Landscape architecture professor Kristine Miller will discuss her book, Designs on the Public: The Private Lives of New York's Public Spaces, at the Walker Art Center on Friday, April 13. Her presentation is part of an event featuring rapid-fire project talks by other artists and academics, including photographer Wing Young Huie and Aaron Westre (M Arch '09) [read about Westre's current AOV3 exhibition here].

The free event will be webcast live from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Miller will also speak at the Midwest Great Lakes Regional Conference for the Council of Educational on Thursday, April 26 about her contributions to the positive transformations of education.

For more information about the landscape architecture program, please visit their website.

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Eight College of Design apparel students will participate in the second annual fashion runway competition Scrubbed into Fashion to benefit Smile Network International on Saturday, April 14th in the TCF Stadium DQ room.

Ellie Hottinger, Issa Mello, Kayla Styczinski, Kayna Hobbs, Lauren Kacher, Maisee Her, Mai Yang, and Reagan Rockers will participate in the Project Runway-style competition showcasing their best looks fashioned from medical scrubs. All proceeds will go to Smile Network International.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Runway competition starts at 8:30 p.m. Tickets ($10 general admission, $20 general seating, $50 VIP seating) can be purchased online.

For more information about the apparel design program, please visit their website.

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Thursday, March 29: Leaders in business, government, education, healthcare and the nonprofit sector met to discuss design thinking and what it demands during Design Intersections, a symposium, hosted by the College of Design and sponsored by the design firm Larsen

Presenters for the day included Simon Kavanagh, head of International Development and Education Design for KaosPilots; Pieter Spinder, Tribe Leader and Initiator for Knowmads; John Foley, Executive Director of 4Front, Franziska C.E. Krüger, a business designer and Knowmads graduate, and Dean Thomas Fisher.

You can see more photos from the event here. If you didn't attend Design Intersections, you can download a PDF of Simon Kavanagh's presentation here and Pieter Spinder's presentation here. Videos of the presentations will be available soon on our YouTube channel.

Friday, March 30: KaosPilots and Knowmads hosted a free workshop discussing the future of education and what it means for the University.  Participants were asked to consider:

•    How can we rethink how we learn, share, and apply what we know in this time of accelerating technological and social change?

•    How we can apply design thinking principles to transform how we teach, learn, live and work in Minnesota?

•    How can students and faculty at the University of Minnesota be engaged in democratic, participatory ways in co-creating new approaches to teaching and learning?

•    We welcome the University community and others interested in education for building a creative and innovative Minnesota.

The event was sponsored by the Jandris Center (College of Education and Human Development); Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development (College of Education and Human Development); Center for Science, Technology and Public Policy (Humphrey School of Public Affairs); Weisman Art Museum; University of Minnesota Libraries; Gary S. Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship (Carlson School of Management); and College of Design.

Interested in attending next year? Sign up for our mailing list.

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Ricardo Rebolledo (Housing Studies) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship to study Portuguese. He'll use the award to prepare for his eventual study abroad researching favelas (poor shanty towns) in Brazil.

Rebolledo, who also has minors in Latin American Studies and Spanish, will pursue the fellowship during the 2012-2013 school year.

"I want to learn Portuguese so that I can eventually learn more about [Brazil's] ongoing destruction of the favelas (or poor shanty towns) in preparation for the Olympic Games to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2016," says Rebolledo. "This is an immediately pressing human rights issue about housing policy: the poor are being evicted from their homes so that the growing economy of Brazil can accommodate the international spotlight of the Olympic Games. It raises many interesting issues, both legal and moral."

Fluency in Portuguese, he explains, will help him understand what people say, in their own words.

A recent article in the New York Times: 'Slum Dwellers Are Defying Brazil's Grand Design for Olympics,' explore the issue in depth.

For more information about the Housing Studies major, please visit their website.

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Brett Hussong (BED '04, MLA '08) announced that he has joined Alta Planning + Design, a company based in Portland, OR that uses principles of transportation and recreation planning, landscape architecture and environmental awareness to design better places to bike, walk, play and live.

You can read his bio on the Alta Planning + Design website here.

Hussong works out of Boulder, CO, and will also be working on the proposed Southwest Light Rail Transit project for the Cedar Lake Park Association, a high-frequency train that would serve the southwest Twin Cities metro area.

For more information about the Landscape Architecture program, please visit landarch.design.umn.edu/.

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Jill Fuerstenberg (BS '97 Costume Design) announced that she will join the product development team at Taymark, Inc. The letterpress and imprinting company provides youth-oriented promotional and recognition products. Fuerstenberg previously worked in product and apparel design for Wilsons Leather and Northern Cap and Glove.

For more information about our product design, retail merchandising, or apparel design programs, visit the College of Design academic programs page.

