PROJECT MENTOR

Project Mentor is a joint venture initiated by AIGA and produced by Project M and The Bielenberg Institute at the Edge of the Earth as part of a national initiative to promote mentoring. The goal of this project is to stimulate dialog about mentoring between design studios and young designers which ultimately will result in useful information to guide the mentoring process. The “Mbulance,” piloted by Project M designer Kodiak Starr, will travel around the country gathering mentoring stories, advice and questions from designers. A website and blog will document the expedition as Project Mentor visits AIGA chapters, design schools, and design firms. Please contact John Bielenberg if you would like to get involved.

SILICONE STRIPS

Husband-and-wife innovators Kraigh and Anna Stewart of Atlanta have devoted the past three years of their lives to designing and delivering a new, practical product to the food retail market. Thefoodloop, the first heat-resistant silicone food-trussing tool that eliminates the frustration of using string and toothpicks to keep the turkey together or stuffed fish from floundering, is finally hitting the shelves of national chains like Bed Bath & Beyond this fall. A key ingredient to the product design is its unique color, fuchsia, making the serpentine apparatus easy to find in cluttered kitchen drawers. Not to mention on the store shelves. The Stewarts, under the corporate name fusionbrands, hired Hungry Man commercial director Dave Gray in New York to handle the forthcoming viral marketing campaign. (Ironically, he’ll try to make it hot.) And they’ve found themselves in the capable hands of Lamson & Goodnow, a trustworthy manufacturer of cutlery since the Civil War.

DIAGNOSING DESIGNERS

Among other distinctions, Liza Lou of Los Angeles holds the Guinness World Record for Largest Bead Art: She used 40 million glass beads to create a spectacular 168- sq.-ft. kitchen exhibit in 1998. (If strung, the beads would stretch from L.A. to San Francisco.) Now, Lou’s installation, “Kitchen,” along with the work of 12 equally fastidious artists, will undergo pseudo psychoanalysis at the Katonah Museum of Art in upstate New York (Oct. 2– Jan. 1, 2006). Over + Over: Passion for Process is a provocative exhibit that pushes psychiatric theory to explain the extreme nature of “Process Art.” As more new media artists incorporate traditional arts and crafts techniques into their fine art, it begs some questions, says co-curator Ginger Gregg Duggan. “Stitches have superceded pixels as the new brushstroke,” she says. To give her theories heft, she’s asked Dr. Judith Rapoport, chief of the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., to write an interesting essay regarding artistic “Magnificent Obsessions.” An art therapist rather than a child psychiatrist would have made more sense, but perhaps Duggan suspects something about the role of the artist’s inner child. To create a buzz around the show, she’s also coined a term to stigmatize artists who embrace technological and handmade processes simultaneously: HyperProcessed.

THE LOGIC AND UNPREDICTABILITY OF DESIGN

It began as an outreach program where designers taught inner-city Philadelphia kids the craft of printmaking on fabric; 28 years later, The Fabric Workshop has expanded from a 5,000-sq.-ft. studio to a 35,000-sq.-ft. museum. In December, designers Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton will raid FWM as guest curators of Swarm: an exhibition exploring the “uncanny intelligence conveyed by masses of simple objects and organisms.” Artists and designers like John Maeda and the Bouroullec and Campana brothers will reveal their fascination with “swarm logic”—using small parts to create systems whose final effect cannot be wholly predicted. Yukinori Yanagia will install an ant farm, encouraging patrons to pay closer attention to complex, ordinary patterns of life. But however unpredictable the subject may appear, Mother Nature will dictate. The ants will inevitably die before the show closes in March.