ID [PNW]

Kodak Brownie Junior - Photo by J.A. Morris This summer has been busy with new progress on the Teague documentary and biography.  Here's a quick summary: New Alliances             Thanks to Vicki Matranga , I connected with Charlie Myers , son of C. Stowe Myers, partner at the Teague New York office.  Charlie has compiled films, audio interviews, and photographs and is offering them for us to use in the doc.  I just received a DVD of digitized 8mm film of the Teague office from 1939 to 1943.  It has great scenes of employee designers working, drawing, rendering, making models, smoking pipes and having parties.  Awesome stuff, thanks Charlie!             Gifford Jackson was a designer at the Teague office from 1954 to 64 and I was recently introduced to him through Budd Steinhilber.  He was personal friends with the Teague family.  He live...

A tapestry by William Morris in 1879. The theme of this year’s IDSA International Conference in Portland, OR was D.I.Y.   Some of the presenters were incredibly talented and interesting; others were a bit smug and self-important.    While listening to the creator of Etsy.com gloat about how “revolutionary” they were by selling handcrafted items on their website, I was reminded of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement of 100 years ago.  This Etsy-DIY can be described as people with internet access and spare time making expensive crafty non-essential items for other rich people with internet access.  That’s all it is.  This has very limited impact on only the richest 1% of the world.  In fact it is more elitist and limited than what a professional industrial designer can do who is designing a $20 mobile phone for Nokia, which today allows communication for millions of poor Africans and Indians. So, why is mass production inherentl...