Student surveys are always tricky. Ultimately, everyone wants to help a student project along, but very often they’re longer or more cumbersome than most market research surveys and rarely offer an incentive for participation. Just as often, they come and go, with little evidence or news of their effectiveness or the application of the survey results. Thankfully, that’s not always the case.

A couple of months ago I was asked to respond to a survey about social responsibility in design and design education. Today, I saw the results of that survey.

Creative For A Cause is the thesis project of Syracuse University senior Heidi Cies. “A Resource for Visual Communication Educators” she calls it. Having identified a lack of standards or common ground on which design educators are incorporating social responsibility into curricula, Heidi set out to build a collection of online and offline resources, case studies, role models (thanks for including Citizen Scholar!) and more, targeted and promoted directly to educators.

Beyond creating a well-edited, nicely-structured site that tactfully asks for additional resources in the clever add-it-like-a-comment arrangement of submission forms, Heidi’s site has the potential to act as a common cross-discipline and cross-institution source of information for educators.

With enough traffic or interest, perhaps Heidi will pursue growing of her site into a network that will allow educators to exchange and update this information more freely. Maybe other existing networks will look to embrace and integrate her research. I look forward to seeing how it progresses.

Core77, the wildly popular design site (much more than just industrial design these days) launched a series of podcasts in December 2006. Since February, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Steve Heller, editing and co-producing his contributions to the site—interviews with some of the most fascinating contributors to the contemporary sphere of design.

• Frank Luca of The Wolfsonian


• Maira Kalman


• Mitch Nash of Blue Q


• and most recently, Edwin Schlossberg

Of course, there are other contributors in addition to Steve, including our dear friend and client, Alissa Walker. Check out interviews by Alissa, Steve, and others (and some conference presentations, including Natalie Jeremijenko) at Core77.com/broadcasts.

For the last two years I’ve been working away on my MFA from the School of Visual arts. This coming week, we graduate at Radio City Music Hall. Perhaps more exciting, our thesis exhibition opens on May 8th at the Visual Arts Gallery in Chelsea, New York City (601 West 26th Street, 15th Floor). Opening reception is from 6-8pm. See below for more details or check the gallery site.

In a graduate course at the School of Visual Arts I designed a series of products based on a single form and manufactured from the same mold. The form was derived from those of the iconic Levittown houses on Long Island. The project, Welcome To Levittown, was part of the exhibition Souvenir…The Rest Is History, curated by instructor Kevin O’Callaghan. Kevin discusses the Levitt houses in a recent podcast published by the SVA MFA Designer As Author program.

A senior studying Graphic Design at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, asked that I send an image “in the place that [I] work.” She’s putting together a database of images with designers and their workspaces. I’m curious to see the final form of this collection.

Until then, sans people, here’s my desk on a Friday night.

I’ve always been a fan of quotes, any and all, and feel that they’re an imprecise yet effective tool for learning. Even if out of context, quotable phrases act as a springboard for internal and external exploration, criticism, and debate. I also find, that the people I admire most often have some of the most eloquent and surprising quotes that help them describe their perspecive on the world.

Bruce Mau is one of these people; this is one of those quotes:

The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.—Arnold Toynbee, British historian

This is quoted in a lecture by Lester B. Pearson, Nobel Peace Prize-winning former foreign minister of Canada who invented peacekeeping, whom Bruce Mau references in some of his presentations and also in the book that accompanies the Massive Change project.

There’s more to be said about Massive Change, but it’s saved for another day.

In preparation for next week’s relocation to New York, part of the periodical and annual report collection has been donated to UCF’s Graphic Design Student Association. Enjoy!