#2014 community

[betterworldxdesign]

'Accessible Fashion' Forward

Grace Teo, founder and co-chair of Open Style Lab, wrote us the obligatory haiku: 

People pass you by

Stop and talk! Or they'll pass by

Indefinitely.

It was pretty cool. Almost as cool as her bio.

Born and raised in Singapore, Grace landed in Boston for a Harvard-MIT PhD in Health Sciences and Technology, and later founded Open Style Lab - an educational program that teams up student engineers, designers and occupational therapists to create clothing for people with disabilities. As someone who dreamt of being a make-up artist/costume designer but forayed into medicine and research instead, Grace loves starting conversations between strangers to explore what can spark out of them. She's also passionate about mentoring younger people, and has consistently done this for the past 15 years or so in various academic and social contexts. 

She also told us a bit more about what she's been up to.

What’s your square one and how do you build from there?

My square one is the question: Who am I doing this for? If it's for myself, or even other people, I know I've lost track. I believe in God, and think that the only way to live life to the full is to live for God, because his acceptance of me is complete, unchanging, and independent of my achievements. Once I'm rooted in that place of stability, I gain the courage to do what's right and has the longest lasting impact on the people around me.

What’s the last great article you read or exhibit you went to? 

Last great article I read was actually forwarded to me by my Open Style Lab co-chair, Alice Tin. It's called 'The Creative Climate' by David Brooks for the NYTimes. i think it describes very well the beautiful tensions that must exist for creative activity to take place. There is a sense of constantly questioning purpose, systems, and mechanisms that we're entrenched in and seeking to better them. My favorite quote from it: "If they are religious, they seek to live among the secular. If they are intellectual, they go off into the hurly-burly of business and politics. Creative people often want to be strangers in a strange land."

[betterworldxdesign]

Blue Lobsters and Aristotle: Introducing Deb Mills-Scofield

Long-time friend of Better World, social media superstar, and “groundbreaking systems engineer turned consultant/venture capitalist/ teacher” Deb Mills-Scofield will be joining us once again at this year’s conference!  Her work seems to span entire disciplines and her awesomeness seems to know no bounds.  

We had the opportunity to ask Deb a few questions in the lead-up to our time together this September.

What's your square one and how do you build from there?

What's the last great article you read or exhibit you went to?

-- “Actually, I’m going to break your ‘request’ for the latest and talk about the exhibit that had the most profound impact on my life….  Growing up in New Jersey, commuting distance from NYC, my mom took me into Manhattan every Tuesday because the museums were free (I didn’t go to school on Tuesdays).  Art was a ‘routine’ part of my life. In my senior year in high school, the Guggenheim had the first large-scale exhibit of Mark Rothko’s works after his death. I was 16 going through my ‘existential’ stage.   I don’t know how many times I went to see that exhibit, but it was a lot!

The exhibit started on the top floor with Rothko’s early works, multi-colored and detailed, and ended on the ground floor with his last black/grey painting.  Sometimes, I started at the end and went up to the beginning; sometimes I started in the middle and went up or down. The dramatic change in his art combined with the spiraling down/up of the museum was very powerful, teaching me how critical perspective was to everything - life, ideology, etc.  The different emotional, sensual, intellectual experiences between going down or up made it clear to me how varying one’s perspective, how looking at things differently, impacted how we viewed the world, each other and ideas. Less than a year later, I was a freshman at Brown where learning to think differently was the norm.  Then I went to Bell Labs, where perspective made a huge difference in how one invented and innovated.  Who knew that the Rothko exhibit would stay with and guide me decades on?”

(a.k.a. the best ‘broken request’ we could have asked for)

Write us a haiku.  

Please it would be so funny.  

Seriously though.

-- “Oceans deep hide rare

    Blue Lobsters found in ‘random’  

    Serendipity”

At the conference, Deb will be leading a “workshop on applying Aristotle's classic virtues (e.g. love, courage, faith) to the design process.”  We’re pumped.  

[betterworldxdesign]

A Visual Empath of Our Own

We asked Brian Glenney, one of our presenters at this year's conference, to write us a haiku.

​I spy with my eye a fly ommatidia. Six side redesign. 

Our poetry scheme was turning out better than expected (even if we couldn't quite remember what ommatidium were).There's always more to our presenters than we are able to sum up with a simple bio/picture combination. We've asked them each a few questions to help give you a better idea of who, and what, to expect at ABWxD '14.  

What's your square one and how do you build from there? 

I am always trying to see the world from behind the eyes of others. I'm a visual empath of sorts and that kicks off all kinds of disruptive ideas and disorienting images. Then, I play with the processes that generate these very private ideas and images and find ways to make them public.

What's the last great article you read or exhibit you went to? 

I'm very much obsessed with graffiti, which is on public exhibit in an alleyway or rooftop near you. They view the urban landscape differently that the normal city-dweller. To them, the urban is a wild jungle, with all of the dangers and adventures of the tropics.

Brian plans to run a color sonification workshop twice, starting each with a short show & tell and then working with participants to consider their own applications. 

He'll begin by sharing his latest use of the color sonification device: having someone create a song by sonifying color. He'll then have a synesthete listen to the song and explain what they "saw". Next, an artist will render the synesthete's image in color, coming full circle back to color through several psychological and interpretive "filters". 

Participants will be able to use the device and consider their own applications.

  Brian Glenney is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gordon College. Aside from publishing scholarly articles on ancient and modern theories of perception, he experiments with perceptual exotica such as hearing colors with sensory substitution devices and photography through animal eyes. His diverse ventures include the Accessible Icon Project, a movement to transform the "wheelchair" symbol into an active, engaged icon, an icon that was recently inducted into the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection and presently shows in their exhibition, "A Collection of Ideas." More of Brian's varied work can be found at brianglenney.com