It was probably a bad idea, in retrospect, to start by telling everyone I would become a vegetarian. I was half-way through an environmental science class my last year at Brown University and I had just discovered how environmentally unsound meat-consumption could really be. Recently, Michael Pollan asserted, “A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a meat eater in a Prius.” While this might not have been factually sound, it’s hard to deny that with the astronomical amounts of food that the human population consumes, what we choose to eat can have a large impact on the environment. I have always strived to be a pretty environmentally conscious human being (coming from Berkeley, its hard not to) so I decided that I needed to think more about my eating habits.
A Step into Sustainable Eating
Friday, November 6th, 2009Project: Ivy Film Festival 2009
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
The Ivy Film Festival is the largest student-run film festival in the world. Every year, they receive hundreds of film and screenplay submissions from undergraduate and graduate students from around the world. The Festival has also featured prominent and acclaimed speakers such as Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Adrian Brody, and Oliver Stone.
In 2009 and my senior year of college, I was contacted by the festival and asked if I would do them the honor of imagining a visual theme that year’s festival. Given the popularity of festival as well as my own interest in cinema, I graciously accepted.
Project: Enigma Twist
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Back in the days when I was a student at Brown, I always used to look forward to reading the Brown Daily Herald. One reason was because my friend, Dustin Foley, had his own daily column called “Enigma Twist.” Enigma Twist was ambitious project to come up with a new type of puzzle every day but somehow he pulled it off for my entire senior year.
Recently, Dustin has decided to make Enigma Twist into its own website. He asked me to help him to make a logo and I was eager to help. When sketching out ideas, I wanted to make something that would embody the attitude of his puzzles. The puzzles were really more about being fun and clever than looking fancy or professional. His puzzles and his website seemed to fit right in with the comic culture that seems to be evolving with today’s youth. Think dinosaur comics or xkcd. I decided, instead of trying “professionalize” enigma twist, I should embrace this new interesting style.
A Better World by Design
Sunday, October 4th, 2009
I spent my entire weekend this week volunteering and sitting in at events for the Brown/RISD joint conference, A Better World by Design and, I have to say, I enjoyed every moment of it. Not often enough have I felt this sense of community where everybody was on the exact same page and here to discuss the same issues.
I love design but I often think about to utility of its service. It is so easy to get lost in the mess of commercial product design and feel that design only perpetuates this colossal consumer culture. Perhaps because I have drowned in this sentiment so often, it was invigorating to hear what inspired people and organizations had to say about what they were doing to help the world – from Project H’s redesign of the Hippo Roller to Ken Banks’ open-source FrontlineSMS project. In addition to specific projects, it was also simple refreshing to see and meet so many professionals and students that felt the same way I did about design and were compelled to change the status quo. It gave me hope for the future of design in our world.
Considering this was only the second year for the conference and many of my classmates were involved in putting it together, I feel very proud of how well it turned out. Congratulations!
Aristotelian Aesthetics
Sunday, September 13th, 2009When I took a course on information design last year at RISD, my professor, Krzysztof Lenk, introduced in the first class the idea of Aristotelian aesthetics. He described this notion as the ability of good design to evoke intense emotion in its audience. He said this reaction should not be caused by the design of embellishments but by good design of the information itself. Good information design both structures the information itself in a way that is easily comprehended and, perhaps more crucially, has a singular thesis. When these two principles are achieved, we can achieve a beauty in the Aristotelian sense.
I have often recalled this one moment in class and I think I have finally distilled how intricate this one bit of advice is. Intrigued by this discussion, I went to try and fully understand what Aristotle’s philosophy of design was. Unfortunately, a initial google search brought nothing up on the matter – Aristotle never did have a stance on visual design. After a little bit of research, the closest literature I could find on the matter was an essay that Aristotle wrote on literary aesthetics.