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The Core77 Conference
Brings You Inside Design
Brilliant, transformative ideas aren't created in a vacuum. They are generated when challenges are confronted by possibility and ingenuity. This intimate, one-day event offers you thought-provoking presentations that could inspire your next great idea.
Meet and listen to accomplished practitioners and problem-solvers discuss the challenges and opportunities they met head on through innovative design and forward thinking. You'll walk away understanding how to demonstrate the value of design, create future scenarios, use design to affect organizational change and unleash new visions out into the world.
Step outside of the vacuum and join us for a day full of new ideas, insights and fresh perspectives that culminates in an evening of live music, great food and drinks
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Speakers
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Jordan Brandt
Technology Futurist, Autodesk | San Francisco, CA
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Allan Chochinov
Partner, Core77 | New York, NY
Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, and Chair of the Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His work in product design focused on the medical field, consumer products and workplace systems. He writes and lectures widely on design and contemporary culture. -
Casey Neistat
Film Maker | New York, NY
Casey Neistat is an NYC based filmmaker. He is the creator of the HBO series The Neistat Brothers and he won an Independent Spirit Award for producing the film Daddy Long Legs. His online films have been viewed over 60 million times in the last 3 years. -
Heather Flemming
CEO, Catapult Design | San Francisco, CA
Heather Fleming is the CEO of Catapult Design, a product and service design firm focusing on human-centered design for impoverished communities. Heather has worked as a product design consultant in Silicon Valley, has lectured at Stanford University and California Academy of the Arts and co-founded and led the Appropriate Technology Design Team. -
Carla Diana
Designer, Writer, Educator | New York, NY
Carla Diana is a designer, writer and educator who explores design visions for near-future technologies. She oversees the Smart Interaction Lab at Smart Design, and recently completed LEO the Maker Prince, a children's book about the future of 3D printing and design. -
Michael DiTullo
Chief Design Officer, Sound United | Vista, CA
Michael DiTullo is the Chief Design Officer of Sound United. Previously Michael was Creative Director at Frog Design, and held various positions at Nike and Evo Design. He has been a Core77 contributor since 2003, you might know him on our discussion boards under the pen name of “yo”. -
Becky Stern
Director of Wearable Electronics, Adafruit
New York, NYBecky Stern is a DIY guru and director of wearable electronics at Adafruit, an educational electronics manufacturer and kit company in NYC. She has been combining textiles with electronics since 2005 and hosts “Wearable Electronics with Becky Stern”, a weekly live show on YouTube. -
Ethan Frier
Co-Founder, Project Aura | Pittsburgh, PA
Ethan is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon's School of Design where he learned how to build and question the world around him. He believes in the power of the bicycle as a tool of personal mobility, freedom and fun. His work to further promote the argument for the bicycle in the modern city is inspired by the complex implications of such a simple machine. -
Michel Dallaire
President, MichelDallaireIndustriel, Inc.
Montreal, QCMichel Dallaire's Montreal-based design firm works on a wide range of projects, including consumer and industrial products, public furniture and transportation equipment. He is the recipient of numerous international awards and honors, and has taught design courses at universities around the world. -
Jessica Charlesworth
Parsons & Charlesworth | Chicago, IL
Jessica Charlesworth's work explores ways of using design to unravel and provoke rich interactions between people, technology, products and services. Revealing insights into her working process, Jessica's projects explore new possibilities and alternative futures. Jessica has run workshops at various schools in the US and the UK, has exhibited her work at festivals and museums around the world. -
Tim Parsons
Parsons & Charlesworth | Chicago, IL
Tim Parsons is a product designer and a writer and lecturer on matters 'design'. Tim was brought up in Wiltshire, England and studied industrial design at the Royal College of Art in London. His projects examine notions of familiarity, functionality and the quality of materials and processes, producing simple, durable objects. -
Dong-Ping Wong
Founding Partner, Family and + Pool
New York, NYDong-Ping Wong is a partner at Family, a design firm based in New York City with a focus on productive civic and cultural architecture. -
Mason Currey
Editor, Core77 | Los Angeles, CA
Mason Currey is a senior editor at Core77 and the author of the book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. He has been an editor of Metropolis and Print magazines, and his freelance writing has appeared in the New York Times and Slate, among other publications. He lives in Los Angeles. -
Edward Albert
Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Hofstra University
New York, NYEdward Albert is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Hofstra University. Prof. Albert has an avid personal and professional interest in cycling, and has been studying and writing about the sport since the early 1980s. He specialized in bikes built in the early and mid-20th century in New York City. -
Ricardo Prada
UX Manager, Google | San Francisco, CA
Ricardo Prada leads Google[x]'s central User Experience research and design team, which helps breakthrough technologies become user-centered products through a unique mix of moonshot thinking, market research, user research, interaction and industrial design. Dr. Prada's own work emphasizes cognition, emotion, and behavior as primary components of product design. -
Ray Hu
Managing Editor, Core77 | New York, NY
Ray is the Managing Editor of Core77. Aside from design, his interests include art, music, cycling, urbanism, food, patterns, maps, coffee and em-dashes—seriously, he includes at least one in every post he writes. -
Marta Salas-Porras
Creative Director, Obscura Digital | San Francisco, CA
Marta Salas-Porras is Creative Director at Obscura Digital. She has previously worked for 25+ years in entrepreneurial start-ups, product development, branding, and design innovations as founder of MartaDesign. -
Colin McSwiggen
Technologist & Writer | Boston, MA
Colin's interests are splattered everywhere. He contributes to a number of magazines, collaborates internationally with a handful of artists and designers, and works on math research. In interstitial moments, he writes and produces music. He lives in Boston.
