Art Center Futures

Art Center College of Design Visioneering Panel

brought to you by Livescribe

Last night Art Center College of Design's new president, Lorne Buchman, started a conversation within our community about future directions with a few guests from outside the college. This is a Livescribe recording of the panel discussion, delivered to a packed house of students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Panelists were Katherine Hayles, David Rice, Stephen Oliver, and Andrew Blauvelt.

The discussion was webcast, but I'm not sure they saved it in a form that is still accessible, so I'm posting the session here for those who are interested. For those of you unfamiliar with Livescribe recordings, the audio is linked to the written notes, and you can click anywhere on the notes to hear what was being said at that time. It's a useful way to record a session as long as this one, because you can skip around.

Today we will have a day-long brainstorm on a number of topics: students & student life (life?! what life!! you mean there's life outside of Art Center??!! ;-)), curriculum & pedagogy, outside partnerships, governance & community (promises to be a hot topic, given the excitement of the past couple of years), and future trends & global context. If I have time (we start the term next Monday) I'll report on that as well.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

I've struggled for years to accurately convey the complex picture of industrial design at Art Center—the reality behind the hype. We are sometimes viewed as shallow stylists, mostly because what people see of our work are slick photos of final models. Rarely do people get to see the process that we employ, and the thinking behind it. This isn't limited to us, by the way—if you examine what gets published about industrial design, you'll see an endless parade of glamour shots of the latest shiny thing, and the criteria used for the curation of this work seem to revolve around the hot image it will create in a magazine. This shallow picture isn't helped by the fact that we at Art Center are often running at such a pace that we—students or faculty—rarely get out to share with others what we're up to.

Industrial designers complain that people misunderstand what we do. Part of the blame lies with us. We struggle to appear in publications that limit the view of our work to the single glam shot. If we're not careful, we might wind up like those architects who seem to design a building to create a photo op for the cover of Architectural Record—not to provide an optimal experience for the people who will inhabit the space.

For years I've admired the way that IDEO crafts their own story. Through artful self-publication as well as controlled use of traditional publishing outlets, they have created the image that we have of them. They are not known for any particular design; they are known for their innovation process, as they should be.

What's a designer to do who doesn't have the firepower of a major office as backup? Check out the blog of industrial design student Stéphane Angoulvant. In January 09, at the beginning of his second term (or the second half of his freshman year), he decided to start a record of his work at Art Center, project by project, course by course. 

We get to look over his shoulder as he tackles each assignment, understanding not only the process he uses to solve the problem but also the rationale for the assignment in the first place, how it fits into the stream of coursework that makes up the curriculum. He does this without undue self-aggrandizement but with quiet confidence and clear-eyed excitement. As he says in his kickoff post, "Just want to keep it simple here and post what I can from my ongoing design projects." Following his posts I see the world that we have created for our students from the student's-eye view, and at the same time get to revisit the fun of my own experience learning the design process so long ago.

Following a notice on Coroflot earlier this year, the blog has acquired an enthusiastic following of fellow students and admirers. By the time Stéphane reaches his 8th term, he will have already created that new requirement for career success—a solid web presence.

I find this profound in so many ways—seeing the world of the Other from their point of view (which is what my research methodology is all about), seeing the organic start of a designer building what will eventually become his career and his reputation, and perhaps most interesting, seeing how young designers gather together in communities of shared interest. IDSA, and all who purport to be gathering places for designers, take special note of this last one.

What I'm Up To

Research wall from Camp Boomer, a three-term research project on Baby Boomers entering retirement, by Laura Dye and Heather Emerson, back when they were my students.

I'm two-thirds through with my MSID in design research at Art Center, and I feel the need to take stock of where I am. I've been teaching design research to product design students at Art Center since 1991, but since my journey down the path of getting this additional degree I have been traveling over some interesting ground. Here's an update.

My goal is to be able to teach product design students how to do credible and effective qualitative design research. Most product designers are at first focused on the methods, like we would be on any set of tools. Give me the tools, and I'll use 'em. I think this comes from how we learn the design process. It is a standard sequence—investigation, problem definition, ideation, concept generation, concept refinement, final design specification. We learn it by doing it, over and over. We expect that any problem can be solved by the application of this process, and for the most part this is true.

