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Featured Speaker
How Play Makes the World Kinder
Tucker Viemeister, Lab Chief, Rockwell Group
Luckily, design is fun and rewarding. If cavemen didn’t play with fire, where would we be today? Young Frank Lloyd Wright played with his blocks. Eames played with bent wood, Buckminster Fuller played with ‘tensegrity.’ In order to succeed today, designers need to play with all kinds of complex and contradictory factors. Friedrich Froebel (1782 –1852), the father of Kindergarten, said: “Play is the purist, the most spiritual, product of man… It produces, therefore, joy, freedom, satisfaction, repose within and without, peace with the world. The springs of all good rest within it and go out from it.” (Sounds like design—both the verb and the results!)
Tucker Viemeister
Tucker Viemeister is Lab Chief of Rockwell Group's interactive technology design Lab, which combines digital interaction design, modeling and prototyping for hospitality, retail, packaging and products. The Lab experiments with interactive digital technology in objects, environments and stories—blurring the line between the physical and virtual. He also, along with David Rockwell, cofounded the collaborative Studio Red which was dedicated to innovation for Coca-Cola. Since joining Rockwell Group in 2004, Tucker has been instrumental in the design and development of a number of projects, including JetBlue's Marketplace at the JFK International Airport; "Hall of Fragments," an installation that opened the Corderie dell'Arsenale at the 2008 Venice Biennale; a transformation of the Sheraton's lobby in Toronto; the traveling Red Lounge for Coca-Cola; and MGM City Centre in Las Vegas.
Prior to joining Rockwell Group, Tucker helped establish important design organizations including frogdesign NY, Razorfish, Smart Design (where he led the design of the widely-acclaimed Oxo "GoodGrips" universal kitchen tools), and Springtime USA. He holds 32 US utility patents. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Staatliches Museum, Germany. He has received numerous awards, including the first Presidential Design Achievement Award in 1984. In addition to his work at Rockwell Group, Tucker teaches at New York University's ITP, is a Vice President of the Architectural League of New York, Chair of the Rowena Reed Kostellow Fund, President of the International Design Network Foundation, and is a Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America. He is a graduate of Pratt Institute and was named after a car.
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