Contemporary Design Presentation

What is meant by Contemporary Design?

Instead of drilling boring lectures into the heads of the students, Edwina Riddell has found a creative and effective solution to deliveing the information. She assigned a particular design era to a group of 2 - 3 students, and thus transferred the engagement of the topic to the students.

I find this to be a a brilliant idea! The students get Public Speaking experience, they perform their own research, and in the end student presentations are usually listened to more attentively, than teachers, due to a feeling of solidarity.

Each student group presented on the chosen design era during the class (one group per week). Afterwards, Edwina filled in any of her extra knowledge and provided comments.

For our presentation, Gina and I selected Contemporary Design, an exciting and relevant period of design, which is still affecting our choices today.

Click the image below to view the PDF of our presentation:


Semester 1: Intro to Studio Practice, taught by Edwina Riddell

Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman

Have you ever planned to attended a lecture not expecting much, perhaps even thinking it will be boring... Well, Andrew Zuckerman's talk about his Wisdom series was just the opposite of that! Right from the beginning he established a connection with the audience, and shared his passion generously. To me, this was one of those fortunate opportunities, where I found myself at an event, which left me thinking for days to come.

On October 16, 2008 photographer Andrew Zuckerman gave a talk at the opening of his exhibition, titled Wisdom. Through his work Zuckerman hopes to revive the tradition of the elders being the wise members of the tribe, and to helps us realize that we are a collective group, which possesses an enormous amount of knowledge and experience. He interviewed and photographed 51 people over the age of 65, whom we consider to be wise. Those include Nelson Mandela, Clint Eastwood and Judi Dench.

The exhibition is currently still running until November 16th at the State Library of New South Wales. The exhibition space is set up beautifully and simply, utilizing only black and white colors with clean typography along the walls. If you have a chance, go see it!




In addition to the exhibition, Andrew Zuckerman also produced a book and a movie with the same title, Wisdom. Here is the movie trailer. May we find the wisdom within ourselves and share it with the world.



The full video of the talk and some additional "behind the scenes" videos are available on the State Library website here [long link].