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:

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 –

Last night, Dirk+Weiss attended the launch party for Design Museum Boston. The party started at 7:30, and by then, a good amount of attendees had already shown up. By the 8:00 hour, the place was booming, shoulder to shoulder.

The event had many interesting components, including a silent auction, with many donated items from such companies as Bose, Philips, Wacom and Converse. All proceeds going to help fund the new museum initiatives.

By far, the most exciting thing to see was the turnout. The almost overwhelming number of people out at this event, supporting design, was fabulous. There was definitely an electricity in the air, and lots of networking going on.

We believe that design is strongest when collaboration happens (www.ourdesign.us). Pigeonholing your self as one type of designer can be limiting. The Design Museum Boston launch event was proof that there is strong motivation towards melding the formerly narrow paths of design (graphic, industrial, instructional, marketing etc..), into a unified mission.

Speaking of missions, Design Museum Boston’s mission also is a reflection not only the design profession, but our economic environment. Firstly, having many venues and locales for events and showings, rather than one space that rotates work. Maybe even renting spaces that have been long vacant, to help support local realtors. Secondly, a focus on design education, especially to the general public, about the role of design in their lives. Communicating, and creating a new value for design.

Design Museum Boston’s crew is currently working on two new events, to be coming soon to the Boston area. When they happen, we will most certainly support in any way that we can, even if it’s just buying the special drink at the bar. We feel that this initiative is a real push forward for design, in the right direction.

“Designers are the new rock stars!”

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 – On Wednesday night we spoke to a crowd of photographers, designers, and architects about our ‘number one hit single’ Anyone Can Swiss. The response to our presentation was quite exciting. We met some really great people, and enjoyed the 20 slide, 6min 20sec format, as it is in the vein of how we work: fast, to the point, and with maximized efficiency over all.

I had lots of great conversations with many people. If you didn’t get a chance to say ‘Hey!’, then drop us a comment below!

Thanks Everyone for a great evening.

Every two years, the AIGA has it’s Best of New England design competition. If you have been following our updates (or love/hate Helvetica) you probably have seen our project Anyone Can Swiss. Well, we can now call Anyone Can Swiss “Award Winning”.

That’s right, Dirk+Weiss has won a Best of New England (BoNE) award for outstanding design. The BoNE awards only go out the best New England designers with ‘knock your socks off’ work. Admittedly, the website for Anyone Can Swiss is not your typical graphic design project, but somehow, it felt right at home inside a graphic design competition.

Overall, we feel the judges connected to the bigger picture, and maybe even had a little fun with the project. That’s exactly what we wanted. Anyone Can Swiss is not just a “Perfect Helvetica Poster Generator”, it is a social experiment for graphic designers. Sure it pushes a few buttons, and causes some to ask “is this a joke? or serious?”. That’s the whole idea: contemplation and discourse.

We would like to thank the AIGA BoNE Show Judges and AIGA Boston for taking the time consider Anyone Can Swiss as an award winning design project, and creating an opportunity for us here a Dirk+Weiss to promote what we do to the greater design community.

Now what? Well, check out our Anyone Can Swiss iPhone app. Why the iPhone? We ask simply, why just be on the web, when you can be on the web and mobile? And we feel it is a safe assumption that many of the 40,000,000 iPhone users in the US are indeed, graphic designers.

Above: Microsoft’s Surface Interface. Proprietary madness. Lets go open-source and make it available to everyone!

In typical Dirk+Weiss fashion, we are building an interface for this years 2009 AIGA BoNE Show. This kiosk combines projection and a touch input device, powered by a custom software interface.

The purpose of this kiosk is to showcase the website winners of this years Best of New England design competition. Our goal is to create an interface that is not only well designed, but extremely intuitive.

The next generation of software interface is well, interface-less. Menu’s are going away and being replaced by hand gestures and organic content design. Thanks to a generous donation from TechSuperpowers in Boston, we have access to a MacMini and other various components for hardware. Come by the show in June, to check it out!

AIGA BoNE Show 2009 Info >>