Designism 2.0 Part 1 - See
Posted on
2007-Dec-13
at
05:42
After introductions from ADC President and Taxi head honcho Paul Lavoie, the night has begun.
If you listened to our brief interview with Brian Collins in the last blog spot, you'll know that the purpose of Designism is to show how designers can use their talents to bring about social change. The first act of the evening showcases young creative people who are doing just that, not for a paycheck but out of passion. Introduced by Kay Sloan, President of Massachusetts College of Art and Design and moderated by Alissa Walker, writer and editor for the popular design website UnBeige, we got to hear from three very talented, socially conscious creatives.
The first panelist was Ellen Sitkin, a designer at IDEO. Inspired by a project involving architects moving into very low income communities, Ellen was part of a similar undertaking, replacing architects with a team of eight idealistic designers. Using their own money, Ellen and her partners spent a month living in a bunk house in a impoverished rural Alabama community. They spent that month getting to know the people of the area, talking with them and learning firsthand about the hardships they endure. This experience was then used to brainstorm for ways to use their design talents to improve the lives of the people they befriended. This lead to Ellen and her partners to put into action a way to raise awareness about the community's drinking water. You can see the efforts of Ellen's project right here.
The second speaker was Andrew Sloat, a designer and film director who started his own project called Drainage Ditch. Andrew's work is quite political, but not in that Che Guevara T-shirt wearing sorta way. Instead, Andrew has used the very words of the US Constitution, from its preambles to its amendments, in a most intriguing way. The words that are meant to hold the United States together are kind of dull, but Andrew has made a number of short films based only on these words, arranging letters in a way that encourages deeper thought this iconic document. To see how Andrew handles the 22 Amendment, take a look here.
Our third speaker certainly drew a lot of attention, due to his disguise of a huge Afro wig and aviator glasses. His name is Ji Lee, and he's a creative over at Droga5.
The reason for the get-up? Our friend Ji is a criminal.
You see, Ji's an ad guy, and like most advertising creatives, he hated the overwhelming majority of ads out in the real world. He was continuously frustrated by clients who were content with doing very low-key work that received little notice, work that wasn't innovative in the least. So he came up with a very subversive idea. He took a few thousand dollars of his own money and printed up a bunch of large stickers shaped like blank cartoon speech bubbles. He took these blank stickers and stuck them on ads all over New York. He left them blank because he was curious to see what others would write in them. Despite more than a handful of tickets for vandalism, Ji's idea grew and grew into what is now known as the Bubble Project. He uploaded the template for his sticker on his website, and now the project is worldwide.
Ji calls it "turning a corporate monologue into a public dialogue." We call it pretty fucking cool.
We snagged Ji before he ran off into the night and got a few words from him. Click right here.
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