alex bitterman design.intelligence
this is alex's online home for design-oriented stuff.Archive for Design
Holy Cow
My Design Applications II graduate students made their presentation to the Hertel Avenue community in Buffalo today. Their work was exceptionally well received, so much so, the presentation was featured as the afternoon headline buffalonews.com, and was also featured on NPR-affiliate WBFO, NBC-affiliate WGRZ, and even the afternoon Shred and Regan show on WEDG. What a day!
You can read the whole article from the Buffalo News at http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/569302.html
Joe Bruno is a crook.
This made my day. For too many years, Joe Bruno and Sheldon Silver have hamstrung New York State, playing dirty politics, and using the government for their own petty gains. We’re all paying the price for this now, and finally, after too many years, Mr. Bruno (at least) is getting his due.
From:
Friday, January 23, 2009, 1:50pm EST | Modified: Friday, January 23, 2009, 2:49pm
Ex-NY Senate leader Bruno indicted
Business First of Buffalo – The Albany Business Review
Former Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno was charged with defrauding “the state of New York and its citizens,” in an eight-count indictment released today.
The indictment charges Bruno with mail and wire fraud.
Bruno, in a news conference, called the investigation into his dealings a “fishing expedition.”
“For over three years, I’ve been the target of a ‘get Joe Bruno campaign,’” Bruno said in a news conference today.
Bruno, who retired from the Senate last year after 32 years, was accused in the 35-page indictment of entering relationships with people or companies that had business before the state Legislature and then “concealing, disguising,and failing to disclose the existence and nature of such compensated contacts,” the indictment said.
The indictment alleges Bruno, a Republican, engaged in a “scheme to defraud” by getting paid $3.19 million for work he did on behalf of labor unions and private companies that did business with the state without disclosing that relationship to the Legislative Ethics Committee.
“The state of New York and its citizens paid defendant Joseph L. Bruno a salary for his honest services, but, as a result of the scheme and artifice to defraud, to their detriment, were deprived of such honest services and instead received dishonest services,” the indictment reads.
Federal prosecutors allege the scheme took place from 1993 to December 2006, a period that included Bruno’s tenure as the Senate Majority Leader, one of the three most powerful positions in state government.
According to the indictment, during that time, Bruno was paid for services he provided to two companies and three individuals:
• Wright Investors’ Service, an investment adviser in Milford, Conn.;
• McGinn, Smith & Co., an investment banking firm in Albany;
• Leonard J. Fassler, who was associated with Sage Alerting Systems, Inc. , Microknowledge Inc. , and other firms
• Russel C. Ball, who was assoicated with Roadway Contracting, Inc. , and BB Gardner Management Corp.
• Jared E. Abbruzzese, who was associated with Communication Technology Advisors LLC, and other firms.
Regading Wright Investors’, the indictment alleges Bruno signed a written agreement with the firm on March 1, 1994, that paid him a fee for each client that opened an account at the firm as a result of a referral from Bruno. Wright paid Bruno a total of $1.3 million from 1994 to 2006.
Bruno allegedly contacted 16 labor unions on behalf of Wright suggesting the unions hire Wright. Bruno did this, the indictment alleges, while he “wielded power and influence” over the unions as the Senate Majority Leader.
In August 1998, Bruno became a part-time employee of Wright, but “routinely failed to disclose his status as an employee to union officials he contacted,” as required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
A total of 11 unions that Bruno contacted during the time he worked on behalf of Wright became clients of the firm, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors allege Bruno tried to conceal the private work he did on behalf of Wright by falsely claiming his contacts with union officials had been disclosed to the “Senate” Ethics Committee. The indictment alleges Bruno had never asked for nor received an opinion from the Legislative Ethics Committee about the work he did for Wright.
Bruno said today that he was the target of an investigation started by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
“Gov. Spitzer spent much of his time as governor challenging me,” Bruno said. “I have had every relationship of my life probed, scrutinized …” Spitzer resigned last year as a result of a prostitution scandal.
Bruno said the U.S. Attorney’s office had to come up with some some charges to justify a three-year investigation that cost millions of taxpayer dollars.
“I broke no laws,” he said. “I’m a businessman. I have a right to make a living.”
Bruno took the position of chief executive officer at CMA Consulting Services in Latham in July, four days after retiring from the Senate. Kay Stafford, who stepped down as CMA’s top officer when she hired Bruno in July, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Stafford, a longtime friend of Bruno’s, gave him her CEO job and became CMA’s president of the computer software development and technology consulting business.
Bruno said he would fight the charges.
“Many of you know my background. I’ve been a fighter,” he said. “I do not plan on changing now.”
Design Loves a Depression
from
read the article online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/weekinreview/04cannell.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
January 4, 2009
Design Loves a Depression
By MICHAEL CANNELL
Few of the arts benefited from the late economic boom more than design. After all, when the wealth is flowing, people don’t covet the concerts you see or the books you read. They covet the couch you bought, and then they buy a cooler one.
