My new favorite blog, from my long time favorite education collaborator. At Design Educator xtine burrough takes on design and education, with a focus on the role of art in design education, and vice versa. written by an artist teaching design. Full of great things to think about as an artist teaching design, and as a student learning design or art or art & design.

I asked xtine to write a post about bad email addresses. These are only slightly modified versions of some of my students current email addresses. I have modified them enough to preserve their anonymity, but preserve their character:

xxxrlf2k1xxx@aol.com

bellabambola967@aol.com

catseyez1984@aol.com

I gave a lecture on August 8th at Dorkbot PDX entitled FAIL, WIN!, FTW?. It is a summary of my recent work experimenting with open licensing on physical objects. I explore what has worked, and what hasn’t, and some of the lessons I have learned.

Marisa Olson also spoke; her lecture is here

Watch the whole thing. Or at least the first 12 minutes. Its worth it. Fascinating. It is so familiar that I feel like I was shown this in grade school… alongside Powers of Ten.

Some things have changed since Ulrich Franzen made it: waterfronts are now viewed as more precious potential parks than he views the street. Putting a two mile long building on any waterfront would not work these days. Also, his vision of shared cars is starting to come true, with shared rentable cars now available in most cities, and bicycle share programs across Europe and heading stateside. I wondered if today’s political and economic culture could handle he importance and respond to the difficulty of such massive change; a review of Boston’s tragically executed and financially draining Big Dig would be a good case study in what can go wrong. All that said, I felt there were two things missing: Subways and Bicycles.

In early September I will be participating in New Amsterdam Bike Slam, Transportation Alternative’s co-sponsored bike think-tank as poetry-slam. As the description says:

Over three challenging rounds, each team will defend its proposals in front of a panel of expert judges and a live audience. At the end of the evening, the judges will declare a winner, with the most innovative and practical plan for making New York, and New Yorkers, more bicycle-friendly.

I’m brainstorming already, and I welcome suggestions about how to improve biking in downtown and the NY Harbor area. This is, of course, something near and dear to my heart as I commute by bike to CSI via the SI Ferry.

Liz Danzico (of Bobulate and SVA) asked me to finish this sentence in front of a camera: “So you’re thinking about becoming a designer? If I could tell you only *one thing* about going into the field, my advice would be ___________ ”

I think the most important piece of advice is to bring your camera everywhere you go. If you think your camera is too big, get a smaller one. I have a big DSLR that almost never gets used for anything other than documentation, but I always have my little point and shoot with me.

Black Market Type and Print Shop

July 9 - August 14, 2009
Opening July 9, 6-8pm

This installation is guest curated by Joseph del Pesco. He has created font alphabets based on the handwriting of famous contemporary artists, which are available for use by visitors.

Image is from Black Market Type and Print Shop Installation

“Black Market Type and Print Shop”
06.09.09

Author: Micah Malone

05.07.09-06.27.09 Feldman Gallery at the Pacific Northwest College of Art

Creating fonts can be a touchy subject, raising issues of intellectual property—touchier still when the fonts in question sample hand-drawn lettering from well-known works of art. However, for the exhibition “Black Market Type and Print Shop,” font generation becomes a clever game of connoisseurship. Curator Joseph del Pesco appropriated mostly handwritten texts from single pieces of art (or series of works) as source material for his exhibited typefaces, without seeking permission from the sampled artists.