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Congrats to Ben Lindau (M.Arch '06) and Mike Oertel (BED '05), members of the team behind "Twin Cities Trails," a music video inspired by the band Queen. Their video earned the Viewer's Choice Award at Videotect 2.

The second annual video competition challenged entrants to think about urban design issues related to transportation. The Viewer's Choice Award was determined by an audience vote at the Walker Art Center screening on March 1.

Photos from the event are available here.

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Four students from the College of Design are traveling to Ogden, Utah for the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) this week: Misty Karges, apparel design; Amanda Marcott, BDA in Architecture; Brenna Hoisington, B.S. in Architecture; and Sebastian Marques, B.S. in Architecture. The annual conference gives undergraduate scholars in all fields and from all types of institutions of higher learning a forum to share the results of their work through posters, presentations, performances, and works of art. The students will be accompanied by Kate Maple, Assistant Dean for Student Services.

Amanda Marcott will present research on gothic cathedral vaults and is looking forward to visiting another state and seeing other projects. "I feel very lucky to be in a program that has faculty who are willing to give up their time and coach students without any research experience," says Marcott, who's attending graduate school in the fall for her M.Arch degree. "I am attending NCUR for the experience in presenting my work, analyzing the role of the vaulting systems in design, and seeing what other undergraduate students are doing."

Her advisor, Assistant Professor of Architecture Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla, also encouraged Sebastian Marques to submit an abstract to NCUR. "I am attending NCUR because I believe it will be a great experience and opportunity to further develop my professional career," says Marques, who will present on the impact of digital technology on the design of vault systems.

Brenna Hoisington is looking forward to seeing projects related to her field of study and talking with students from various undergraduate programs. "This will be my first conference and I am excited to share my research about a historically significant structure," she explains, referring to her research on the seventh street arches in St. Paul.

Misty Karges worked with Assistant Professor and Director of the Apparel Design Program, Lucy Dunne, to see if the wardrobe habits of participants using a Smart Wardrobe system--a program designed by Dunne to track garment usage--were impacted. Karges is also a member of the Studio IV class designing space suit and space flight garment components for NASA. She'll travel with her classmates to Johnson Space Center at the end of April to present their design.

Students interested in attending NCUR in 2013 or participating in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) should visit the Office of Undergraduate Research or speak with an advisor.

Posted by Jolene Brink at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dear Colleagues,

With spring break behind us, and as we dash toward May, I wanted to take a moment today to just remind everyone of the programs and offerings we have on the agenda in the coming weeks.

From our annual Design Intersections event - this years title: Tweak or Leap? - coming up on Thursday, to our award winning Design in 7 program coming the first week of April, to two separate symposiums, Digital Provocations and Fashion & Health - details of those and other offerings, like product design's PLAYsentations, are available on the events section of our website.

Another item added just recently is a lecture and reception the College is sponsoring with the Institute on the Environment (IonE) featuring our alum, and the founder of ESRI, Jack Dangermond, coming up on Tuesday, April 10. We've been working with IonE and the University to host Jack's visit, and I know he is as excited to come back to campus as we are to hear from him. More information can be found here. And please be sure to pass along to anyone who might be interested in attending.

Have a good week.

Tom

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Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute), will give a public lecture titled: "Mapping and Geographic Analysis Supports Collaboration and Decision Making" on Tuesday, April 10, 2012, beginning at 4:30 p.m., at Cowles Auditorium, in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 301 19th Ave. S, on the Minneapolis campus.

Dangermond earned a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Minnesota in 1968, with a focus on landscape architecture and urban planning. In 2008, he was presented an Honorary Doctor of Science degree for his pioneering geographic information system (GIS) research and work.

Esri was founded in 1969 by Dangermond, and his wife Laura, as a small research group in Redlands, CA, focused on land use planning and decision-making. Today, Esri is a software giant, providing research and tools that are instrumental in the diverse work of their over 350,000 client's world-wide. From distribution routes and surveying, to hurricane response management and cancer risk analysis, Esri technology is a staple for public entities and private companies around the globe. This spring Fast Company magazine named it one of the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies in healthcare for jump-starting "geo-medicine" with maps revealing health risks by location and redefining the notion of a medical history.

Dangermond is invited to campus as the first Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Institute on the Environment (IonE). Sponsored jointly by IonE and the College of Design, the lecture is free and open to the public, however, pre-registration is required.

To register, or for more information on the event, visit z.umn.edu/dangermond.

More on Jack Dangermond, including a recent New York Times feature, can be found at z.umn.edu/esri.