The investigation stage, however, has its own set of tools (methods), borrowed from science, psychology, anthropology, etc., and there is no standard set that applies to all situations. It is important to know not only the methods that are out there, but also the rationale behind their application. And nobody has a complete list. For example, Brenda Laurel’s Design Research cites 36; the Design and Emotion Society’s Methods and Tools web site describes 57 (not all research—some of those are analysis); and IDEO outlines 36 research and 15 analysis tools in their Method Cards. After reviewing these and other sources and allowing for duplication, I have found 52 distinct techniques for research and 18 for analysis (and I've only begun to compile a list of those).

Many design firms' initial experience with research is via the hiring of a specialist. They observe the process that that person uses for a particular investigation and assume that that is "the process," (it's as if they think that, like design itself, design research has a universal process applicable to all situations). Some offices then polish up that process, giving it a catchy name and graphic veneer, and add it to the list of their firm's capabilities as a branded form of research, much like they began to offer engineering capability in the 80s. It's a way of making their firms more marketable. In the competitive environment of today's consulting offices, this is understandable and necessary.

The problem is that the research approach should differ depending on the issues under investigation. Good research takes into consideration the entire palette of methods available and chooses the right set to uncover the necessary knowledge in each situation. It's vitally important, then, to understand the rationale behind each choice.

And above all it is important that designers understand that qualitative research is not merely a kit of tools, it is an approach. At its heart is an immutable demand: to understand and have empathy with the point of view of all customers and stakeholders in a situation. In order to gain this understanding one must make smart decisions about which methodologies to employ. [I use the term methodology to mean the tool, or method, plus the rationale behind using it.]

So my goal is twofold: first, to acquaint my students with at least a basic set of methods, and second, to enable them to understand why, and in which situations, a particular one would be effective.

I continue to teach my course the way I've done it since 1991: using the time-honored project-based learning we're accustomed to—learning by doing. The students engage in fourteen weeks of field research and analysis (in some cases, more than one term's worth, as in Laura Dye and Heather Emerson's Camp Boomer project, above), culminating in a research presentation. They choose the topic and I advise them on approaches that would be effective. The problem with this is that the students, like the consulting firms I describe earlier, often come away from the experience thinking that there is one way to do research.

To remedy this I have added a theoretical component that teaches the wider range of methods and their accompanying rationales. A survey of the methods is followed by learning the principles behind their application via the case study method. The cases are written specifically to teach design research, and each case centers on important axioms. Much like the case study method pioneered by the Harvard Business School, the cases provide opportunities for students to engage in discussions centered on the decision process involved. Instead of discussions about management theory, the cases I am writing focus on the decisions necessary for planning research activities. A range of cases allow students to act out the planning process—and choose approaches—for research that would apply to a variety of design problems.

So far, I've got that long list of methods and am working on descriptions of each of them (broken down into: a brief description, an example, the objective, the procedure, the rationale, advantages and limitations, and citations of references where one could go for more examples, papers by those who have used the approach, etc).

I've got a few simple cases that I have used to teach basic axioms, and am working on some larger ones with research specialists from a couple of well-known firms. Both are excited about my doing this work, and although it's a tall order to flesh these out, it will be worth it.

While I started out like many product designers, focusing on finding "the right kit of tools," I have come to realize that the so-called tools are only a means to an end. What really matters is how smart you are at analyzing what you get from using them, and figuring out what it means.

Mobility Vision Integration Process Workshop

Today at Polar Opposites Geoff Wardle presented the Mobility Vision Integration Process, a method developed by Lloyd Walker, Geoff, Andy Ogden, Heidrun Mumper-Drum and David Muyers at Art Center. It's a way to run futures scenarios brainstorming workshops using a set of cards that they have developed. This video was shot at Art Center's Sustainability Summit this past Spring, where the mVIP cards were rolled out for the first time. In it, Lloyd Walker describes the mVIP process and you can see how we used the cards.

In today's workshop, a team looks over the "hand" of cards they've been dealt that describes the future world. The team gets an understanding of this world for a few minutes and considers the implications of the scenario. 

Left to right: Ron Pierce in the black shirt, Peter Treadway, standing, and Mark Dziersk, at far right. My apologies to the other two designers! I've forgotten who you are!

Next, four cards are dealt that describe the enterprise the team works for, the enterprise's axiom, the customer, and a constraint. The team considers all cards and brainstorms design solutions that address the circumstances set out in the cards.

Finally, one member of the team (in this case, Los Angeles designer Max Beach) presents the design solution to the rest of the teams.

We always have a good time running this workshop. It's a break from the tedium of PowerPoint, and provides a great networking opportunity. When we ran it this Spring, we broke the entire conference out into groups. It was great.

