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April 27–May 3, 2014

1/ Information Everywhere: Flexible Content with Responsive Design
Responsive design ʺfrees our contentʺ to work anywhere, anytime, and gets us back to developing and delivering quality content – where and when our customers need it. Adopting responsive design means that technical communicators no longer need to spend time designing and creating deliverables for different devices.
When: Tuesday, April 29, 2014, 6:30pm–10pm
Where: Medidata Solutions, 350 Hudson St, Floor 9, NYC
Price: $20 STCNY members, $30 general public

2/ The Story of Data: Visualization, Mapping, and Photography
From our smartphones to the city power grid, massive amounts of data are collected and monitored on a daily basis, radically transforming how socioeconomic conditions are understood and managed. Learn about digital strategies employed in data science, geography, journalism, and critical design that may be applied to photography projects for social impact.
When: Tuesday, April 29, 2014, 6pm–8pm
Where: Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, 547 West 27th Street, NYC
Price: Free and open to the public

3/ BUTTER: A Night of Pop Culture and Popcorn
A monthly screening event that showcases and connects filmmakers from the ADC community. An international panel curate the film lineup each month, which includes award-winning documentaries and shorts, as well as quirky animations, music videos and commercials.
When: Tuesday, April 29, 2014, 7pm–10pm
Where: ADC Gallery, 106 West 29th Street, NYC
Price: $10 ADC members, $15 general public

4/ Oliver Munday: Backwards
A look back at 5 years of studio work, passion projects, and the hints that an inevitable job in publishing were there all a long.
When: Thursday, May 1, 2014, 5pm–8pm
Where: Type Directors Club, 347 West 36th Street #603, NYC
Price: $5 TDC members, $15 students, $20 general public

5/ Free First Friday
On the first Friday of every month, admission is free and public tours led in English and Japanese are available at 2:00pm. This May’s film selection will be The Oyler House: Richard Neutra’s Desert Retreat by Director Mike Dorsey. Cash bar with wine and beer.
When: Friday, May 2, 2014, 5pm–8pm
Where: Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Long Island City
Price: Free and open to the public

6/ Heller Fili Moving Sale
Hundreds of books (recent & vintage) on design, typography, lettering, photography, fine arts, cooking and Italy. Posters, ephemera, rarities and more. Bring your own bags. Free Louise Fili SVA subway poster with purchases over $300. Cash only.
When: Saturday, May 3, 2014, 12:30pm–4:30pm
Where: SVA Branding Studio, 132 West 21st Street, 11th Floor, NYC
Price: Free and open to the public

One extra session added this coming Friday April 18, from 12-2PM, at The Wave, B90th Street: Last chance to get your Rockaway story recorded! As part of the “Dear Rockaway” project, our team has been setting up open interview times over the past months inviting local residents to share their impressions of the peninsula, memories, happy and sad, wishes and hopes. The collected quotes will be used to create a series of wild posters and inserts in the 100-year old weekly, The Wave, to bring back a living portrait of this place.

Every week, our Rockaway team storyteller, Carolyn Louth, addresses the locals with her “Dear Rockaway” letter, which provides at once transparency, updates and news about the progress of our project in the Rockaway, in her inimitable, light, friendly yet convincing tone. The team has opted to leverage the strategic media channel of the Wave to inform, communicate and recruit potential participants in the oral history project which, not only has catalyzed a latent interest in the Rockaway Museum, but also had fed fresh content into the designers’ messaging strategy.

Photo: Sarah Tay
Seaport team community engagement strategist Francesca Birks introduced the event, which included a part 1 talk by placemaking expert Susan Silberberg and a part 2 event, which engaged the community to collectively make an inventory of the Seaport’s hidden treasures and stories.

Photo: Sarah Tay
Designer Yeju Choi presenting the past, present and future of the South Street Seaport Team’s progress.

Photo: Sarah Tay
Susan Silberberg on “Places in the Making,” a convincing white paper, developed in collaboration with her MIT students in Urban Studies and Planning, which reveals the importance of the placemaking process in building social capital and restoring local political voices in communities. As a point of inspiration, placemaking expert Susan Silberberg delivered an amazing presentation, it was priceless, specifically because it was so didactic, and perfect in the context of a community engagement event with the right (Seaport) people in the room. The questions quickly fused from residents accustomed to attend hundreds of these community gatherings. Our goal was to offer alternative thinking to their usual nostalgia+complaint M.O., and also yield a “making together” moment, which Silberberg had spoken so eloquently about.

Photo: Laetitia Wolff
Community Board 1′s director, Catherine Hughes, inspired by Susan Silberberg methodology. At this table, far right, artist Sara Williams, owner of Fresh Salt restaurant, presented Out to Sea, her attempt to activate the Old Seaport with temporary art programming in empty retail spaces.

Photo: Laetitia Wolff
For this community charrette designers tapped into the wisdom of the diverse and passionate community of residents, business owners, day workers and visitors, as well as AIGA/NY design members who joined in an open, inspiring dialog to imagine the next Seaport. One of the exercises consisted of locating on large tablecloth-like maps the hidden treasures of the Seaport, unknown stories, but also troubles, wishes and the participants also identified potential programming opportunities.

Photo: Laetitia Wolff
The second exercise consisted of writing a postcard to an imaginary recipient describing a hidden treasure in the neighborhood. Each table lead was invited to read someone else’s card afterwards as a way to build the collective conscience of this waterfront community assets.

Photo: Brendan Crain, Yeju Choi center in front of the Catch&Release installation

Our Seaport team closed phase 1 of Catch& Release on Saturday March 15 with a well-attended site visit co-produced with OHNY (Open House New York, the leader in urban tours). WXY Architecture + Urban Design’s Adam Lubinsky and Design/Relief designer Yeju Choi led a walking tour that explored the proposed site of the Brooklyn Bridge Beach, part of the East River Blueway Plan, and finished the walk with our pop-up participatory installation Catch — & — Release, to understand how social and infrastructural strategies for addressing the void created by the FDR can work hand-in-hand to reconnect the neighborhood with its waterfront.

Our Red Hook team has been busy on the ground conducting research, mapping out the front and back of Red Hook, interviewing stakeholders and residents, represented by a diverse palette of organizations such as tenant associations, social and health services providers, and recovery efforts entities, to name a few. They made a point in “plugging in” existing community meetings, rather than creating their own. Their approach has been driven by a humble effort in listening and approaching these communities as outsiders and blank slates, at a time when a number of organizations, Federal, State and otherwise, have poured into these places to offer solutions for stronger, more resilient and sustainable places. Although our teams were warned of the general fatigue that the Red Hook community may feel, they have only found open hearts and hands.

NY Rising, Gov. Cuomo state-funded initiative, has been an inspiration for our team, whose members attended a number of their Red Hook-based community gatherings. Their website  includes interactive maps of Red Hook, and other Disaster-stricken areas in which they’ve been working to identify community needs since this fall.

The Red Hook Houses and the JR project near the NYCHA Houses. Photo: David Al-Ibrahim

Red Hook team storyteller James Andrews presenting Design/Relief at the Wednesday meetings of the Red Hook Houses, November 18, 2013