ICA/AIGA DESIGN SERIES

Design and Play

Featuring Constantin Boym, Chris Foster, Jim Crawford, and Ellen Lupton
Looking at the prevalence of playful, brightly colored, and unique design across many design disciplines, the panelists will address how their work has developed in recent years and why people want to play.

Constantin Boym
Constantin Boym founded Boym Partners Inc in New York 1986. The studio's designs include tableware for Alessi, watches for Swatch, showrooms and retail displays for Vitra, and exhibition installations for several museums including Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Objects designed by Boym Partners are included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Boym Partners are recipients of eight I.D. Magazine Annual Design Awards, two Federal Design Achievement Awards, and in 2005 were finalists in the National Design Awards in Product Design. Boym is the author of New Russian Design, and the studio's work was the subject of Curious Boym: Design Works, published in 2002 and recipient of an I.D. Magazine Design Award.

Chris Foster
Foster is Senior Designer at Harmonix Music Systems, a video game development company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Known for their many highly acclaimed and top-selling music video games, Harmonix is perhaps best known as the developer of Rock Band as well as the original developer of the wildly popular Guitar Hero series. Previously, Foster worked for Turbine (Lead Designer) and Impressions Software (Game Designer / Producer).

Jim Crawford
In 2002 Crawford and Gregory Blum founded STRANGEco, the foremost purveyor of artist-based toys, design objects and curiosities. STRANGEco has been instrumental in popularizing international Designer Toy culture by creating, distributing and promoting Art Toys in the U.S. and abroad.

Ellen Lupton
Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking, and curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She is the author of several books, including Thinking with Type,  D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself , and most recently, Graphic Design: The New Basics. Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the U.S. She has contributed to various design magazines, including Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis. She has a regular column, "The El Word," in Readymade magazine. Her editorial illustrations have been published in The New York Times. A frequent lecturer around the U.S. and the world, Lupton will speak about design to anyone who will listen.

This program has been made possible through the generosity of