MODERN COMFORTS The Eames chair, left, is an enduring classic; the Vermelha chair, by the Campana Brothers, right, is in MoMA.
In the recent giddy years, signature architects and designers came to be known by their first names — Rem, Philippe, Zaha — and they were photographed as prolifically as Bono in new design hotbeds like Miami and Dubai. Brooklyn designers became the apotheosis of indie cool (thin portfolios notwithstanding), and the British collective Established & Sons and other skilled maneuverers learned to breed their self-conscious furniture selectively into limited editions that sold for the kind of prices more often found in the art world. All of which was chronicled in self-celebratory books like “S, M, L, XL” by Rem Koolhaas, a 1,300-page monograph as lush as glazed fruit and weighty as firewood.
Looking back, those of us with front-row seats might have known that this design surge would not sustain itself. Two years ago, at the Milan furniture fair, Marcel Wanders, a Dutch designer known for arty provocations, held a thumping party to show off his 15-foot-high lamps and other furniture of distorted Alice-in-Wonderland scale. Never mind that his work was upstaged by his girlfriend, Nanine Linning, who hung upside down half-naked while mixing vodka drinks from bottles affixed to a chandelier. Form followed frivolity. Function was left off the guest list.
Now, given that all those slick Miami condos are sitting empty in the sky, designers like the Campana Brothers, with their $8,910 Corallo chair, and Hella Jongerius, with her $10,615 Ponder sofa, might have a harder time selling their wares. Already designers are biting their knuckles over the damage reports. The American Institute of Architects reported that last month’s billings index, a gauge of nonresidential construction, reached its lowest level since it began collecting data in 1995.
The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case during the Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.
“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,” said Kristina Wilson, author of “Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression” and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. “It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”
The most popular American designer of that era was probably Russel Wright, who acted as the Depression’s Martha Stewart, turning out a warmed-up, affordable version of European modern furniture, tableware and linens for a new kind of informal home life. A bentwood armchair cost $19.95. “They were not just cheap, they were beautiful, and that was a powerful combination,” Ms. Wilson said.
Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II.
Will today’s designers rise to the occasion? “What designers do really well is work within constraints, work with what they have,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. “This might be the time when designers can really do their job, and do it in a humanistic spirit.”
In the lean years ahead, “there will be less design, but much better design,” Ms. Antonelli predicted.
There is a reason she and others are optimistic: however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems, and if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be “standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever,” said Reed Kroloff, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art.
On the other hand, the design community talked up its role in safeguarding the world after 9/11, with little result.
Modernism’s great ambition was to democratize design. Ikea and Target have shown that the battle for cheap design can be won. The emphasis will most likely shift to greater quality at affordable prices. This time around it will be the designer’s job to discourage consumers from regarding that $30 Ikea side table as a throwaway item.
If household furnishings are to avoid landfills, says Julie Lasky, editor in chief of I.D. magazine, they must be capable of withstanding the vicissitudes of fashion — like the Aalto stool, but at a fifth of the price. “It will be about finding the sweet spot between affordability and durability,” Ms. Lasky said. This kind of innovation means rethinking the economy of production and distribution so that goods are made cheaply closer to home (or in the home, if the most radical ideas are to be taken seriously).
One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions. Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.
The old paradigm — epitomized by shelter magazines like Architectural Digest and Dwell — that found romance in single-family homes, each with its own lawn, detached garage and septic system, may crumble under the weight of its wastefulness. One challenge will be for designers to coax us to a more efficient way of living, as the architect Lorcan O’Herlihy is doing with his light and airy schemes for multifamily dwellings in Los Angeles, a city where backyards and driveways are all but a birthright. Fewer buildings will go up, and the stock of mid-century buildings nearing the end of their lifespan will be thoughtfully reworked to make them efficient and in keeping with principles of sustainability.
If Ms. Linning’s dangling from the ceiling was a cultural moment now passed, we can look forward to others for an age in which beauty and austerity go together.
Michael Cannell is a former editor of the House & Home section of The Times and founder of thedesignvote.com.
Europeanization of Major U.S. Brands
Undoubtedly, the graphic design of consumer product packaging in Europe is more sophisticated that similar products in the United States. I’m not exactly sure why, but often European brands adhere to modernist design principles, and as such, packages and labels reflect a less-is-more aesthetic. American counterparts are often festooned with wanton drop shadows and visual textures which most certainly evoke a more emotional than rational purchasing choice. The more matter-of-fact mode of visual communication favored by European brands seems to be influencing some major U.S. brands. Tropicana quietly relaunched their line of orange juice in the U.S. last week, and the redesign is significantly more Euro in terms of style than the well-established U.S. counterpart. Tropicana has even harmonized the names of its line—renaming “Grovestand” (again, a folksy, homespun, quintessential American moniker) to “High Pulp” (which is a significantly more British-style mode of description)—with international counterparts.
