Blog

Peopling of America Center opens at Ellis Island

By Samantha Hoover
Culture + Museums
American Flag of Faces, 2011

American Flag of Faces, 2011

It’s always thrilling to see Lady Liberty up close, even for this jaded New Yorker. I must admit it’s rare that I get the chance, but I did at the Statue of Liberty’s 125th birthday celebration on October 28th. The event—which included marching bands, politicians, celebrities, and, of course, fireworks—also commemorated the opening of the Peopling of America Center at Ellis Island, which was designed by ESI and marks an important milestone in our long-term collaboration with the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.

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Designing Interdependent Systems to Course-Correct the World

Gideon D’Arcangelo
By Gideon D’Arcangelo
Communication Networks
Incremental Housing, Chile, 2003-2004

Incremental Housing, Chile, 2003-2004

“Almost one billion people are living in the informal settlements, commonly called slums. This population is projected to swell to two billion by 2030.” A staggering statistic at the heart of the Cooper-Hewitt’s Design With the Other 90%: CITIES exhibit on display at the United Nations Visitor Center until January 9, 2012. This show expands on the 2007 show, Design For the Other 90%. While that show focused on objects that can change the world, this show focuses on systems. That makes it a harder story to communicate, but curator Cynthia Smith and the exhibit team have put in a valiant effort to tell these complex and interwoven stories of intervention.  

Community mapping projects and bootstrapped SMS census-taking are initial themes of the exhibit, pointing out that it is exceedingly difficult to intervene among the uncounted and unseen. After this, affordable housing is front and center, from ingeniously inexpensive durable building materials to complex infrastructure plays. “Incremental Housing” from Chile is a prime example of this. This a program of half-built houses – spines of residential infrastructure that include kitchen, bathrooms, basic structure – while residents are responsible for building out the rest in their idiosyncratic ways.  The net value of the property is significantly raised by the sweat equity of the residents.  

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Takeaways from "Act Locally/Think Globally" Symposium

Ericka Hedgecock
By Ericka Hedgecock
Design

If there is one key takeaway from this year's Society for Environmental Graphic Design Exhibition and Experience Design Symposium it was this:

Work your networks.

Starting or expanding your business abroad is a complex, if not daunting, endeavor. Developing a network of international partners, fabricators, vendors, and resources requires trust and faith –  trust in the value of your ability and services, and faith that you can work together to produce your vision to exceed the expectations established between you and your client. How and where to start?

Held annually since 2004 at the extraordinary Cranbrook Academy of Art, the 2011 Symposium topic was "Act Locally/ Think Globally". SEGD is a global community of people working at the intersection of communication design and the built environment. In addition to a robust conference and workshop schedule, SEGD provides advanced learning and leadership to a community of 1,600 members. This year's symposium brought valuable insight into the challenges and opportunities of establishing yourself in the international marketplace. Below are highlights from our discussions:

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The Spy Did It

Pete Vigeant
By Pete Vigeant
Play!
ESI at 2011 Come Out and Play Festival

Participants play ESI's Live Action Spy Party game at the Come Out and Play Festival on Govenor's Island, July 16, 2011

On July 16, a large group of relative strangers came together and shared a unique and positive experience. The annual gathering known as Come Out and Play brought the large field on Governor’s Island to life with a diverse series of physical and mental games that spanned the entire beautiful day and challenged participants to open their minds to new, sometimes goofy, adventures.

ESI Design entered our Live Action Spy Party into the mix, a non-digital version of Chris Hecker’s experimental video game about artificial intelligence and espionage. The game features a Spy trying to accomplish three discrete tasks without being detected by an ever-watching Sniper. The rest of the players act as decoys, performing the playful actions and reactions prescribed on their instruction cards. Live Action Spy Party is a blast to play whatever the role, because there’s always something to do and see, but observers get the extra special treat of watching the performance and trying to identify the Spy themselves.

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User Research for Carnegie Learning: Don’t Forget to Do Your Homework!

By James Tu
STEM + Learning
Carnegie Learning Math Series

Screenshot of Carnegie Learning MATHia software

In the fall of 2009, Carnegie Learning, a leading publisher of innovative, research-based math curricula, approached ESI to help them create an engaging and appealing design for math software and textbooks for middle school students. We recently completed our work on this new product; it was officially announced by Carnegie Learning today. As a lead designer on the project, I wanted to share the user research we conducted to demonstrate how it fueled our creative process and helped us create an engaging learning experience.

Most students will likely tell you that math is not their favorite subject. (There are many reasons for this and hopefully STEM will help change this, but we won’t delve into that here). So, we set out to discover the things that middle school kids do like.

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The Motion

Pete Vigeant
By Pete Vigeant
Play!
Image of ESI staff playing with the new Xbox Kinect.

ESI staff play with the new Xbox Kinect.

Two major hardware releases that have recently promised to radically change the game market are the PlayStation Move and the Xbox Kinect. Each of these devices offers a high degree of interactive gaming, but in different ways (we have both set up in competing rooms here at ESI!).

