I was recently on a panel at the University YWCA in Champaign called “Institutional Racism 101.” This is part of a series the YW presents that provides participants a “racial justice certificate” when the series concludes. Gia Lewis-Smallwood organizes the series. Kudos to her and the Y! I was pleased to meet a whole new […]
Mozilla Ignite “Killer” Apps
The Mozilla Foundation has joined with the National Science Foundation and U.S. Ignite to sponsor a “killer app” challenge. The deadline is August 23. Today I submitted my idea, which you can see here along with many, many others. (There are monetary prizes.) This is the 150th anniversary of a mass execution of 38 Dakota […]
Bondville Stop of the “Inter-Urban” Project
What do a panel truck, a jib crane and the remains of a wooden grain elevator have in common? All are being repurposed by an energetic, volunteer team of sculptors and designers for Urbana Land Arts Inter-Urban project. When it is all finished (soon–in August 2012!), it will be a mobile exhibition space, with the […]
Illinois and Imagining America
I know that I am comparing apples and oranges when I complain that the University of Illinois is paying $175,000 to Lisa Troyer to leave but that it cannot find $5,000 to pay dues to maintain UIUC membership in Imagining America. Troyer is former chief of staff to former UI President Michael Hogan, and now […]
Spaces of Connection
The Erasing Boundaries Project hosted a national symposium in April 2011 in New York City called “Educating at the Boundaries: Community Matters.” The project is a collaboration among landscape architecture, architecture and planning faculties, students and community partners. This was the second symposium; the first was held in 2008. The goals include examining the pedagogy […]
Of Rockets and Humanities
Speaking a year ago at the 50 Years of Public Computing at UI symposium (April 15, 2010), Professor Marc Snir noted that technologists at times have been uninterested in the outcomes of their inventions: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.” Of Community Informatics (CI), Snir noted: […]
Responsive Architecture
I had the good fortune to hear Tristan Sterk talk the other night in Champaign. He’s teaching now at the Art Institute of Chicago, and came down at the invitation of Therese Tierney, an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the U of I. Tristan is principal of the Office of Robotic Architectural […]
Regional Relationships
The collaborative artist team, Regional Relationships (RR), has just launched its first edition! Matthew Friday, the first artist commissioned by RR, has been working in southern Ohio with flooded mines. He writes of “interlocking networks of abandoned mines” that number about 12,000. A bacteria has colonized the flooded underground areas and, as part of their […]
BEE: Built Environment Education
I have been asked about integrating aspects of architectural history into K-12 curricula, which is something I did on a very small scale when my kids were in elementary school in the 1990s. I never went so far as to align the activities we did with state standards, but that’s because I worked closely with […]
Ubuntu
Last Thursday (December 11), I attended a panel organized by a working group at the University of Illinois called Ubuntu. Computer scientists kind of colonized the word by using it to describe a Debian-based Linux distribution. But in any case, Ubuntu is a Xhosa and Zulu word describing a philosophy of community and sharing. And […]
