It was a great start to Insights this year with 301 people attending the Marian Bantjes lecture. Come see Work Worth Doing on Tuesday, March 11, at 7 pm in the Walker cinema. Buy tickets here.
Inspired by their shared experience as part of the inaugural team of designers at Bruce Mau’s Institute without Boundaries program and its Massive Change project, Lorraine Gauthier and Alejandro Quinto formed their interdisciplinary studio, Work Worth Doing, in 2004 with the simple yet complicated goal of creating positive social and environmental actions for corporations, governments, and communities. Recent projects include: Now House, a demonstration project for green housing, which will turn a post–World War II house into a near-zero energy home; an installation and research project that asks the question “ What if Greenland was Africa’s water fountain?”; a proposal for civic participation in discussing democratic solutions to terrorism in Madrid involving text messaging and public projection; and Hyperborder, a research and book project about the U.S.-Mexico border in collaboration with architect Fernando Romero. Prior to Work Worth Doing, Gauthier operated her own successful communications design studio for more than 10 years, and Quinto studied new media and design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at the University of Brighton, England, and recently served as designer-in-residence at North Carolina State University. You can see more of their work here.
On a side note, Alejandro is a former Walker Fellow and MCAD alum; we met at MCAD and have been friends ever since. Alejandro is also a contributor to our blog and wrote the entry below on design and regional economic development. To see what they have been thinking about recently, we asked them a few questions:
1. What have you been obsessing about?
The interdependence of North American countries; design methods applied to sustainability problems; the economic and geographic dimensions of design activities in urban regions
2. What’s your most prized possession?
My passport and visa(s)
3. What are you reading?
Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind
4. What’s one of your guilty pleasures?
BBQ eel sushi
5. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Justice
6. What is one of the most unexpected influences on your design?
Statistical analysis of opinion surveys
7. What were you doing before you responded to this questionnaire?
Wishing late happy valentines day to a friend
8. What question do you wish we’d asked you?
Do people in Canada really live in igloos?
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