I talked to a number of educators who wanted to check out the cards as a brainstorming and team-building tool for their students.

Be sure to check out the Flash demo we have on line. You can deal yourself (or your students) a "hand," print it out on a letter-sized sheet (using the button at the top right), and have a hard-copy for reference during the exercise. You can deal yourself a random hand or you can select the cards.

Check it out—try it with your team, your firm, or your students, and let us know what you think!

Top o the Morning

Toasting the morning sun with the only liquid that makes sense in the desert—water—in my new Kor hydration vessel, courtesy of the folks at Eastman. They had presented the Kor story at Art Center a few months ago and told an abridged version here at Polar Opposites Thursday morning. We run materials-based explorations in our Color, Materials, and Trends Exploration Lab (CMTEL), and are scheming up a plan to do one with Eastman soon. More later... I've got to meet Geoff Wardle (whom you saw flying a screaming monkey in the previous post) to help him run a workshop later today with a tool we've developed in Grad ID that enables anyone to run a futures scenario workshop, the deck of mVIP cards. More about that later, too.

Screaming Flying Monkeys at Polar Opposites

You had to be there. I'll get serious later, but for now, enjoy the screaming flying monkeys, brought to you by the folks at P&G Design.

Have Laser Cutter, Will Build House, Part 2

At Art Center, we've been discussing building student housing for years now. Here's an interesting proposition. It's a wild thought, and one which goes against my (and Art Center's) view that the acres of wild hills that we own around our Ellwood Building should remain untouched, but imagine these little houses perched on that landscape! 

That last link, by the way, is to a photograph on you-are-here.com, a site by German petrochemical engineer Martin Schall, who, to date, has shot 2,360 photographs of Los Angeles over who knows how many vacation visits over the years. An amazing body of work showing a somewhat scary level of devotion to our fair city. There's a story there, I'm sure. Maybe one day I'll find it out.

Objects of Affection, Part 1

The past few days I've been emailing back and forth with my new colleague, Julka Almquist, who will be teaching a new course in design ethnography at Art Center. I find we are both Eva Zeisel fans. I was reminded of a piece I wrote back in 1996 for presentation at the IDSA National Education Conference. It describes, in a very personal way, my first meeting with Eva and the impact this meeting had on me. I met her in the early 90s, at the start of a renaissance of interest in her work. Today, of course, she's the talk of every design magazine and newspaper. It was a night to remember, as I was not alone—with me came Sara Little Turnbull, another giant figure in design. I will post the piece that I wrote about our meeting—Objects of Affection—in several episodes over the next few days. I hope you enjoy it.

Once upon a time in a library, I found a book which changed my life. It is called Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry. I like the sound of that. Inside, there’s a photo of Eva, suitcase in hand, just arrived at a small midwestern train stop, setting off across a field towards a factory in the distance. The Designer for Industry, come to do her job. 

The front cover shows a nested group of serving dishes, the shapes splashing outward in a corona of liquid white. The curving edges of the platters unfold upward, tapering and thinning as they stretch toward the gripping-places, inviting the touch of a hand. 

I paged through the book to find shapes I had known all my life: the salt and pepper shakers nestling together like mother and child; glassware remembered from a thousand neighborhood dinner tables. Table furnishings from my childhood, looked at with my designer’s eyes. I had no idea shapes could be like this.

Eva Zeisel worked and lived through the flash points of the modern movement. A journeyman-potter with a studio in her parent’s garden in 1925 Vienna, when young women from well-to-do families didn’t do such things. A studio in Berlin in the 30s, when the design world was being set afire, and Berlin was the place to be. Art Director of the china and glass industry for the Russian Republic in 1935, when Russia was an exciting but dangerous place to be. Falsely accused of plotting to kill Stalin, imprisoned and interrogated for months and then miraculously released. She escaped from Austria the day Hitler invaded. She eventually settled in New York, set up a studio and taught at Pratt for many years.

Throughout this explosion of living, Eva created many, many designs of tableware for manufacturers here, in Europe and Japan. At the height of her popularity from the 40s to the 60s, thousands of her designs were selling successfully all over the world. I studied the photographs in the catalogue. The shapes full of life, expressive. Astonishing. The curves seemed to extend beyond expectation in a multi-lingual vocabulary of expression from one pattern to the next – here friendly and informal, there sophisticated and crisp, elegant and fluid. I was looking at the work of a master.

To be continued...

Art That Makes You Think

I ran across this quote on John Massengale's blog (New Urbanist architect). He's commenting on the waterfall art installation in NYC.

