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I’m super excited to share the talk I presented at the Chicago TechWeek 2012 conference and expo, 6/24/2012. My sincere thanks to Jeb Ory (of 5 Degrees) for the kind invitation to speak.
My talk is title Designing Interactions and Experiences and it covers two classes I teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
At the very end, there’s a quick shout out to our latest Kickstarter, Designign Chicago: New Tools for Public Transit.
As always, my deepest thanks to the my amazing student teams at the SAIC for their passion, dedication and ingenuity.
]]>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.
]]>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).
]]>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
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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.
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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.
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.
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Let me know what you think!
