This weekend, Dirk+Weiss was at A Better World By Design conference in Providence Rhode Island. Held at the RISD and Brown campuses. The conference had workshops and speakers covering all aspects of design, systems, and critical thinking. Exhibitors showed off their new projects, and crowds piled into hear some of the newest, freshest solutions to some of the worlds largest problems.
I had the pleasure of co-facilitating two workshops with Project-M‘er Marc O’Brien, and Ben Gaydos and Karen Stein from GoodGood Design. Workshops: Thinking Wrong and Rapid Prototyping; each workshop deals with staying open, and creative, to all possibilities when working on projects and initiatives. Energy was through the roof, and the paradigms of design were blown wide open. Participants started projects on Friday with a Think Wrong session, and then brought their projects to life on Sunday with Rapid Prototyping. Projects varied from education reform to marine life that can help produce renewable resources for cities and towns.
Dirk+Weiss would like to thank Marc O’Brien for inviting us, and all of the staff and volunteers that made A Better World By Design 2011 a huge, inspirational success. Here are some photos:
Our own Matthew White has been teaching design and app development like crazy over the last 6 months or so. His app development class at a local community college as made some major waves, and landed him an article in quarterly publication for Bunker Hill Community College.
What? That’s right, DW is potentially teaming up with Speed Club this summer to aid in the production of a feature length documentary! We are traveling along side of two friends as the journey across the US on choppers! 4000 miles of never ending road, days of HD video, and a huge chopper rally in Southern California. We are very excited to dig into this project but note, we said “potentially.”
Unfortunately, funding for this project has somewhat dried up in the last few weeks. We are reaching out to any and all our visitors to please review their request and make a contribution in any way possible. Keep in mind, everyone who makes a contribution gets something in return. Whether it’s getting you name listed on the site, getting a free copy of the DVD, or a free T-Shirt, EVERYONE IS A WINNER! Click here to review the project in its entirety and to find out how you can contribute.
While we still believe HTML/JS developers have lapped Adobe and flash in terms of efficiency and delivery viewports, this video from Adobe shows a glimmer of hope. This prototype “Wallaby” application converts Flash to HTML5, keeping animations and graphics, but losing some things like blending modes and other fancy special effects. Hmm… Very Interesting!
A start for Adobe. We’ll probably have to wait until CS6 to see this implemented. We also speculate that this is a re-working of the previously anticipated Flash to App converter that was to be part of the CS5 suite (now available since Apple lifted third party bans on dev). Can we beta Wallaby? It might be energizing to see old flash projects on my iPhone.
Last week we launched a new application called “Baby Loves Music”. That same week we received our first Cease and Desist letter from Baby Loves Everything to stop all infringing acts of the name Baby Loves Music, as they claim common law ownership over the name.
After some digging at the US Patent and Trademark Office, we found that a patent for the name Baby Loves Music was listed, but dead. We feel we are outside the definitions of goods and services, but none-the-less (even though the patent is dead) we are not here to bust anyone’s chops.
We have designed a solution to this issue, and it is as follows: We have changed the name of the application “Baby Loves Music” to “Baby’s First Music”. We have changed all instances of the name across websites and iTunes. A update to the application has been approved for sale, and all owners of the application will receive a push notification of the update’s availability.
We wish the owners of the “Baby Loves..” line of products would accept our sincere apologies if they feel we have infringed on any trademarks (living or dead), and want you to know that in no way did we wish to profit from or harm your brand. We also wish to state that Dirk+Weiss has no affiliation with the name Baby Loves Music, or company Baby Loves Everything, LLC.