Eliasson Waterfall at Brooklyn Bridge from rsguskind on Vimeo.

He says, "Art like this is supposed to make you 'think.' I don't think it makes you think anything worth thinking. I wish art schools would go back to teaching the transcendent power of beauty."

Heads up: teaching the transcendent power of beauty, in fact, has migrated to industrial design. It did this midway through the twentieth century. Case in point: Eva Zeisel.

Eva was the first to teach an industrial design approach (design for mass production) for tableware at Pratt in the late 30s. Here she is, above left, with some of her students' work. She arranged for them to design products for the Bay Ridge pottery in New Jersey. The dish on the right is from her "Classic Century" pattern—a combination of two of her most popular designs, "Tomorrow's Classic" and "Century"—now sold by Crate and Barrel.

When she visited Art Center in the 90s, Eva took a tour of our gallery. On the wall in the fine art side was, if I remember, a large crucifix made of what looked like scrap wood. There was also a structure the size of a small hut, built of the same sort of wood. Zeisel is an opinionated woman. She stopped dead in her tracks and demanded an explanation. I told her that I didn't think I had one. I could only observe that it seemed to me that creating something that was accessible, something that an average viewer would find beautiful, was now forbidden in fine art.

Zeisel stood near a display of orange juice squeezers. They were designed by early-term industrial design students in beautiful, curvilinear shapes and vibrant colors. She wondered why it was that here [with a wave of her hand taking in the ID side of the gallery] where there are so many limitations—constraints of technology, function, user need and business realities—was where the beauty lay, and not there [in the fine art gallery] where there were no constraints.

As she has said to me more than once, "That's a very good question!"

David Macaulay

David Macaulay has been working on a new book. He gave us a guided tour at Art Center's Serious Play conference a couple of weeks ago. It's another book about how things are built / how things work, but this time it's about the human body. I loved the gentle Prismacolor shading in some of the drawings. From top to bottom, conquering the ascent of the nose, of course, the stomach and intestinal system (complete with trucks hauling away the waste), and finally, the bottom end of the spinal cord being lowered into place in the pelvis. This one promises to be another delight.

Re-Authorship of the Body: Amiee Mullins at Serious Play

Aimee Mullins knew at a young age that she was going to be the person who would choose her identity. In John Hockenberry's terms, he and she both have "re-authored" their bodies, taking over their bodies for a second time after, in her case, double amputation and his, an auto accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. For those of you who have not read Hockenberry's book, Moving Violations, I'd consider it required reading for any designer. This is the second time I've heard Mullins, and though the second time around I found her talk less focused, less inspiring, the conversation at the end with Hockenberry was a treat.

Second Life at the Art Center Design Conference

Philip Rosedale was a kid who read a lot, got into electronics, then computers, and was obsessed with making things. Wood, electronic—it didn't matter. He thought it would be good to have his bedroom door go up, instead of swing inward. So he cut through the ceiling joists, installed a garage door hoist.... He sees Second Life as a way for people to do things they want to do but may not have the opportunity to. Why do we dream of going into space? It's the illusion that you can begin again. Leave life as you know it behind; transform yourself (ah... but will you be able to do that? or will you find your old self wherever you go?).

Rosedale questions: Why is the impulse to create in Second Life not utopian? Is a virtual world likely to be a utopia? The web is profoundly bottom up. There is a fundamental freedom at the level of the individual. Utopia is top down.

Rosedale comments that there is a lack of cultural fine tuning in Second Life. I notice that, as his slides cycle through, there is a profound ugliness about many of them (not the image at the top, but for example this one, immediately above. I'm just sayin'...). In a future post I will talk about what this reminds me of—the uneasiness that designers have with the awkward creations of non-designers. Shiver. (Or... the sheer exuberance of unbridled enthusiasm exhibited at events like the Maker Faire. I want my Muffin car!) 

The internet is disturbing like electricity was, but it's impossible to ignore. A huge disruptive change that we can't get away from.

The Origins of Serious Play, Revisited

Coming June 17th: in celebration of Charles Eames Centennial Year, the Eames Office will host a celebration of the first day of issue for the Eames postage stamps. The event will be between 11 am and 1 pm at the Eames Office at 850 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica.

