I’m proud to announce that STACKD is featured in an online publication called Urban Omnibus that intends to “increase understanding of the city we have and encourage ideas that can lead to a more inclusive, more sustainable, more beautiful city that could be.” We’ve worked hard in getting some of the kinks out of the system in time for the article’s publication and are keeping our fingers crossed that people will sign up and start using STACKD to build relationships with others in their building – or nearby. The article gives a bit of conceptual urban theory background to the project, how we originated the idea as a way to meet other businesses and where we think it could lead. Please let us know what you think, even the bad stuff!

Yesterday, I spoke on “Designing for Interaction” in the Urban Design Studio that Kaja Kuehl is coordinating this summer. The quicktime above is without any of my commentary so it may be a bit cryptic. The gist of the talk is that our surroundings can be understood as an intricate system of information. As designers we can have an impact on how people understand their surroundings. For example, subtle visual cues such as color and typography can help to find the right gate at an airport. The example I used in the video is in Madrid. The second part of the talk showcases four of our projects in which we designed how people experience information in a physical environment. The first two projects are exhibitions. One at Van Alen Institute and one at the Architectural League. Both of those are a few years old. The third project is a permanent installation in the Maria Mitchell Observatory at Vassar College. It is essentially wallpaper that completely envelops the entrance space with a large image. The closer you get to the image the less detail you can perceive. The last project is an installation at Rockefeller University acknowledging the Nobel and Lasker Prize winners this institution has produced over the decades.

Our friends at Valiant asked us to get involved in an international competition to design a logo and a collection bin for e-waste recycling. We designed the basic branding of Design The 4th Bin together with Mina Hatano and developed the website based on Wordpress.

Because we didn’t really want to create too much of a blog look and feel, we chose a Wordpress template that allowed for many static elements and tweaked it quite a bit. I wrote my first little Wordpress plug-in (customization of admin panel/ dashboard), we integrated PayPal payment for the sign-up fee and added some fields to the Wordpress user database which we use to manage contributers.

We hope we we’ll be able to contribute our share in addressing this huge ecological disaster which so far has not received the attention it deserves.

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UPDATE: Registration Deadline for the competition is June 19, 2009. For the project Valiant also teamed up with Per Scholas, The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis Magazine, Soho Reprographics, and Core 77, the New York City Department of Design and Construction, Studio Scott Henderson + MINT, and Ishida Crandall.

This is what I love: simple and descriptive.

I started teaching the spring semester of my course at Parsons yesterday. The title is Design 4: Information Design. ID is a favorite subject of mine so I am excited about having a place to finaly use my collection of good design. The class is in the Design Management Department and I’m still trying to figure out what that exactly means. Everybody I talk to has a different opinion. This semester looks like it will be fun to teach. I know a few of the other professors better than I did last year and I can collaborate with Philipp von Dalwig over at Manifold. He is running the same class a few hours earlier each Monday. I’m planning to invite a few guest speakers this term so let me know if you are interested in coming along.