• HOME
• ABOUT
• PRESENTATIONS
• PHOTOS
• DISCUSSION

• ORGANIZERS
• SPONSORS
• CONTACT

Joshua Onysko

CEO and Founder of Pangea Organics

The Fringe Predicts the Future : A look at the history and the future of Pangea’s cutting edge design and the integrated DNA of the brand.

Pangea Organics is currently the largest cold-processed organic soap manufacturer in the US. In addition to bar soaps, the line also includes shower gels, liquid hand soaps, hand and body lotions, facial cleanser, facial toners, facial creams, facial mask, facial scrub and lip balms. Throughout Pangea’s growth, from its inception in 2000, Onysko, 32, has retained private ownership of his company, never straying from its vision: Ecocentric bodycare; always beneficial, never artificial. Onysko remains committed to creating products that are always organic, nurturing, handcrafted, fair-trade (whenever possible) and cruelty-free. To that end, Pangea Organics’ products are never made using petrochemicals, parabens, GMOs or other synthetic or harmful ingredients. Not only do Pangea’s ingredients begin to break down within 48 hours of use, but a generous portion of Pangea’s profits are helping to build the Pangea Institute, an emerging non-profit organization dedicated to researching and teaching all aspects of sustainable living and business practices. Pangea’s efforts have been recognized with 40 awards since 2006. Pangea’s products are crafted with deep knowledge, craftsmanship, and compassion and, as a result, are standouts in the natural products industry, providing excellence in content and quality at an affordable price point. Pangea’s number one goal is to create a new understanding of health and beauty. With this, Pangea hopes to reinvent the way we, as a society, nurture our bodies and raise the bar for other companies. What we consume today, directly impacts how we – and future generations – will live tomorrow.

Rick Poynor

British writer, editor, critic and curator, specializing in design, media, and visual culture

First things . . . when exactly?
A decade after the publication of the First Things First 2000 manifesto, graphic design is fully subordinated to marketing and is an increasingly sophisticated tool for stimulating consumer desire. Yet every rational view of the future says we should be consuming less rather than more. If graphic designers aspire to become ethically motivated agents of change, they will need to undertake a thorough and probably painful reassessment of their role. Does graphic design have any sense today of what its alternative purposes might be? What should we tell design students about to enter the profession? What do we expect them to do? Can the design business find the commitment to invest its energy and skills in non-harmful causes, and the resolve, where necessary, to say “no”? Would that mean the end of design as we know it?

Rick Poynor is a British writer, editor, critic and curator, specialising in design, media, and visual culture. He was the founding editor of Eye magazine in London, which he edited from 1990 to 1997, and he has contributed the “Critique” column to Eye since 1999. He has been a resident columnist for Print magazine in New York since 2000. His articles, essays and reviews have also appeared in I.D., Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine, Blueprint, Icon, Frieze, Creative Review, Domus, Adbusters, The Guardian, Financial Times, and many other international publications.

In 1999, he was a co-organiser and signatory of the First Things First 2000 manifesto, launched internationally as a campaign in several design publications. The text anticipated a growing awareness of the need for responsibility in design and was translated into many languages, and debated widely in education and the design industry.

In 2003, he was a co-founder of Design Observer, which rapidly became a leading international weblog for design discussion. He wrote for the site regularly for two years and remains a contributing writer.

His 14 books on design and the visual arts include Typography Now: The Next Wave (1991); Typographica (2001); No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003); and three collections of his essays: Design Without Boundaries (1998); Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001); and Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture (2006). His latest book is Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (2008), the first monograph about the radical Dutch graphic designer.

Poynor has been a Visiting Professor (1994-99) and a Research Fellow (2006-9) at the postgraduate Royal College of Art in London. He also taught at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht (1998-2000). He is a frequent lecturer and has spoken about the challenges facing design and visual culture at many public events, conferences and design schools throughout Europe, the United States, Australia and China.

Nathan Shedroff

Teaching Sustainability in the context of Business, Design, and People.

Sustainability is only the start of contemporary design education. Issues of business, leadership and strategy, necessarily, need to be integrated for effective professional practice. Nathan will share models and experience in teaching across Sustainability, Business Leadership, and Integrative Thinking in CCA's MBA in Design Strategy. In particular, he will describe a typical arc of learning students experience around Sustainability and will highlight specific tools found to be helpful. He will present CCA's Systems Strategy model, used to orient students to the common frameworks between these disciplines as well as Government and NGO domains.