Ruminations: in the next few posts, I'll be talking about some of the topics covered in Art Center's Serious Play conference this past week. Eames Demetrios had a scant ten minutes to talk about the work of the Eames Office, yet touched on some important themes. First, his bemusement that the world focuses almost solely on the furniture designs of Charles and Ray Eames: as beautiful as the objects are, the ideas behind them are as important. In the lunchtime roundtable after the talk, some seemingly pulled up a chair only because they wanted to know where to get their vintage chairs restored. Demetrios is always gracious in fielding these sorts of inquiry, but steers the conversation to the heart of the matter: the Eames Office ethic, the process, the ideas. A few choice selections: 

The Eameses never delegated understanding.

The design process never ended; the play process never ended.

Eero Saarinen couldn't wait to be an adult, because then he would really be able to play.

Eames' experience bumming around Mexico during the Great Depression: he saw there people who were living a rich life despite having nothing. He learned that he could live on next to nothing and stopped using "making a living" as an excuse for taking a job he didn't believe in.

Here's something that will blow your mind. Most people think there are two versions of Powers of Ten: Rough Cut, created in 1968 for the Association of College Physics, and the later, final version. There are three versions, not two. In 1963 they created a rough sketch of the concept in a simple line-drawing animation without sound, just because they had the idea and wanted to test it to see what sort of camera movement would create the illusion. When the physicists requested the film a few years later, the Eameses had the proven idea ready to execute.  This was typical. They explored ideas they were interested in, and eventually the clients caught up with them.

Note to young designers: were the ideas that captivated the Eameses forms of self expression, or did they spring from other motives? Contrast this with German designer Boris Hoppek, who says, "Everything I do is for myself, I try to do what I like. I am an egoist and get paid for it." Witness his design for Copenhagen's Hotel Fox, which purports to be the "soft-sewn world of a baby's cradle:"

Is good design fashion? Is it timeless? 

Early on, the Eameses realized that the age of information was coming and that designers could have something to contribute. IBM bought a thousand copies of the film that resulted. Though the Eameses were consultents to IBM for the rest of their lives and created out of that collaboration such jewels as the exhibition Mathematica, it came about from a pure motive to explore a noble (and way ahead of its time, I might add) idea.

Lunch

A few shots of people I ran into over lunch.  Two of my former students who have become regulars at this conference, Alan Mudd and Kenneth Jewell from Continuum, and found them horsing around with Steve Montgomery, who I worked with at Hauser (we go back to the time of the green shag carpet, and later, the office overlooking the pet cemetery, and alas, Hauser itself has gone on to the place where design offices go to die), and who I have been teaching with at Art Center for quite a number of years now.

Gaylon White from Eastman Chemical, always a generous sponsor for conferences and especially design education. Check out their innovation web site. It's got a wealth of information for designers, about designers that they've worked with and interesting applications of their materials. Not your dull engineering site. 

This July, Eastman is bringing together materials guru Chris Lefteri and Art Center students in a designstorm with our Color, Materials, Trends Exploration Lab  (CMTEL) in a special exploration surrounding materials use. 

Gaylon has a talent for finding designers with vision. Case in point, on display at the conference is the eyewear designed by IDEO for the "Collective Vision" project. A couple of my favorites from that project, below:

This one is an elegant play on the veils we used to see on ladies' hats (when we used to see ladies wearing hats).

... and Gaylon wouldn't be able to operate without Anna Laws, his right hand. Here she is in the "room of swag," with a towering pile of Eastman tote bags behind her.

One of the goodies in the tote bags is a bottle of "Y Water," a flavored water designed for kids, package designed by Yves Behar's Fuseproject, using a material developed by Eastman, designed to have a second life as a building toy after they're used.

I think you can tell I've been lagging behind in my posts today, as compared to yesterday. I promise you I'll catch up when I look over my notes later.

Day 3

Hello and welcome to day 3 of the conference. We're watching PechaKucha presentations by eight Art Center department chairs right now. We have altered the format slightly, though (being Art Center), from 20 slides in 20 seconds to a super-charged 15 slides in 10 seconds. A challenge, but worth it.  Above, Environmental Design chair David Mocarski holds forth.

I ran into Eames Demetrios again, and he showed me his new book, hot off the press, of quotes from Eames in several languages. I am thrilled. It contains two of my favorites, "The best you can do by Tuesday is a sort of best you can do," bringing to mind the short stop-action film the Eames Office whipped together over a weekend because Charles never liked to show up empty handed (he was scheduled to appear on a TV show early the following week), and my other all-time favorite, "Innovate as a last resort," which always can be counted on to shock my students. What? Eames? The innovator, saying that? Yes indeed, grasshopper. Innovate as a last resort. Why use a wild new process / technology / idea when there is an existing one that will do the job as well? To do so would be doing something new for "newness'" sake. And to paraphrase another of my all-time heroes, Eva Zeisel...

