AIGA Austin

Join us for a panel on ReDesigning Earth Day and greening your practice (both at work and at home). This is an interactive discussion with Austin and Boston via live video conferencing.

Kelly Granola Blanscet, Christie Zangrilli, and Liam Kernell will speak from Austin while David Small, head of the MIT Media Lab’s Design Ecology research group and two of his thesis students present their studies regarding information in space from Boston.

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AUSTIN

Tribe is a democratically run, worker-owned marketing, communications and design agency devoted to the Common Good. We define Common Good as any initiative that sincerely promotes positive benefits for our planet, its people and its communities.

Kelly Blanscet, Creative Director
Kelly, the founding member of Tribe, is an award-winning graphic designer and art director with over 20 years of creative experience. Expanding the concept of sustainability to the workplace structure itself, she initiated Tribe Creative Agency as a cooperative enterprise, empowering workers with equal co-ownership and democratic rule—and by appealing to their passions by servicing clients invested in the Common Good. Her small creative boutique, Graphic Granola, has taken on numerous environmentally-friendly projects over the years, from green building to Green Party campaigns, as well as servicing many Austin area non-profits. She has led creative teams at several agencies in Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas/Fort Worth—including Senior Art Director at Parker & Wood (San Antonio) and NourzAds (Austin), Senior Designer at Williamson-Dickie (Fort Worth), and Designer at direct marketing giants Harte-Hanks and Advo (Dallas). She has a BFA in Advertising Art from the University of North Texas.

Liam Kernell, Chief Strategist
Liam brings over 20 years of marketing and strategic expertise to Tribe, with many of those years spent focused on furthering Common Good causes. He was formerly Director of Creative Services for EnviroMedia Social Marketing, where he directed and managed award-winning campaigns for Don’t Mess with Texas (the state's official anti-litter campaign), Texas Department of State Health Services and Lower Colorado River Authority. He also has marketing and advertising experience in the technology sector, managing print, online and content teams at companies such as Dell, 3M and Freescale. Prior to joining Tribe, he gained social media experience as senior project manager and executive producer for Powered, Inc. He served two terms as president of the Austin Advertising Federation, and was a recipient of the organization’s Silver Service Award in 2004, awarded to advertising professionals who "have made outstanding contributions to advertising and who have been active in furthering the industry's standards, creative excellence and responsibility in areas of social concern." Liam has a BA in Social Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Christie Zangrilli, Art Director
Prior to joining Tribe, Christie ran her own graphic and web design studio in both New York and Austin, working for clients ranging from small businesses to large corporations. In addition to traditional 2D design, Christie is well versed in 3D arts of environmental design, creating everything from interior graphics to innovative wallcovering products and installations. She also works with non-profit organizations that are focused on sustainability, such as Austin Green Art, Project H and Sol Design Lab. Other recent ventures include creating an outdoor signage piece for a new Green Tech High School, designing therapeutic-room wall applications for a foster-child community and leading communications for an innovative Solar Charging Station project. Christie has a BFA in Graphic Communications from New York University, and an MFA in Design from the University of Texas.

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BOSTON



David Small heads the MIT Media Lab’s Design Ecology research group. He and two of his thesis students will present their studies regarding information in space.



David Small is interested in the intersection of design and technology, and his work creates visual communication that incorporates new display and computational technologies, novel software techniques, and perceptual and cognitive issues. Small received his PhD and MS in media arts and sciences, and his BS in cognitive science, all from MIT. He began his studies of dynamic typography in three-dimensional landscapes as a student of the late Muriel Cooper, founder of MIT’s Visible Language Workshop. He was also a member of John Maeda’s Aesthetics and Computation Group. Small’s thesis, Rethinking the Book, examined how digital media, in particular the use of three-dimensional and dynamic typography, will change the way designers approach large bodies of information. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta11, the Centre Pompidou, and the Copper-Hewitt National Design Museum. He is the principal and founder of Small Design Firm, Inc.



Embodied Data Visualization – Richard The

This project proposes a novel, experimental way to experience statistical data. By virtually putting abstract information in context with people in our immediate environment, a new set of relationships between the data, our personal life and the society we live in is established.



In a proposed installation, the viewer sees the world around him overlaid with a virtual layer of information. In his view each person is virtually annotated with one data point of a statistical data set from another world: A distant place, another time or even a fictional reality. While still situated in the viewer’s surrounding, the people become embodied representations of this possible reality and the viewer can literally walk through the data set. This thesis will investigate if through the juxtaposition of abstract data and real people the relationship between the information and our individual lives becomes more tangible and direct; if it entices us to reflect on our own and other people’s situation and if it makes us consider the implications a possible other reality could have on our lives.



Grassroots Mapping – Jeffery Warren

Grassroots Mapping (grassrootsmapping.org) is a series of participatory mapping projects involving communities in cartographic dispute. Participants worked with a series of organizations and communities to produce maps with children and adults from several communities in Lima, including the Cantagallos settlement of Shipibo on the bank of the Rimac and the Juan Pablo II community in Villa El Salvador.



Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers used helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras. The resulting images, which are owned by the residents, are georeferenced and stitched into maps which are 100x higher resolution that those offered by Google, at extremely low cost. In some cases these maps may
be used to support residents’ claims to land title. By creating open-source tools to include everyday people in exploring and defining their own geography, Warren hopes to enable a diverse set of alternative agendas and practices, and to emphasize the fundamentally narrative and subjective aspects of mapping over its use as a medium
of control.



In this talk, we will review the January projects in Lima, Peru and discuss the ongoing work of activist and community-based grassroots mappers around the world.