Leading environmental graphic design professionals from North America, Europe, and beyond  will meet to share ideas, strategies, and resources during SEGD’s first-ever international symposium October 22 in London.

“Minding the Gap: Views on EGD from Both Sides of the Pond” will focus on the broad contemporary practice of environmental graphic design, the range of disciplines represented in the SEGD community, and the role of EGD in the built environment.

“The scope and impact of EGD continues to evolve and expand, and this is a perfect moment for North American and European designers to meet, exchange ideas, and focus on what lies ahead for our profession,” says David Gibson, information designer and principal of Two Twelve (New York). Gibson and Alexandra Wood, principal of Holmes Wood (London) are co-organizers of the event.

The opening session will highlight the breadth of EGD, from wayfinding to environments and exhibition design. After opening remarks by Lee Skolnick, Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership (New York), presentations will include David Gibson on wayfinding; Laurence Madrelle of LM Communiquer (Paris) on environments; Gary Shelley of Casson Mann (London) on exhibition design; and Jason Bruges, Jason Bruges Studio (London) on art and lighting design.

"Mirror, Mirror" at the V&A was a 2009 interactive lighting installation by Jason Bruges.

The symposium will be held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where environmental design has helped shape the visitor experience and provide context for one of the world’s most diverse museum collections. Moira Gemmill, the V&A’s director of projects, design, and estates, will lead a panel featuring contemporary designers working for the museum, including Lucy Holmes of Holmes Wood; Agnieska Glowacka of Glowacka Rennie Architects (London); Frans Bevers of Opera Amsterdam; and Christopher Bagot of Softroom Limited.

Holmes Wood (London) have designed a broad range of communications at the V&A, from wayfinding to exhibition graphics.

A panel discussion hosted by the Sign Design Society, led by SDS President Michael Wolff, will showcase design for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Recent winners of the SEGD Design Awards program will highlight the day’s final session. 2010 winners including Tim Fendley of Applied Information Group (London), designers of the Legible London pedestrian wayfinding system, and Nuno Gusmão, principal associate of P-06 Atelier (Lisbon), which won awards for the Theatre and Auditorium of Poitiers, Bikeway Belém, and Museu Fundação Oriente, will present their work.

The Legible London pedestrian wayfinding program, Applied Information Group

The symposium will close with a “Looking Ahead: View from Both Sides of Pond” discussion between Pentagram partners Daniel Weil (UK) and Michael Gericke (New York).

The symposium will highlight EGD’s multidisciplinary nature and its reach into all aspects of design for the built environment, says Alexandra Wood, a member of the SEGD Board of Directors.

Bikeway Belem, P-06 Atelier

The event is open to designers, clients, developers, fabricators, technology providers, and other professionals connected with environmental graphic design or allied disciplines including architecture, graphic and interior design, information and interaction design, wayfinding, and signage design.

“SEGD offers an incredibly valuable array of educational resources to those of us practicing environmental graphic design,” says Wood. “Encouraging a formal dialogue among colleagues ‘across the Pond’ is a great first step toward sharing SEGD resources globally.”

Following the symposium, on October 23 SEGD will host a roundtable discussion with various European design organizations. For information on this event, contact ann@segd.org.

“Minding the Gap” is made possible in part by lead sponsor Principle Group.

For more information or to purchase tickets for the symposium, visit the SEGD website. –P.M.K.

This week we’ll be blogging from Washington, D.C., where the 2010 SEGD Conference + Expo is convening around the theme of “Designing Change, Changing Design.” Headquartered at the Gaylord Hotel in the new National Harbor development across the Potomac River from the Capitol, the conference jumpstarts later today with the Fourth Annual SEGD Film Festival (showing the second part of Gary Hustwit’s three-film trilogy, Objectified).

For the next three days, conference attendees will hear about how design can be a positive force for change in our communities, our workplaces, and our personal lives. On Thursday, June 3, keynote presentations will focus on influencing design for the government (by Robert Peck, commissioner of the U.S. General Services Administration), navigating complex public-sector projects (by Phil Freelon, heading a multidisciplinary design team for the new National Museum of African American History), and designing for tomorrow (by designers from the MIT Media Lab and London’s Bartlett School of Architecture).

Friday, June 4, is SEGD’s EXPO!, which showcases more than 70 providers of services and products for environmental graphic design. Saturday, June 5, Stefan Sagmeister will speak on how change begins with you. And Brian Collins (founder of branded experience firm COLLINS:), Deborah Adler (designer of Target’s ClearRx system), and Emily Pilloton (founder of Project H Design), will challenge conference participants to use their design skills to change the world. — P..M.K.

When developer Milton Peterson bought a barren 300-acre stretch along the banks of the Potomac River in 1995, he was the third developer to try his hand at transforming it into a viable enterprise. It took vision, and Peterson had one. Inspired by grand public spaces like Las Ramblas in Barcelona, he dreamt of a classic, pedestrian-oriented boulevard and inviting public gathering places. More than a decade later, the $4 billion National Harbor opened, offering an entertainment, resort, and convention alternative to the urban experience of Washington, D.C.