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Product Design Assistant Professor Barry Kudrowitz developed his Toy Product Design to teach graduate and undergraduate students how to take their product ideas from concept to functional prototype. Last semester, Jesse Purvey, Annice Larkin, Colin Nelson, and James Cosper developed a toy that will be part of a permanent exhibit at the Works Museum in Bloomington, MN. The musical toy (pictured below) was featured on the Canadian Discovery Channel's show Daily Planet this spring.

You can watch the Daily Planet clip here.

Throughout the hands-on course, offered in the Spring semester, students in PDES 3711 bring their projects to Play Testing events at the Minnesota Children's Museum and involve kids in the design process. At the end of the course, students present their toy product prototypes at PLAYsentations to toy designers, engineers, children and the University of Minnesota community.

"Drawings are essential," says James Cosper, who currently works in the lab as a workshop instructor, "but when people can see and feel the prototypes I think we get a better sense of what is working and if they are really excited about the concept."

Jesse Purvey, a Mechanical Engineering student with minors in Design and Leadership, registered for Toy Product Design because it fulfilled some of his required credits. He's pursuing the design minor because it offers opportunities "outside of the box" from his regular Engineering classes. "I'm really impressed by the space the space and resources [in Rapson]," says Purvey, "I really feel like I've gotten a lot of hands on experience. It's cool to see these kinds of interdisciplinary projects happening." After graduation he plans to pursue a career involved with global systemic design and involving intentional design on a large scale.

The musical toy Purvey and Cosper helped develop for the Works Museum exhibit is scheduled to be fully operational and on display later this spring.

Student currently in the Toy Product Design course will showcase their new toys at the PLAYsentations on May 2nd at 7:30pm in the Bell Museum Auditorium.

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A new article by Dean Tom Fisher in the Public Sector Digest makes a case for adapting public policies to the changing needs of the workforce.

"The Contingent Workforce and Public Decision Making" addresses rethinking zoning laws, K-12 education, and the role played by retail. With a growing number of contingent workers in mind (self-employed, freelancers, or accidental entrepreneurs laid off from full-time positions) who are predicted to become a majority of the workforce by 2030, Fisher suggests visiting a Starbucks and looking at the number of working, because, he points out, "The next economy, of course, is not next: it's already here...So how do we embed that fact into day-to-day public decision-making?"

You can download a complete PDF of the article here.

Dean Fisher also writes a column for the Huffingtonpost.

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Nostalgic for winter already?

Emily Stover, a Master of Landscape Architecture student and public artist, shared these photos of the TönöSauna, a wood-burning sauna built from a salvaged 1966 Avion travel trailer. Originally commissioned for the 2012 Art Shanty Projects, a four-week art event on frozen Medicine Lake, Minnesota, this nifty shanty might roll through a community near you sometime soon.

"By making the sauna mobile," explains Stover, "we can bring it to Twin Cities neighborhoods unfamiliar or underserved by such a needed social space. We encourage people to come out of their homes and join others at the public talks, sound installations, and classes that we have held in the TönöSauna."

The trailer has a space designed so people can, warm themselves, and relax. It's meant to be used as an art and conversation space, a platform for new media art, music installations, and talks led by historians, artists, architects, and others.

Molly Reichert, an adjunct professor at the School of Architecture, was also a member of the team behind the design, along with Emily Stover, Daniel Dean, John Kim, and John Moore.

Interested in renting the TönöSauna? Contact artshanty2012@gmail.com.

Posted by Jolene Brink at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dear Colleagues,

While I realize many of you have already heard the news, I wanted to take a moment to publically congratulate Lance on his new position, beginning this fall, as the founding Director of the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability at Pitzer College.

Lance has provided over 25 years of leading landscape architecture and design research, teaching and thought to his students and colleagues at the University of Minnesota. From his time as associate dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and director of the Metropolitan Design Center, to his current leadership position as head of the Department of Landscape Architecture, he has been a tireless advocate for his discipline, and the University, and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him over the years.

Using this past week's weather as a guide, he and Carol will have to adjust to a cooler climate, but I have no doubt that they'll be able to figure it out in time. Please join me in wishing them both continued success on this next chapter in their lives.

Tom

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Amber Sausen (MArch '10, MS Sustainable Design) participated in the 2011 Urban Sketchers Symposium in Lisbon, Portugal. The three-day symposium brought together sketchers from six continents to draw in the city. Sketches and lectures from the symposium were documented in the recently released book Urban Sketchers em Lisboa desenhando a cidade.

Sausen works for Architectural Alliance where she is a designer and manages sustainability documentation (i.e. LEED, B3) for several projects. Architectural Alliance is a Minneapolis-based architectural design firm with architects, interior designers, planners and support staff. It provides planning, architectural, and interior design services and has received international recognition and design awards.

For more information about the School of Architecture, please visit their website.

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