Room. Lectures are free and open to the public but you do need to register to reserve your space.

Also, please note the new start time of 6:30 p.m.

Meaning is one of the greatest sources of economic value and one of the least respected. Explanations of why people buy things “they don’t need” tend to fall back on stories of status signaling or simple delusion. But actual motives and meanings are much more complicated and interesting, and their results more dynamic and unpredictable. Drawing on her work in The Substance of Style and her forthcoming book The Power of Glamour, author and critic Virginia Postrel will look at what we can learn about our culture and ourselves by taking meaning seriously as a source of economic value. Virginia Postrel is an author, columnist, and speaker whose work spans a broad range of topics, from social science to fashion. She describes her work as “intellectual arbitrage”—synthesizing, analyzing, and communicating ideas from many different fields in an original and accessible way, usually with focus on culture and commerce. Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style (2003) and The Future and Its Enemies (1998). She is writing a book on glamour, to be published in Fall 2013 by Simon & Schuster, and is a regular columnist for the Bloomberg View division of Bloomberg.com.

Each lecture is followed by a lively Q&A session and refreshments in the D-Crit Reading Room. Lectures are free and open to the public but you do need to register to reserve your space.
Also, please note the new start time of 6:30 p.m.