Up on the Issues

Tarquin knows where it's at, design wise.

Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand started a button campaign asking "Why haven't we seen an images of the whole earth yet?" He eventually enlisted the help of Buckminster Fuller. He talks about how powerful this image of a whole earth has been; how it shows how isolated we are. Some people think the earth is flat, because they treat it's resources as limitless. This image of the earth shows that our space and resources are finite.
Brand studied design at San Fransciso Art Institute and photography at San Fransciso State College. He feels that with the right tools, information, consciousness, etc. humans could reshape the world they had made, and were making into a world that was socially and enviromentally sustainable. This way of thinking led Brand to develop The Long Now Foundation, The Global Business Network, The Whole Earth Catalogue, WELL, and others. He has written several books, including How Buildings Learn, and The Clock of the Long Now.
I found the ideas of The Long Now very interesting. Their purpose is to "provide counterpoint to today's faster/cheaper mindset and promote slower/better thinking." I think this is great. If we as a species would have implemented slower/better thinking some time ago, maybe we wouldn't be in the predicament we're in. The Long Now Foundation also sponsors Long Bets, to help cultivate better long term thinking.
Brand is also trying to generate an academic sub discipline applied history. He feels that historians should be involved in shaping public policy, because those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Check out the link, because he can explain it better and more suscintly than I can.

Felice Frankel

Featured in Bruce Mau's book Massive Change, Felice Frankel is concerned with how scientific ideas are visually represented. She works with scientists to develope an image that communicates their scientific research to the general public. She is a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Univerisity, where she heads the Envisioning Science program. She also works as a research scientist at MIT. Frankel's images have been published in over 300 journal articles and have been featured as covers and in other various publications. In 1997, she co-authored On the Surface of Things (I saw this at the bookstore not too long ago, and thought it was more recent, I almost bought a copy). Her latest book, Envisoning Science, the Design and Craft of the Science Image, has been deemed "priceless" by Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, and acts as a guide on the production of effective scientific images. Frankel is also a leader of the Picturing to Learn, program, which encourages students to develop their own visual explanations of scientific themes.
She has received grants from both the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
You can see a list of exhibitions on her website.
Frankel has a degree in biology from Brooklyn College.
She's featured by Apple on their website, and has been covered by the New York Times.
In her interview in Massive Change, Frankel talks about how NASA is bringing attention to the earth through satellite images. She states "Chemists and physicists need to do the same for the micro and the subatomic world. It is just as exciting and beautiful as the cosmos."

I've been noticing this for awhile, that most art/science combinations focus on technology, engineering, chemistry and physics. Biology is prevalent in it's own, broad way, since biophilia is rampent among artists. But you don't find much about geology and art. There also doesn't seem to to be any crossovers between geology and the design movement. The science of design seems centered around climate change, sustainability, and advancing technology. All of these things are starting to move forward together and the geosciences seem to be off on their own. Why is this? Is it because we're trying to get to the future by studying the past?
The most publisized science these days revolves around trying to save ourselves and our future. The design movement is all about the future. Is there a way to get to the future though the past? Is there a way to a viable future of our field through our past tradition?

Hella Jongerius

Hailed as an "unrivaled' contemporary designer, Hella Jongerius is a Dutch designer who "works on the the cusp of design, craft, art and technology fusing high tech and low tech, tradiation and the contemporary, industiral and artisnal."She started her own design firm, Jongeriuslab where she produces her own projects, while also completing projects for Marharam (New York), Royal Tichelaar Makkum (The Netherlands), Vitra (Basel), and Ikea (Sweden). Jongerius was one of the desingers to collboate with Droog. She designs a wide variety of product for a wide variety of price points (from custom pieces to $40 vase for Ikea).For her, the designing of the object is more important than the making. She "recycles" forms and traditions, but doesn't focus on the ecoloy of sustainability. Jongerius has porduced a ton of work since graduating from the Eindhoven Design Academy in 1993.

Read an interesting interview with her here.

She was been covered in Metropolis, and The New York Times,

Her work has been shown in the Cooper Hewitt, MoMA, the Design Museum (London), the Moss Gallery (New York) and others.