dreamlands

i made sure to make a pit stop at pompidou before i headed home for dreamlands, a new exhibition about the relationship between real cities and their fabricated counterparts. the show connects so many different ideas and work in a really fresh way. some martin parr photos, la tour eiffel and paris partout, the craziness that was walt disney's initial vision of epcot, delirious new york, and learning from las vegas, to name a few. feeling inspired, i just started reading the 1972 investigation of vegas architecture. i can already tell it's going to be a treat...

"learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. not the obvious way, which is to tear down paris and begin again, as le corbusier suggested in the 1920's, but another, more tolerant way; that is to question how we look at things... we look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can look downward to go upward. and withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive. this is a way of learning from everything."

it's about time i posted these...

paris playlists. part un et deux. sort of a random selection, but il y a une histoire derrière chacune chanson... plus ou moins.

oops

so maybe booking a trip to london my last weekend here was a bad idea. at least after the volcanic ash cloud decided to wreak a little havoc once again and keep us grounded an extra night. which wouldn't have been a big deal if it didn't keep me from my last crit/sort of pretty important final presentation for a project i've been working on all semester with alcatel lucent/bell labs. our job has been to research and develop from start to finish a communication tool (think skype, facebook, gmail) for a specific user. (i ended up designing something called "mailbox" for elementary school aged kids.) i'll admit that i was skeptical about the class at first, but i really have learned a lot of valuable things along the way. everything from product analysis and positioning, user research and ethnography, wireframing and mapping, how to use the student's t-test, and really getting to the nitty gritty of interactivity. it would have been nice to wrap the project all up with a bow today, but i guess i'll write this post about it instead. thank you mother nature. we are officially fighting.

a dash of paprika et un peu de seripop

gallerie anatome does it again. (since i've been here they've had the thonik exhibition & a show featuring "les plus beaux livres français.") except this time they're paying homage to some fellow french speaking designers in canada: paprika & seripop. i only took pictures of seripop (sorry paprika. your stuff was too tame.) so definitely check out their websites.

voila...

the fruits of my motion graphic labor.

more french finds

jean julien


supercinq


le club des chevreuils

apparently you have to leave the country to hit the jackpot on cool design stuff. j'ai trouvé quand j'étais à copenhague a few weeks ago.

work in progress

data visualization of every time i took the metro this semester. a good "closure" project if i do say so myself...

keep moving

"a man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not - but a man of superior talent (which i cannot deny myself to be without being impious) will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place." - mozart

found on a bench at the train station in amsterdam. words of wisdom for a weary soul at the end of a weeks worth of traveling. more pictures (hopefully) soon...