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Posts related to: Collaborative Design

SEGD at ESI

Michelle Mullineaux
By Michelle Mullineaux
Collaborative Design, News, Awards, Events

Michael Schneider speaks about the Dreamcube.

The night of May15 was a big one for us. The cheese platters came.

Two large cheese platters arrived for our Small Talks, Big Ideas evening. The Society for Environmental Graphic Design asked us to host the evening and we were happy to do so.

We always have a range of projects we want to talk about. For the evening with SEGD we went with a perennial favorite. The Dreamcube, the 2010 project for the Shanghai World Expo, was 40,000 square feet of integrated, interactive technology and media. Tech and Media Designer Michael Schneider walked our guests through the process and real world challenges of designing a project like this.

Ed Purver, also of the Tech and Media department, then introduced a daily application of the technology used and the lessons gleaned from the Dreamcube.
330 Hudson is a Beacon Capital Partners renovation project in lower Manhattan. For them, ESI is refreshing the lobby with an LED installation that displays striking visuals and relevant data. The application of how people interact with different types of technology is informing the decisions made for 330 Hudson’s lobby.

Community Retail at Scale

Gideon D’Arcangelo
By Gideon D’Arcangelo
Collaborative Design, News, Awards, Events, Technology and Media

This article was originally published in the Robin Report, Community Retail At Scale

It’s Not Just Good, It’s Good For Business

No one can argue with the benefits of scale when it comes to retail. Large-scale retailers provide deeper assortments at lower prices than their ma-and-pa competitors. But there’s a problem with all this scaling up. Mass-scale stores have become divorced from the communities where they sit. Most big-box retail stores look like they have been dropped in place by the mothership, and show little connection to where they are. All retail should have a sense of place. Now that we’re used to all those benefits of scale, customers yearn again for the relationships they had with their stores when they were owned and operated by their neighbors. Prediction: the next big wave in brick-and-mortar retail will combine the power of scale with the benefits of old-school mom-and-pop retail relationships. This is the transformation of big-box stores to come.

Whole Foods Shows the Way

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Q&A with Designer Michael Luck Schneider

Michelle Mullineaux
By Michelle Mullineaux
Collaborative Design, Design, Digital Signage, News, Awards, Events

The culmination of the Dreamcube journey was a theatre in the round in which audience actions changed the exterior look of the cube.

This article was originally published in Metropolis Magazine, Q&A with Michael Luck Schneider

At the upcoming Digital Signage Expo (February 26-28) in Las Vegas, there will be a lot of talk about integrating electronic media into the designed environment. On the 26th, at a full-day session called “New Design Directions: Dynamic Digital Environments,” Michael Luck Schneider, senior designer at ESI in New York will discuss, in some detail, the collaborative effort it took to create the Dream Cube in Shanghai. I asked him about how his global team worked together as they communicated between Cologne to Sydney to Beijing and points between; and the ways and means of systems design. In my previous interviews on the topic of media-rich environments, panelist Paul R. Levy, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Center City, talked about the use of digital media in the large-scale urban environment; Jeff Kovel, AIA, principal at Skylab Architecture in Portland, Oregon, discussed his firm’s experience in building Camp Victory for Nike. Here we dig down into ESI’s interactive spectacular, designed, as Schneider says, to “demonstrate the power of collaboration in shaping a more sustainable future.”

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Q&A with Robin Lewis and our Founder

Michelle Mullineaux
By Michelle Mullineaux
Collaborative Design, Design, News, Awards, Events

Ed Schlossberg founded ESI in 1977

This article was originally published in the Robin Report, Robin Lewis interviews Ed Schlossberg

Robin Lewis: What in the world was Best Buy thinking when they discontinued their Studio D and Escape small store concepts several years ago? You designed these neighborhood boutiques to customize these stores for specific niche demographics and lifestyles. What’s the backstory on this?

Ed Schlossberg: I had this idea in 1998 to do something called a Digital Playground. I thought if these technology companies were going to be successful, they needed to let people play using digital stuff so that they could see what would work. So I made a presentation to Brad Anderson who was CEO of Best Buy, and he said, ‘This is fantastic, we would love to do this.’ He hired us to design the first Digital Playground. It took some time to get it going. When Brad hired James Damien as their visual merchant, he was really excited about it, and we kind of became his team.
RL: What was the design strategy?

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On the Power of the Amateur

Julie Anixter
By Julie Anixter
Collaborative Design

One of the most memorable scenes in the movie City Island happens when Andy Garcia, playing an earnest and aspiring blue collar actor, performs his first audition for a movie. He mangles it. The audition is an abysmal failure. But somebody sees something, and for reasons that should only be revealed by seeing the movie, he is offered a second chance.  As the film unfolds, we see Garcia 'acting' as true amateur. In a tour de force performance of an actor acting as someone who has never acted before, we see him figuring it out as he goes along - trying, learning, stumbling, recovering, finding his footing and, ultimately, his own rhythm, with consequences that must be seen on the big screen to be appreciated. 

For director Raymond De Felitta’s own story behind the story, there’s more here.

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On the Power of An Invitation

Julie Anixter
By Julie Anixter
Collaborative Design

Like many tourists from all over the world, I visited Harlem on Easter Sunday. I was looking for Gospel music, but I found something even more exquisite - the co-created call-and-response service at the Harlem Church of Christ. From the first beat of the pastor's sermon, I knew it wasn’t going to be a passive experience. The entire service was filled (in a binary, spoken-word, sung-hymn kind of rhythm) with the a capella singing of psalms, hymns and spirituals. And the choir? From the first time the pastor raised his hands to conduct us from the podium, I realized that we, the congregation, were the choir! You can experience this for yourself any Sunday at the 10 a.m., 1 p.m. or 6 p.m. services, or on alternate Thursday nights at Church of Christ, 480 Lenox Avenue in Harlem.  And as bonus:  Sylvia’s Soul Food is next door.

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Worldchanging Crowdsourcing

Michelle Mullineaux
By Michelle Mullineaux
Collaborative Design

The betacup's goal is to eliminate paper cup consumption through the design of a more convenient alternative to the reusable coffee mug.

One of the reasons I work at ESI is because I’m a passionate believer in the power of collaboration and open innovation to help solve the great global environmental and social challenges of our time, so my ears perked up today when I heard about the betcup challenge sponsored by Starbucks. 

Drink coffee (or tea) on the go?  In a paper cup?  At five cups a week, the average North American consumes 250 cups a year, which adds up to 8 billion paper coffee cups being thrown away every year.  Ouch. Unfortunately, travel mugs have been slow to transform the issue — consumers find them bulky, inconvenient and hard to clean.

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