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Schedule
Thursday June 19-
TimeEvent Description
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8:30am – 9:30am
Check-in
Coffee & breakfast snacks will be served.
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9:30am – 9:40am
Opening Remarks
Stu Constantine
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9:40am – 10:05am
Everybody + POOL: Dropping the world's first water-filtering floating pool into the river OR Doing rad shit where nobody's asked you to do rad shit.
Dong-Ping Wong
A slideshow about initiating, designing, developing and implementing an Olympic sized floating pool that filters river water for the public to swim in and that's shaped like a giant plus. + POOL is one of the world's largest crowd-funded civic projects, and for us not only a new type of public infrastructure that we're very excited about, but a new model for how design-driven public space can be conceived and grown. It's as much about doing the kind of work that's important for cities like New York as it is for New Yorker's to be able to take a dip in the waters that surround their city.
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10:05am – 10:35am
How do we teach our machines to design?
Jordan Brandt
Cloud applications are beginning to provide data that hints at how human designers collaborate and converge on solutions, providing a seed for machine learning. Several research projects at Autodesk are developing the foundations from which this technology can emerge in products and buildings alike. New object and solution space search methods leverage cloud computing to evaluate billions of evolutionary permutations guided by the designer. Join this conversation that will explore the role of augmented humans in the algorithmic age.
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10:35am – 11:00am
Bringing Meaning to Objects Through Storytelling
Carla Diana
As designers, new technologies are always capturing our imaginations, but in order to become part of our everyday life they need be introduced through human contexts and meaningful stories. In this talk the author will discuss the power of creating playful future scenarios as a means of ushering new technologies into existence. In addition to presenting case studies from professional design work, she will share the process of developing LEO the Maker Prince, a children's story book and object series that illustrates potential futures for 3D printing. LEO's story includes a number of product designs that form the basis of the narrative as well as present the opportunity for readers to download and print the objects themselves. Carla will share the process and motivations behind the project, as well as what happens when you unleash new visions out into the world and allow people to download and remix them.
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11:00am – 11:15am
Break
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11:15am – 11:45pm
Panel: Cult of Bike
Ray Hu - Moderator | Michel Dallaire | Ethan Frier | Edward Albert
There's no denying that cycling is on the uptick these days: It's remarkable how quickly bikeshare infrastructure has become part of the texture of major cities worldwide. Meanwhile, designers have long regarded the bicycle as both a canvas for personal expression and a tool for navigating the world—a nice balance of form and function. If the bicycle itself has remained largely unchanged for over a century—a fact that underscores its enduring appeal—its place in culture has certainly changed through the years. This panel discussion will explore the past, present and future of urban cycling.
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11:45am – 12:15pm
Design in the C-Suite
Michael Ditullo
Many of us want full control over our designs, from strategy to final implementation, but what would you do if you were actually given that responsibility and accountability? Michael DiTullo walks us through his first two years as Chief Design Officer of Sound United and will talk about lessons learned and the level of commitment it takes to create and implement a design strategy in the marketplace, build an internal multi-disciplinary design team, work with multiple outside design houses while minting a singular vision, rebrand and reposition the company, and use design to affect organizational change and redefine a company's culture.
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12:15am – 12:45pm
Carving a Role for Design in Global Development
Heather Fleming
Each year the US spends on order of $20 billion in foreign assistance programs. This includes new energy initiatives, clean water access, improved education, and food security. As designers, we typically don't see our role in society as shaping and participating in these types of global development challenges, much less public sector challenges in the US. Yet these challenges are ripe for a new of thinking, and moreover, they are intensely human-centered challenges.
But what do designers have to offer the international development sector and the growing number of social entrepreneurs who tackle societal challenges through business? Let's look at the growing movement of designers and firms taking on global development and the growing number of governments and NGOs who are responding.