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. This program melds the unique principles that design offers business strategy with a vision of the future of business as sustainable, meaningful, and truly innovative—as well as profitable. www.designmba.org

He is one of the pioneers in Experience Design, an approach to design that encompasses multiple senses and requirements and explores common characteristics in all media that make experiences successful, as well as related fields, Interaction Design and Information Design. He speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including, Experience Design 1 and maintains a website with resources on Experience Design at www.nathan.com/ed He’s a serial entrepreneur, works in several media, and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers.

His three new books in 2009 include, Design is the Problem, about sustainable design; Experience Design 1.1, an update to his 2001 book; and Experience Design 1 Cards, a design tool based on his book that helps designers create more meaningful experiences.

His 2006 book, Making Meaning, co-written with two members of Cheskin, a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultancy, explores how companies can specifically create products and services to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers. www.makingmeaning.org

In 2006, Nathan earned a Masters in Business Administration at Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, CA, the only accredited MBA program in the USA specializing in Sustainable Business.

Nathan earned a BS in Industrial Design, with an emphasis on Automobile Design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. However, fear of Detroit, coupled with a passion for information design led Nathan into this arena, where he worked with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness. Later, he co-founded vivid studios, a decade-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. vivid’s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture, by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry.

Nathan was nominated for a Chrysler Innovation in Design Award in 1994 and 1999 and a National Design Award in 2001.

Be sure to attend the end-of-conference Main Stage Panel Discussion on Sunday, May 16th, for the change to win one of five copies of Nathan's new book, Design is the Problem, courtesy of Rosenfeld Media.

Barbara Sudick

Associate professor, Communication Design at California State University, Chico.

AIGA Standards of Teaching: the development of a code of practice for Design Educators

What is the design educator’s responsibility to students, other educators, academic institutions, the profession, the public, and society and the environment? Over the last year and a half, the AIGA Design Educator’s Community (DEC) has been in the process of creating a living document to help make ethical decision-making an integral part of design education. This session will discuss how we can reach a consensus on the values and responsibilities that shape the practice and teaching of design. It will also invite participation and feedback on a prototype for the AIGA Standards of Teaching, a code of practice for design educators, including a vision statement which articulates our dreams and hopes, ethical principles which outline our goals and rules of conduct which provide guidelines for making ethical decisions.

In 2008–09 she was the distinguished Nierenberg Chair at Carnegie Mellon University. Sudick holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University and a BFA in Arts and Crafts from Kent State University.

Her current research explores ways to embed the responsible ethics of social, cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability in the teaching of design. She is a member of the national steering committee for AIGA’s Design Educators Community, where she is leading an initiative to extend AIGA’s professional code of conduct and ethics to include the academic design community. She is also working with the IGA Center for Sustainable Design to develop new pedagogy for teaching responsible and sustainable practices. She was recently a facilitator for the Designer’s Accord Global Summit on Design Education & Sustainability.

Robyn Waxman

Professor, Sacramento City College Founder, F.A.R.M (Future Action Reclamation Mob) Coordinator of Design Education, The Designers Accord

Robyn’s Main Stage Presentation:
Design Education & Sustainability Toolkit Update (DESIGNERS ACCORD)
The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create positive environmental and social impact. Among the key priorities of the Designers Accord is to influence design education so that the next generation of designers will have the frameworks, tools, and value systems in place to practice sustainably.

In Fall 2009, the Designers Accord hosted the first international summit on design education and sustainability to collectively tackle this great challenge. Our formula was simple:
• 100 educators, administrators, and thought-leaders
• 48 hours in San Francisco
• 8 inspirational speeches
• 8 breakout worksessions of highly participatory small group brainstorming
• An open exhibition of work, projects, programs
• Time to talk, think, learn, problem-solve, and imagine possibilities

This presentation will share our innovative and choreographed methodology at the Summit, our vision for the future of the toolkit, and the status of its release.

Robyn’s Affinity Session:
Understanding the Next Generation of Designers—The F.A.R.M Story
How do we inspire, yet work hand-in-hand with the next generation of design activists?

