If you purchased tickets for this event, please note that due to inclement weather it has been postponed.  We will try to reschedule the event in January. Please visit the ICA website for program updates.

This event is sold out.

AIGA Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston invite you to an event inspired by Design Life Now, the inaugural touring exhibition of the Smithsonian Institution/Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Triennial.

Discover the new and unexpected voices in design as these four give picks from their respective fields. Lupton, a writer, curator, and graphic designer, co-founded the trailblazing studio Design Writing Research. Kidd, a graphic designer, best-selling author, and editor, is well known for his book and cover designs. Mori is the principal of Toshiko Mori Architect and a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Fry is known for his work in combining computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization.

Admission
$12 general admission
$8 AIGA Members   

Sign up now. Limited availability.

Register at www.icaboston.org or call 617-478-3103
(call for AIGA member discount)


Ben Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as Computer Science, Statistics, Graphic Design, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for the visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edyth Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He currently works as a designer in Cambridge, MA.
 
With Casey Reas of UCLA, he currently develops Processing, an open source programming environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive media software that won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. In 2006, Fry received a New Media Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the project.

His personal work has shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003. Other pieces have appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and in the films “Minority Report” and “The Hulk.” His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the journal Nature, New York Magazine, and Seed.

www.processing.org


Chip Kidd is a writer and graphic designer in New York City. His book jacket designs for Alfred A. Knopf (where he has worked since 1986) have helped spawn a revolution in the art of American book packaging.

As an editor of books of comics for Pantheon (a subsidiary of Knopf) Kidd has worked extensively with some of the most brilliant talents practicing today, including: Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes, Kim Deitch, Charles Burns, Mark Beyer, Ben Katchor and Alex Ross.

A comprehensive monograph of Kidd’s work, CHIP KIDD: BOOK ONE was published in October of 2005. The introduction is by John Updike and the 400 page book features over 800 works, spanning two decades, from 1986 through 2006. It’s first edition sold out a week before publication and it has since gone into three consecutive re-printings.

Kidd was awarded the 2007 National Design Award for Communications, and In the fall of 2006 his work was included in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s third National Design Triennial.

The Cheese Monkeys, Kidd’s first novel, was published by Scribner in Fall of 2001 and was a national bestseller, as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His second novel, The Learners, will be published in February of 2008.

www.goodisdead.com


Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is one of the co-curators of Design Life Now: National Design Triennial, organized by Cooper-Hewitt Museum. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. She has produced numerous exhibitions and books at Cooper-Hewitt, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002). She recently has focused on bringing design awareness to broader audiences. Her book Thinking with Type (2004) is a basic guide to typography directed at everyone who works with words. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design processes to a general audience. Her newest project, D.I.Y. Kids (October 2007), co-authored with Julia Lupton, is a design book for children illustrated with kids’ art. “It’s never too early,” they explain, “to talk to your child about design.” Books in the works include Design Your Life (with Julia Lupton) and Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips). She is the co-author with Abbott Miller of several books, including The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992), Design Writing Research (1996), and Swarm (2006). Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the U.S.

www.designwritingresearch.org


Toshiko Mori, FAIA is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture and the chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 2002. She is also principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, which she established in 1981 in New York City. Mori taught at the Cooper Union School of Architecture from 1983, until joining the Harvard GSD faculty with tenure in 1995. She has been a visiting faculty member at Columbia University and Yale University, where she was the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 1992.

Mori's strong research-based approach to design has been commended in awards and invitations to lectures and exhibitions around the world. In the fall of 2005, her work was exhibited in "Renewing Wright" at the Heinz Architectural Center of the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh. Her profile, "Postscripts: Building on Sacred Ground", appeared in The New York Times in May 2005. She has edited a volume on material and fabrication research, Immaterial/Ultramaterial, and is currently preparing her next publication: Textile Tectonic in Architecture.

In 2003 Mori was awarded the Cooper Union Inaugural John Hejduk Award. In 2005, she received the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Medal of Honor from the New York City chapter of the AIA. She has served on the board of trustees of the Van Alen Institute and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and has been an advisor to the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is currently an advisor to A+U Magazine and serves on the President's Council for the Cooper Union. Mori earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Cooper Union and an Honorary Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University.

www.tmarch.com