December 2009

Grazie Amici

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After six years of publication, SocialDesignZine is shutting down. The blog on social design was set up inspire and provoke a discussion among Italian designer and beyond.

The founders maintained an aggressive publication schedule (nearly daily!), hosted offline typographic tours, published two beautiful books of selected posts and comments, an exhibition, and a publication on civic branding and design culminating in the Più Design Può conference in May 2009. Unfortunately, though the SDZ site receives a good amount of traffic, an active community of commenters never really materialized and the daily maintenance had become increasingly difficult to sustain. Still, it’s a high note to end on.

I had the great pleasure of meeting the site’s publishers Gianni Sinni and Andrea Rauch at the conference in Florence and was impressed with the depth of their politics and the ease at which they integrated their civic commitment with their studio practice. Now that they are free of the daily publication schedule, I look forward to seeing what new endeavors they develop. Grazie a Andrea e Gianni.

>  28 December 2009 | LINK | Filed in ,
Ten Things I Have Learned. Milton Glaser: “It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behaviour towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public.”
>  27 December 2009 | LINK | Filed in ,
desigNYC. “We created desigNYC with the mission of improving life in NYC by connecting nonprofits and community groups in need of design services with professional, pro bono design resources.” More on the backstory here. The deadline for designers to apply is January 1!
>  24 December 2009 | LINK | Filed in
Design the Next New York City Condom Package. Free NYC CondomsIf you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere. Last year the New York City Health Department gave away 41 million condoms. Now they are inviting you to design next year’s wrapper. The deadline for entries is January 22, 2010. Read more at the NY Times or the official nyc.gov condom site.
>  15 December 2009 | LINK | Filed in ,
Command-C. Did you hear the one about the city as software platform? A group of NYU students has taken a more oppositional approach, posting a series of simple computer commands to address gentrification, development and neighborhood preservation.
Urban Computing
>  1 December 2009 | LINK | Filed in ,


On to January.
Back to November.