The Millennials (ages 18–29) are technologically savvy, participatory, positive, reluctant to criticize, and experiential. They have respect for the law and for authority, yet demand transparency and feel entitled. Many Millennials are interested in participating in sustainability movements, but only in a manner that nurtures these sub-cultural nuances.

Design is experiencing a paradigm shift. Designers are experi menting with more interactive ways of engaging participatory culture and democratizing making. The methods in which design engages the world is expanding. My work seeks to examine the role of the next generation of designers in catalyzing their generation’s social and environmental movements.

The F.A.R.M story will serve as one way to rethink traditional activist mediums (the poster and the protest) and the role of the design educator, in an effort to more fully engage the Millennial generation.

Robyn Waxman is an award-winning designer, educator, activist and farmer. Having taught at a variety of colleges and universities for over 15 years, she is a founding faculty member for the Graphic Communication program at Sacramento City College. Additionally, Robyn is the Coordinator of Design Education for The Designers Accord and is coediting a toolkit on sustainability in design education. She has taught, lectured and presented her work and thinking at California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, the Artists and Art Director’s Club, the AIGA, and Art Institute of Sacramento.

Currently, Robyn’s work focuses on design’s role in the next generation of collective action. Several media outlets featured her urban farming projects, including the San Francisco MOMA, KPFA Radio, Communication Arts Magazine, Print Magazine, and the AIGA.

Robyn holds a bachelors degree in Visual Communication from the University of Delaware and a Master of Fine Arts in Design from California College of the Arts, where she was the 2009 graduation speaker and remains a “spotlighted” alumna. She currently practices design, teaches, and reclaims land for building urban farms in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Davis, California.

Rick Valicenti

Founder and design director of Thirst/Chicago

The Braided Career Path Towards a Moving Design
Sustained invention, intelligence, and a passionate intent are the cornerstones of Valicenti’s 30-year practice. “Keeping one’s personal and professional creative energy alive is the on-going challenge.” Valicenti’s conversation will look at the practice within Thirst, a small Chicago-based studio which makes design with and for designers. Case studies will braid lessons learned from the personal research and the professional opportunities and over the course of the presentation Thirst’s ever-evolving social responsibility initiatives created under the moniker of Moving Design, a new model of pedagogy which resides at the intersection of experience, experimentation, and education, will be shared.

Rick Valicenti is the founder and design director of Thirst/Chicago, a firm devoted to art, function and real human presence that has been influencing the design discourse internationally since 1988. In October 2006, Rick was awarded the prestigious AIGA Medal for his sustained contribution to design excellence and the development of the profession. The medal is the highest honor of the graphic design profession. In 2004, he was awarded the AIGA Chicago Chapter Fellow, and he has been a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) since being invited in 1996. His works and the works of Thirst are currently on exhibit at the Schmidt Center Gallery & Ritter Art Gallery at Florida Atlantic University in the show Curiosities: Rick Valicenti + the 21st Century Thirst. Previously, his work was featured in the 2006 Triennial Design Life Now at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Selected works have also been included in the Museum of Modern Art exhibit Emigré Covers, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s permanent collection and the STA Chicago Design Archive.

Rick has juried the President’s Design Awards for the National Endowment for the Arts during the George H.W. Bush and William Clinton Administrations. He was recognized as the top designer across all design disciplines to represent Illinois in the first ID50 of ID Magazine. He has been nominated twice for the prestigious Chrysler Design Awards, as well as numerous awards from the AR 100, Graphis, Communication Arts, Print, Step, NY Art Directors, Tokyo Art Directors, ID Magazine, and the AIGA Year in Review.

Rick’s work has been published in practically every major graphic design publication. Cover stores include Eye.06 (London), Émigré (twice) and Idea (in Tokyo). Recent book publications include Phaidon’s 10×10 (published late 2003), Graphic Radicals by Katherine McCoy and Typography One by Rick Poyner. In April 2005, a 356-page monograph on the Thirst work was published by The Monacelli Press titled, Emotion as Promotion.

Recently, Rick gave a presentation at 2009 Design Indaba, the world’s largest multi-disciplinary annual conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Throughout his career, Rick has lectured across six continents including Beijing, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, London, Porto, Oslo, Berlin, Florence, Toronto, and throughout the United States.