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. 

Speaking tour of Seoul, Korea—Dec 19-23, 2011

Now that the Fall 2011 semester has come to a close, I am happy to announce that I will be in Seoul starting next Monday for a week, giving talks speaking about my work as a designer, teacher and artist. I’ll also be visiting the SAIC’s Samsung client team to present the amazing work my students did for them this semester. As you can imagine, I’m crazy excited to visit Korea and Seoul for it’s prominence in design and culture on the world stage.

Below is a press release from the Nam Jun Paik Museum, who will be hosting my talk Dec 20th.

Design for Citizens—how design can be used to foster community in urban environments

George is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He teaches graduate level classes in the Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects department. He is also co-founder and design director at Greater Good Studio, an innovation consultancy that uses design methods to solve social problems.

Greater Good Studio believes in three simple truths:

Research changes design.
Design changes behavior.
Behavior changes the world.

George has been a design consultant (at IDEO), a public servant (at the Chicago Transit Authority), a teacher (at theSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago), and now an entrepreneur (at Greater Good Studio). He remains wildly optimistic that user-centered research and insight driven design brings awareness and tools, can bring change to even the most entrenched problems of our time. 

George will present projects from his 13 year career as a designer, artist, teacher and citizen: designing city buses, designing components of a smart city and creating a new vision for public school cafeterias. In addition, exclusively for Nam June Paik Art Museum, he will present a photographic study about race and identity called CHROMAsome.

georgeaye.com
greatergoodstudio.com

GFRY2012 class blog goes live

After many, many months of writing proposals, giving presentations, cajoling partners, inspiring speeches and careful negotiations, the GFRY Studio, “(re)designing a public school cafeteria” is all go and full steam ahead. And like many of my classes*, it’s not real till there’s a blog to go with it. 

As in previous classes, the students soon take over the running of the blog, but as we build up momentum, I’ll be posting about food, schools, and kids and all things related on that blog. The first post even has a mini FAQ for those who are wondering what the hell is going on here.

Click here for the GFRY2012 class blog 

*It’s a shame the #SamsungSAIC class this year had to go into stealth mode due to confidentiality agreements, as it’s been a teriffic blog with tons of updates from the student teams.

Ezio Manzini lecture in Chicago, Nov 14th, 6pm

I’m crazy excited to be a part of this amazing lecture and panel dicussion on Monday. 

Some old CTA posters that never saw the light of day

While rooting around some old archives of my work, I found these two posters that I had designed while I was at the CTA, for the summer rock concert season that lands in Chicago each year, namely Lollapalooza and Pitchfork. Unfortunately, they never got printed for one reason or another, but I thought it would have been clever to take commonly used iconography of public information graphics and remix them slightly.

Let me know what you think!