To make it work, Peterson knew he needed to create a strong sense of place and an inviting, pedestrian-friendly ambience. The development’s success is owed in large part to extensive and integrated public art, landscape, and wayfinding programs developed by Sasaki Associates.  ”It was like building a city from scratch,” says Brian Pearce, a Sasaki senior associate.

The project is profiled in the latest issue of segdDESIGN magazine. And incidentally, the Gaylord National Hotel at National Harbor is the headquarters of the 2010 SEGD Conference + Expo June 2-5. We’ll see you there. — P.M.K.

Gaylord National Hotel

Mirror, Mirror at the Victoria & Albert Museum (2009)

Jason Bruges has been called a lighting designer, a lighting artist, an installation artist, an inventor, a designer, an interactive architect, a digitalist, and even a city interventionalist. It’s all semantics: very simply, Bruges and his award-winning multidisciplinary studio are focused on creating interactive digital spaces that “excite, intrigue, and perform.”

Jason will be part of the “Changing Design/Designing Change” conversation at the 2010 SEGD Conference + Expo June 2-5 in Washington, DC.  He took a few minutes this week to chat with SEGD.

Get a Word In, Cambridge Regional College (2009)

Q: You were trained as an architect and worked for Foster + Partners before moving into interaction design. What inspired you to make the move from designing buildings to designing interventions that relate or respond to the built environment?

A: As an architect I was fascinated by systems, techniques, and materials that enable buildings and architectural spaces to come alive, talk, perform, or simply exist in the fourth dimension. As a student I had followed examples such as Jean Nouvel’s L’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (1988) and Buckminster Fuller’s Montreal Dome  (1967), both of which had “intelligent” or animated facades. I looked at the early work of Diller and Scofido (and Renfrew), and Christian Moeller and became engaged in the process of investigating buildings and built forms that would excite, intrigue, and perform for their viewers. I see my work now as an extension of this exploration.

Gift Wrapped, Dexia Tower, Brussels (2008)

Q: So much of your work—such as Mirror, Mirror at the V&A Museum— is about allowing users to be a part of the conversation in an architectural space. Why is that important?

A: Exploring interaction—which is innately about conversation— requires more than one participant, so the environment or interventions we create require an audience, viewer, playmate, critic, or observer. I don’t see our work being complete without there being feedback or observation. For me, work without people is hard to justify.

Mirror, Mirror (2009) exemplifies this approach. It is about digital narcissism: people admiring themselves and being drawn to their reflections in the water.

Q: What kind of work are you doing for the Toronto subway system?

A: I’m creating an integrated public artwork for the interior of York University Station on the Toronto York Spadina Subway Extension. It is a fabulous environment to be working in. I’m interested in spaces and how they are inhabited by populations in flux, so a space such as this— which has pedestrian and subway movement—is a very rich environment for a site-specific work.

Panda Eyes for the World Wildlife Fund (2010)

Q: Fill in the blank: “If I could you use design to change the world, I would _________________.”

A: I would change the world’s view on how we use resources, because I think the changes that are required have a lot to do with behavior. This is what we have been exploring with projects like Wind to Light (2007) and Litmus (2004), which both act as catalysts for discussions about renewable energy and policies that dictate our use of such technologies and approaches. –P.M.K.

SEGD Conference + Expo | June 2-5, 2010 | Washington DC

The world is changing fast. And as technologies, economies, and our physical landscape undergo constant metamorphosis, designers have to keep up.

How is the design world adapting to all this rapid change? How can we harness the incredible energy afoot and create positive change for our clients, our colleagues and employees, our families, and ourselves? That’s the Big Question at the 2010 SEGD Conference + Expo, and one that will be tackled by the likes of designer/provocateur Stefan Sagmeister, Project H founder Emily Pilloton, interactive lighting designer Jason Bruges, architect Phil Freelon, and many others in Washington, D.C., June 2-5.

The complete conference website was launched today. Check out the star-studded speaker list, fascinating project tours, and great networking opportunities. And get yourself registered to attend. Come be a part of the change. — P.M.K.

More than 25 million people visit Washington D.C.’s National Mall and Memorial Parks each year, and on any given day, more than 60 languages are spoken on the mall. It’s a special place, with a dramatic story to tell about America and what it means to be an American.

But many visitors don’t know the Washington Monument from the U.S. Capitol, never mind how to find the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. For them, the two-mile stretch of the National Mall can be a complex, confusing place to be. Help is on the way, though, in the form of a new wayfinding and signage system designed to guide visitors to major destinations, identify monuments, explain park rules, and reduce sign clutter. In late 2007, the National Park Service chose Hunt Design to develop the signage system and, this spring, the first of about 300 new signs will be installed.

The new program is featured in the latest issue of segdDESIGN magazine and will also be a tour spot during the 2010 SEGD Conference + Expo June 2-5 in Washington, D.C. We’ll see you there. –P.M.K.

designed to

A nine-day conference on signage and wayfinding is underway in Vienna this week, with sessions focusing on city wayfinding, airport and transportation signage, landmarking, typography, and information design.