Perhaps this is only the tip of the iceberg, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll begin to see some truly functional and well-designed consumer product and food packaging, rather than decorative visual noise that simply panders to masses of overstimulated and bored American consumers.
The Ties That Bind
This is a great blog post that appeared on Allison Arieff’s New York Times blog. Some definite food for thought.
by: ALLISON ARIEFF
When my mother, Carol, passed in 2004, I found myself spending hours at her empty apartment, sitting amid her things, desperate to find traces of her. I pored over her hundreds of books on art and antiques, looked through the baskets of art postcards she’d collected on her travels for scribbled notes, and flipped through years’ worth of day-planners, searching for evidence of her presence: a signature, a sketch, a smear of her trademark orange lipstick. I found one manila envelope of old family photographs and another containing every postcard I’d sent her during my junior year abroad in London. I cursed my 19-year-old self for not being thoughtful enough to keep the ones she’d written back to me.
My mom used e-mail, of course. And, for a time, I’d been proactive enough to save the meaningful ones she’d sent. But having gone through various versions of Outlook, Entourage, Gmail, et al., I have no idea where they are now. For all that’s miraculous and innovative and convenient and (insert superlative here) about our digital reality, it often seems poorly designed for posterity.
My most treasured find was a falling-apart book my mom had made in a children’s book illustration class she’d taken in the ‘70s (she’d been trained as a painter). She reinterpreted the classic “Noisy Nora,” by Rosemary Wells, with my father, my younger sister and me taking the place of Wells’ family of mice.
This pre-digital era class project hearkens back to the days when graphic works were hand-drawn and assembled. My mom’s drawings were done with a fountain pen, the text typed on a typewriter, each phrase individually cut out with scissors and glued to the page. Not long after the birth of my daughter, my graphic-designer husband scanned the delicate, fading artifact and created a brand new book, one that will not fall apart at the binding as we read to our young daughter.
(Bryan Burkhart)I am grateful to have this small token. I do worry about what we’re all going to leave behind for those looking for tangible evidence of our existence.
It’s true that never in history have so many people been able to tell their stories, and I love that about digital technology. But will we be clamoring to read “The Collected Text Messages of John and Jane” or “E-mails to My Father”? (It’s no coincidence that so many bloggers are in search of book deals.) Call me old-fashioned, but I remain committed to paper, to something I can hold in my hands and, ultimately, pass on to future generations.
(Princeton Architectural Press)That’s why I’ve been so incredibly taken with two slim volumes published this year: “A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart” and “The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings” (both by the incomparable Princeton Architectural Press) These two books elegantly address various notions of impermanence, remembrance and observation.
In “The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings,” the photographer KayLynn Deveney befriends an elderly neighbor and begins to notice and eventually photograph the meticulous ways he orders and organizes his day.
Excerpt from “The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings.” (Princeton Architectural Press)Bert, 91, outlived his wife, daughter and grandson, and the absence of family is reflected in the attention he pays to the most mundane details of life: preparing a list of TV programs to watch, receiving his pension, checking his medication. Deveney observes his daily routine with sensitivity and indeed manages to elevate it to the level of art.
Excerpt from “The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings.” (Princeton Architectural Press)“A Year of Mornings,” by Maria Alexandre Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes, started out as a blog. The two women, who’d met through their work with craft, initiated a yearlong visual conversation with each other: Every day they’d take and post a photograph that in some small way documented their respective mornings.
Excerpt from “A Year of Mornings.” (Princeton Architectural Press)Akin to the images recorded in “Albert Hastings,” these are vignettes of simple everyday things: a cup of coffee, soft-boiled eggs, rain boots kicked off at the front door, the stem of a flower, many crumpled napkins, many spoons. Though the two women were 3,191 miles apart — one in Portland, Ore., the other in Portland, Maine — the images are complementary in their color and composition more often than not. Sometimes startlingly so.
The blog, and the book that followed after a year’s worth of images (and 3,000 visitors a day from Australia to Iceland), capture the rhythms of everyday life, often surprising the viewer by the sheer beauty of the most quotidian element. That each woman paused to record the curve of a daughter’s ear, a bowl of cereal or a shadow cast across the floor before sitting down in front of a computer is an act that carries with it the most clichéd, yet essential, of all messages: stop and smell the roses (and the coffee, the toast, the morning air).
We’re living in difficult times, and it seems it’s exactly these tiny details and fleeting moments that can offer us the most solace and even joy. Just as I hold “Noisy Nora” dear, so, too, I believe, will the children of Mav and Stephanie be grateful for “A Year of Mornings.” Its transformation from blog to book helps to insure its preservation through the inevitable, endless iterations of technological innovations to come.
11
A couple of my (very awesome) students from RIT have been busy working to launch a new magazine. It has a digital home and a Facebook page so check it out: [11]