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12:45pm – 2:15pm
Lunch & Core77 Design Awards
Consumer Products Winner Annoucement
Jury Captain: Johan Liden
Jurors: Brett Tom, Josh Morenstein, Isabelle Olsson, Wyatt ClineInteriors & Exhibitions Category Winner Annoucement
Jury Captain: Geoff Manaugh
Jurors: Jake Barton, Hayley Eber, Yen Ha, Michi Yanagishita -
2:15pm – 2:40pm
Design and Work
Colin McSwiggen
Since the 1700s, designers have been involved in radically reshaping work. Design's biggest impact is arguably in its proven ability to reorganize the production of commodities from toasters to software. From Foxconn's labor scandals to the latest trends in office architecture, what power and what responsibilities do we have toward the livelihoods of people who make and use what we design?
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2:40pm – 3:05pm
Neomaterialism
Marta Salas-Porras
Surfing the enthnosphere, biosphere and technosphere. Rising above the corporate tides of indulgence and specialization while riding big waves with an irreverence to templatized thinking. Understanding the complexities that are present today.
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3:05pm – 3:35pm
Panel: Integrated Technology
Mason Currey - Moderator | Ricardo Prada | Becky Stern
A look into how designers are integrating technology into our daily lives, at two scales. Becky Stern will focus on the personal level, drawing on her experience as the Director of Wearable Electronics at Adafruit Industries. And Ricardo Prada, who leads the user-experience team at Google X, will focus on the community and society level, reporting on the lab's ongoing initiatives to develop self-driving cars, balloon-based Internet access, and other "moonshot" projects. Together, Stern and Prada will discuss the huge potential—and the potential pitfalls—of seamlessly melding new technologies into our everyday experience of the world.
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3:35pm – 3:50pm
Break
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3:50pm – 4:15pm
Spectacular Vernacular
Tim Parsons & Jessica Charlesworth
Many of our projects have the quality of being almost or apparently one thing, but are in fact another. What is apparently real is actually fictional. What looks familiar is also somewhat out of place. What looks mass produced is actually unique. What appears vernacular might, on closer scrutiny reveal the spectacular. This shift in perception through encountering the work is designed to prompt reevaluation. These not-quite-mass-consumed-products or 'quasi-objects' are often embedded in fictional scenarios, created by us to encourage the viewer to rethink the conventional desires of commodity culture, extending them into previously underexplored territory
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4:15pm – 4:40pm
The Order of Things
Allan Chochinov
The sequence in which we are introduced to new products and services goes a long way to determining how we evaluate their worth. This talk will navigate the blurry line between good and evil, revealing both the pitfalls and the opportunities for demonstrating the value of design.
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4:40pm – 5:15pm
Ideas are Easy - Execution is Everything
Casey Neistat
In his talk Casey will discuss the value of learning through doing; you discover what works for you through the making process, not by overthinking things. Casey will go into his personal and career background in order to highlight the importance of learning by doing.
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5:15pm – 5:30pm
Conclusion
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6:00pm – ???
Party!
Musical guests, drinks, & food
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Videos
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Everybody + POOL
Dong-Ping Wong
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How do we teach our machines to design?
Jordan Brandt
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Bringing Meaning to Objects Through Storytelling
Carla Diana
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Panel: Cult of Bike
Ray Hu, Michel Dallaire, Ethan Frier, Edward Albert
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Design in the C-Suite
Michael Ditullo
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Carving a Role for Design in Global Development
Heather Fleming
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Design and Work
Colin McSwiggen
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Panel: Integrated Technology
Mason Currey, Ricardo Prada, Becky Stern
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Spectacular Vernacular
Tim Parsons & Jessica Charlesworth
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Ideas are Easy - Execution is Everything
Casey Neistat
Videos brought to you by
Employing nine of Protomold’s most frequently used resins, Proto Labs devised a multi-colored, multi-material, mind-bending Resin Puzzle. The design aid gives a quick glance at the look and feel of different plastics when plotting out materials choices. Mastering the puzzle, however, is another challenge.
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Venue
Click for larger map.
501 Union St, Brooklyn NY
The 2014 Core77 Conference will be held at 501 Union, a renovated former industrial facility in the heart of Brooklyn's Gowanus neighborhood. The historic nature of the space provides the perfect backdrop for the day's discussions and reflections.
Acccomodations
For those coming from out of town we recommend the Nu Hotel for your overnight stay. Located just a few minutes away from the venue with a wide range of activities, eateries and shops nearby.
Getting There
The easiest way to get here is by subway. The closest subway stops are Carrol St (F train and G train) and Union St (R train). There is also street parking and parking lots close by.
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Presenting Partner
Conference Partners