Sponsored by the Vienna-based International Institute of Information Design and the British Sign Design Society, it has so far featured speakers such as David Gibson (on his new book The Wayfinding Handbook), Cliff Selbert (on landmarking in wayfinding), Tim Fendley (on the Legible London pedestrian signage system), and Stefan Eggers (on a new European Union typeface for transportation signage).

For more information, visit the Sign09 website and tune in to Sander Baumann’s DesignWorkPlan. –P.M.K.

The proposal to incorporate design modules into elementary through high school curriculum garnered 23% of the 324 votes solicited by the Design Policy Initiative prior to its Dec. 1 summit. The next step toward developing a K-12 design policy will be teaming up with organizations that have already established similar initiatives, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Association of Architecture Organizations’ A+DEN (Architecture + Design Education Network), which includes AIA, AAF, and the Chicago Architectural Foundation.

The Design Policy Initiative’s second policy priority is preparing and publishing case studies that demonstrate the positive social, economic, and environmental impacts of design. At the summit, SEGD CEO Leslie Gallery Dilworth shared the work done by SEGD and SEGD member firms for Hablamos Juntos, a Robert Wood Johnson-funded research study focused on the use of symbols in health care settings. Case studies like these will be published in print, on the web, and in multimedia formats to demonstrate the value of design.

The third-priority design policy as presented at the summit is to establish design roundtables with the design industry, government agencies, and stakeholders. Ideally, the roundtables will take place at already-scheduled events such as design conferences, and will focus on four areas: 1) health and wellness care, 2) sustainable living, 3) innovation and entrepreneurship, and 4) education for the 21st century.

The summit gathered design association leaders, design educators, and government agency representatives who use design services. In addition to those present at the meeting, more than 200 people participated via a live feed. A full report of the summit can be found at the Design Policy initiative website, and an upcoming issue of  SEGD’s member newsletter, Messages, will also contain a full report. — P.M.K.

You can watch and interact with the Summit live from 9:30am-3:3pm EST viawww.ustream.tv/channel/us-design-policy. The social stream will be connected to the group’s Facebook page, Twitter account @usdesignpolicy, and YouTube page, http://www.youtube.com/user/USDesignPolicy.

During breaks in the Summit, participants will answer your comments and questions on the social stream about what you have seen and heard at the People’s Q&A, moderated by Change Observer’s Brad McKee. 

SEGD is a co-sponsor of the Summit, and has been involved in the initiative since its inception. SEGD CEO Leslie Gallery Dilworth is attending today and SEGD is co-sponsoring the design policy Q&A session.  

The Summit will gather design association leaders,  government agency representatives, and design educators to push the group’s design policy proposals forward. By being a voice for the U.S. design community, the Design Policy Initiative seeks to:

 ”….design promotions to boost the demand for American goods and services

“…create innovative policies to protect American intellectual property and support the People’s entrepreneurial spirit

“…design standards to guarantee inclusion, sustainability, safety, and quality in the experiences of the human remade world

“…facilitate policy designed to address design’s role in making American democratic values tangible to the People.”

Design policy proposals include formalizing an American Design Council to work with the U.S. government; setting federal guidelines for legibility, safety, and accessibility in all government communications; establishing an assistant secretary for design in the federal government; and expanding national grants to support interdisciplinary community design assistance based on human-centered design practices. –P.M.K.

Pentagram principal Lisa Strausfeld and lead designer Chrisian Marc Schmidt outlined the design principles and process that led to a system of dynamic wayfinding totems and iPhone-inspired interpretive displays (see the feature story in segdDESIGN No. 25). Brian MacFarland, MAD’s associate vp of education, said the collaboration “was probably the most difficult aspect of the project from the end user’s perspective. It was very difficult for us to understand the various roles and expertise of the technical companies involved.”

“If we had it to do over again, I would want to know –at the front end — how the collaboration process would work and who the specialists are involved with the project,” he added. “We often felt we were dealing with a foreign language when it came to the technology stuff. And everyone was on different schedules with different agenda and different needs. Knowing how collaboration works and who the players are is helpful in getting everyone rowing in the same direction.”

Workshop attendees also heard about collaboration from the perspective of fabricators and technology consultants. “With technology playing such a huge role in projects now, collaboration between designers and technology firms has to happen much earlier in the process,” said Eli Kuslansky of Unified Field. Kuslansky and designer Lee Skolnick, Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design, will tour workshop attendees around the new Sony Wonder Technology Lab in Manhattan today.

In a new, dynamic format, the workshop was held at various venues in New York City, starting at MAD on Thursday morning and moving to the Hard Rock Cafe, then on to Touch nightclub, where Christie Digital announced the launch of Christie MicroTile, an LED-lit rear-projection product designed for high ambient light environments.  Today, the workshop moves from the Sony Wonder Technology Lab to the new Official NYC Information Center, a Times Square tour with primary workshop sponsor Daktronics, and other Manhattan venues. — P.M.K.