... many times when a designer creates something different solely for the sake of doing something different, the result can be actually quite hideous. Eva is a strong advocate of the playful search for beauty, and maintains that in instead of continually searching for novelty, designers should value the search for simple variety. Her life's work is testament to the fact that creating variety is a noble occupation.

Writing what you don't [already] know

After the last session, the conference broke up into hands-on studios (Art Center's Heidrun Mumper-Drum leads "Nuts to Butter: a Sustainable Design Exercise," above). There were places to create, learn, build, and play. I joined the writing workshop led by author Irene Borger. Here's what I learned: The creative process is a fertile and dangerous place. A liminal state. It has the attributes that anthropologists would characterize as ritual. In traditional rituals, elders protect the neophytes as they pass through the experience. For this reason, creativity requires a protective "container" in which to take place.

It also requires the right attitude, one of openness and non-judgement, as you would want to find in brainstorming. We talked about Flow, about Csikszentmihalyi (see the book list at right).

After spending some time discussing the nature of the protective environment and attitude required, Borger led us through a very simple exercise that had amazing results. She asked us to name three things we had created, and taking one of those, to create a "clustering" exercise around it. This was very much like a mind map, but without the link lines.

Then she read us "One of the Lives," a poem by W. S. Merwin, which begins with the line, "If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father had broken a leg parachuting into Provence to join the resistance..." and continues in a long winding thread to tell a story. Borger asked us to take that starting phrase, "If I had not..." and write about the topic we had chosen in one, unbroken session of about 10 minutes.

The clustering exercise set the stage in the mind and when we turned to the actual writing, we all scribbled non stop. When it came time to read, we were astonished. I came away thinking that it was nearly impossible to not write a compelling story using this exercise, and when we heard one story after the other read, it was fascinating to see how, though each of us started with the same original phrase, our stories were different.

So here are the tools:

Attitude (tolerate delay of closure on a problem)

Protective Container for the process (time, space)

Lists

Clusters (both of which are divergent tools)

Breaking the task into smaller units

Focusing devices (both of which are convergent tools)

Fun (this was the Serious Play conference, after all)

Two bonus tools for expanding a part of the writing:

Deepening: take any word and dig into it. In the phrase "the name was already taken," for example, "What I mean by taken is..."

What I don't remember: ask yourself what you don't remember. This might take you somewhere.

And there you have it.

Aerogel

You've heard of Aerogel, or frozen smoke, as it's sometimes called. In addition to other magical properties, it makes a wonderful substance to project images on. There was a small display showing this at the conference.

Jump!

How to describe the jump rope (yes, jump rope) team? I can't. I notice that none of the other blog sites had video of them, so I whipped out my camera and caught the tail end of their performance. It's a lousy video, and they were slowing down, but I think you get the idea. To see the trailer for Helen Hood Sheer's documentary of this phenomenon, click here.

Here is my lousy video. Keep in mind that at this point in the performance, they were moving at about half-speed:

The Origins of Serious Play

I ran into documentary filmmaker Eames Demetrios in the hallway and we talked about how difficult it's going to be for him to decide what to show in his upcoming presentation. Eames is the grandson of Charles Eames, and has a lifetime of knowledge about the work of Charles and Ray Eames. We both were saying that at every design conference we attend, during half the presentations we're reminded of something the Eames Office did back in the day. And when it comes to Serious Play, the Eameses invented it. Well, it will be interesting to see what he decides to show. Will it be his film, A Gathering of Elephants? Part of the Eameses' Powers of Ten? We talked about a clip of Demetrios' own documentary, 901: After 45 Years of Working, that shows the dismantling of the Eames Office after Ray's passing. There were towers made with xylophone keys that play tunes as a ball falls downward through them. We talked about what Stuart Brown said about the connection between play and the ability to problem solve. The essential aspect of play is a lack of an ulterior motive—if you've got a purpose in sight, you don't have play. One of the first tasks a new hire at the Eames Office might be given was to rearrange the keys in the xylophone towers to create a new tune. They took their play seriously. 

A Lot of Paperwork

Dr. Robert Lang has discovered a way to create patterns for origami from simple stick-figure drawings. His application, Treemaker, is free and runs on all platforms and enables not only the figures you see here (all made of a single piece of paper), but also has enables him to design folding telescopes and mirrors for space exploration, as in this prototype of the Eyeglass, below,  developed for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.