The PlayStation Move is not, as naysayers profess, a glorified Wii-mote. The integration of a camera and sophisticated onboard sensors allow for very accurate motion detection, as well as an augmented reality view of the players. Kids seem to love it. I watched my 8-year-old cousin play Start the Party on her PlayStation 3 and she giggled with delight at seeing herself holding the objects used in the game (such as a mallet, a fly swatter and a flashlight). Interestingly enough, she never had to ask how to play – the system immediately engaged her with games that were obvious and intuitive. The accuracy of the motion sensors during more complex activities, such as Table Tennis, is also yet unmatched by any other simulation.

The Xbox Kinect offers a departure from the controller entirely and feels a bit like magic. The experience is unlike any other in all of gaming and cannot be compared to the Move, the Wii or any other motion-based device. One of the major advantages of Kinect is that the player uses his or her entire body to control the game. Players can simply walk into the play space and immediately take control without a complicated setup.

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TEDxBrooklyn: One Moves Many

By Ariel Newland
Design

TED launched TEDx as a platform for people around the globe “to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.” With events from Kibera to Amsterdam, TEDx came to Brooklyn for the first time over the weekend. The event centered on the idea of “one moves many” or the making of a movement.

As the New Yorker magazine put it "naturally, Brooklyn, a hotbed of freethinkers, is having its own [TEDx] get-together.” So what is it about Brooklyn these days? It’s New York City’s most populous borough with roughly 2.5 million inhabitants. The affordability, amenities, community and beauty have attracted a strong creative class—from artists and designers to writers and inventors—to live and work in the borough. At ESI, nearly half of our staff lives in Brooklyn!

Here are some of the highlights of impressive Brooklynites from TEDxBrooklyn:

Swoon

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Zàijiàn (Goodbye) World Expo!

Michelle Mullineaux
By Michelle Mullineaux
Shanghai Expo
Dream Cube Escalator

It’s hard to believe, but six months and 73 million visitors later, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo came to a close today, and we are having a tough time saying goodbye to our dream project, the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion (affectionately known as the Dream Cube for being the carrier of people’s dreams for the future of Shanghai).

We braved the sea of last-minute Expo visitors this week to give our last round of tours, attend closing ceremonies and explore what’s next for ESI in China. A testament to our incredible design and production team, including PRG (systems integrator), Spinifex (media production), Full Flood (lighting) and Pico (fabrication), the Dream Cube looked as fresh, and operated as efficiently, as it did when it opened in May.  And the message—that a more sustainable future can only be co-created through collective action—is more resonant than ever as it will take a huge collaborative effort to evolve the Expo site after next week.

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Doing Well by Doing Good: ESI Redesigns PS 166's Playground

Kris Haberman
By Kris Haberman
Play!

Ed Schlossberg, Gail Brewer, Debbie Hand, Scott Stringer and Andrea Wenner at the Ribbon Cutting Ceremony, Oct. 18, 2010

Last year, ESI was asked to help design a playground at PS 166, an elementary school on the Upper West Side specializing in arts and music education.  ESI’s Founder and Principal Designer, Edwin Schlossberg, attended this school when he was a very little Big Thinker.

Last week, we celebrated the opening of the new playground at a ribbon cutting ceremony with Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and City Councilwoman Gail Brewer, who provided funds and support for the project. The whole event was festive, the school staff was grateful for everyone’s help, and best of all, the children were excitedly running around and making use of their new playground.

The kindergartners had been without a playground for a year, as it had been dismantled to allow for renovation of the school’s exterior. The students and teachers couldn’t wait to have their playground back to let the kids engage in active play and burn off some afternoon energy.

To kick off the project, ESI staff members Curt Meissner, Joe Karadin and Kris Haberman met with Principal Debbie Hand, Parent Advisor Cameron King as well as select parents and teachers to conduct a “blue-sky” brainstorming session about their desires and needs for this new space. We then provided several active play and programmatic concepts to the committee for their review and selection.

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ASTC 2010: Ho’okele – Navigating to our Future

By Greg Gallimore
STEM + Learning

The 2010 conference of the Association of Science and Technology Centers was held this year in Honolulu.  Ahhh…. Hawaii!  The beaches, the sunshine, the abundance of both single and double rainbows… sounds great, right?  With the particularly poor turnout of attendees this year, many folks I spoke to wondered how great this conference really was.  The exhibit hall was rather small with what seemed like a fraction of the exhibitors in past years, some sessions were spotty with attendees and there just weren’t the new faces and international showing that many were hoping would arrive.    

Putting these observations aside, in a way the conference was great. The educational sessions were quite informative, the special programs and receptions were well planned, and the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony was one of the most impactful and inspiring hour-long speech I may have ever experienced.  His name was Charles ‘Nainoa’ Thompson and he shared with the audience the story of the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s development and journeys to Tahiti and beyond using non-instrument wayfinding.  This was a story of excitement, joy, loss, discovery, and dismay; but ultimately a story of inspiration – a powerful affirmation of the importance of informal education.

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