Biblio is now ready for launch!

It’s with great pleasure that I present to you, Biblio, our new line of handmade wool felt sleeves. From the Kickstarter campaign page: “Inspired by long-forgotten ribbon book bags, these handmade wool felt cases protect your precious belongings while making them readily accessible at a moments notice.”

Take a look at the video and place your pledges on the campaign page here!

For a more reflective thoughts on the process and the Kickstarter platform, please visit Greater Good Studio’s blog for an insight into our new project campaign.

Biblio teaser video for new upcoming Kickstarter campaign

With great excitement, may I present Biblio. It’s a family of simple, elegant felt cases for your iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air*. Biblio is proudly designed, prototyped and manufactured in America.

I can finally reveal a teaser video for this project, which I’ve been working on for the last six months. The project will hit launch in a few more week on Kickstarter and if you’re not aware of this game-changing new platform for designers, please click the link to find out more.

Since this is my first Kickstarter project, I’m keeping my expecatations low but my hopes for learning high. I want to better understand what it takes to design and manufacture a simple piece of design work and then understand how to promote it and there’s no better way than to do it yourself.

This video was produced over the weekend (two days of shooting plus about four hours of editing), primarily serving to help build momentum for our project launch. This preview video helps tells one of three mini-stories we’re planing on telling in our final launch video (design, manufacturing and use) and lets us present to the world the our local soft-goods prototyper and master craftsman, Mr. Lee. His firm is called Lee Sewing based here in Chicago’s west side. 

Mr. Lee has over 35 years of sewing and soft-goods manufacturing experience and working with him the last few months, let me appreciate the beauty of his well-honed hand skills. Nary a wasted movement is made while he works and this video is our homage to him.  

Lastly, my sincere thanks to my design partner on this project, David Hull. I had the pleasure of meeting David (an MFA graduate design student) last year in my Smart Cities class. This project simply would not have been anything more than a paper prototype and a napkin sketch if it weren’t for him. 

When we launch on Kickstarter, I’ll let y’all know!

*Biblio cases will be available in multiple sizes to accommodate all the current Apple laptops including: MacBook Air 11”, 13” and MacBook Pro 15” and 17” models. The iPad case will work with the New iPad as well as the iPad 2 and original iPad (1st gen).

Upcoming workshops, events and speaking engagements

I’m very excited to be able to share a few upcoming speaking engagements over the next few months. I’m honored to be be invited to each of these events and I really still can’t quite believe that I’m out there participating at all. 

Chicago Designers Accord Town Hall Meeting 
Presented by the School of the Art Institute’s AIGA chapter
March 14th
SAIC Ballroom, 112 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60602
Core77’s coverage of last year’s event 
Presenting Greater Good Studio and it’s inception 

40+ Rethinking Design Symposium
Hosted by the University of Kentucky College of Design
March 30th
Student Center, University of Kentucky 
Speaking on a panel discussion on real-time data (SAIC’s Cindy Coleman will be presenting her work from Gensler the day before too!) 

Urban Systems Collaborative Workshop
Hosted by the Metropolitan Planning Council
April 19th, 2012
Metropolitan Planning Council
A report from last year’s workshop
Attending workshops on the future of civic data, architecture and design

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI2012
Workshop 24: Food and Interaction Design Workshop
May 6th, 2012
Austin, TX
Co-presenting a paper with Sara Cantor Aye on the cafeteria project we’re teaching at the SAIC

For Warby Parker's Elise sales person!

Coursekit—my new online teaching tool

Over the last year and a half of being a full-time professor at the SAIC, I’ve searched desperately for some kind of online toolset that would let me host my various classes. I tried with the ‘Living in a Smart City’ class to use a public Tumblr blog, but there were way too many outages for my liking (plus way too many porn blogs). Then I tried to host a blog on my site (this one) for the last Samsung class, but there were tons of issues with logins and the lack of being able to host images and files (unless you were logged in as me and not just a guest editor.)

But in the last few weeks before this new semester started, I found Coursekit. Tip of the hat goes to Judd Morgenstern (friend and ex-colleague from IA Collaborative, Institute of Design grad and damn well dressed fellow).

Coursekit is basically everything I was looking for in an online tool for me as a teacher and I believe what students were looking for—a single place to find everything about the class for reference, and a place for everything relevents that’s developing.

Even though Squarespace turned out to be a rather awkward tool for my students during the Samsung class, the rate of development in the mobile device market place moves so fast that posting to the class blog was the only way for the student team and me to keep track of what’s up that day.

Classes are meant to be social, but they rarely are. We’re changing that—Coursekit

And since I like to experience things first hand rather than just read a review, I have jumped in with both feet and am hosting all three of my classes this year with Coursekit. You can find them on my ‘Classes’ page and you’ll find the syllabi for them there too. I’ll give you an update by mid-semester. 

I’m really hopeful that this will work out and that each time I refer back to it, like a really good syllabus, the investment will pay for itself forward.

More info about Coursekit here.