 Hello everyone again. Hello. Can everyone sit down and settle down? Excellent. Wow, what energy in the room this evening. I've heard some inspiring conversations between teens and designers. Now that you've had time to meet and learn more about some designers in the room, I want to share a little bit about one of the teens in the room today. Hopefully if I can spot her, but I see her now. One of the teens in the room was recently identified as the winner of Cooper Hewitt's first national team design challenge. In January of this year, Cooper Hewitt and Target partnered to launch our first national design challenge for teens. Think outside student design challenge. The challenge asks teens across America to design an outdoor chair inspired by Cooper Hewitt's world-renowned collection that is functional, comfortable and unexpected. The winning chair will be produced by Target as a limited edition. The winning team would receive two chairs for her personal use and five chairs will be installed in Cooper Hewitt's garden. As part of the design experience, Cooper Hewitt hosted a finalist weekend where designers from Target mentored five teens — one of them is also here today too, Lauren — and guided them in refining their designs and presentations to a prestigious set of judges. Although all five designs were incredibly strong, one chair stood out. Claire Christensen, 16-year-old from Minnesota, is here with us today and she is the winner. Please raise your hand. Claire, in the back of the room, wave over there. She's being shy. Wave, Claire. She's in a lovely black and white dress. As the winning designer, Claire was able to visit Target's headquarters in Minneapolis to review and refine the chair production models and toured the Target headquarters to experience the day in the life of a graphic designer, a fashion designer, an industrial designer and more. What an incredible experience for a young designer. You might have already experienced Claire's chair in the room. It's to my right. If not, I encourage you to check it out before you leave. Have a seat. It's super comfortable. Again, it will be installed in the museum's garden after the tent goes down. I have super exciting news. We just heard from Target that they are excited to collaborate with us on our second Teen Design Challenge for 2017. So check back in the new year. We will post details on our websites on social media. So be sure to follow us at Cooper Hewitt's. So you can also have this incredible experience that Claire had. So thank you, Target, again, for your generous support. I want to welcome back Halim on stage to introduce the next portion of the program. I didn't have a chance to introduce myself. My name is Halim. I'm the Teen Programs Manager here at the Cooper Hewitt. I hope that you had an opportunity to enjoy conversations with the amazing designers in the room today. I have been tasked with introducing the next portion of our program. We'll actually have a brief discussion up here on stage with some of our National Design Award winners. They're going to be talking about their history with design and your potential future in design. So I would like to introduce Bertha Alexander, co-founder at Studio O Plus A, which is the 2016 National Design Award winner for interior design. Her San Francisco-based firm works on projects with some of the most dynamic companies in American business, including Facebook, Uber, Nike, and Yelp. We'll also be welcoming Matt Coddham, who is the founder and chief executive officer, chief design officer at Tell Art, the winner of the 2016 National Design Award for interaction design. Tell Art has created interactive tools and experiences for companies such as Google, Target, and the Museum of the Future for the Prime Minister's Office of the United Arab Emirates, which is a really cool project. And last but not least, we're also welcoming Jeff McFetridge, who is a graphic designer and artist based in Los Angeles, California. He was awarded the 2016 National Design Award for communication design. Throughout his design studio champion graphics, McFetridge has created works that have a uniquely human touch for major brands like MTV, Vans, Warby Parker, and Collette. Moderating the discussion this afternoon will be one of our high school students, Amir Akram. Amir is a Cooper Hewitt Design Scholar and a high school junior, as well as a future fashion entrepreneur. So please join me in welcoming the panel. Okay, this is nice to be on stage with you guys. Finally, been waiting for this all day. And I guess let's just get the ball rolling, right? So a question I really wanted to ask you guys is, what creative endeavors did you pursue as a teenager, and do you feel like any of them affected you up until this point? I mean, I could start, I mean, I really started doing what I do now, like almost to an exaggerated extent when I was a teenager, because I started basically, I understood that I wanted, there was all these things I wanted to make as a teenager based on skateboarding and snowboarding. And so to make those things, I realized I had to kind of become a designer, but basically I got asked by friends to draw on their skateboards. It was as simply as that, and then it went from there to being, you know, make actual skateboards that get printed, and then have clients in California that would make a lot of them, and it just kind of slowly, I mean, pretty quickly became kind of real. But that started when I was in high school. Building skateboard ramps, I think, was one of the first things I built as well. I think realizing that design is a lot about making specifications for something, not just having the manual skills to do it, but to imagine how to plan how much material you're going to need, and how to coordinate your friends so that people don't get hurt, and the ramp is actually something that you can use. It's more complex than it seems, and we made a lot of really terrible ones before we made a good one. So I think if there's one great principle of design, it's a process of experimentation and discovery. It's not something where you just think and think and think and then draw the plan of what you're going to make and make it. I'm sure this is probably true of you guys too. Just the act of sketching as a constant feedback loop for yourself to explore the world, explore the materials and tools that you're using is critical, especially in the best cases where you don't know where you're going, or you're given a blank piece of paper by a client and a lot of trust, and they send you off at some time. So as a teenager, my dad is a scientist, and I did not know anything about the creative world. I wanted to be an astronaut for the longest time until I didn't, and this is really embarrassing. My first endeavor in art was one of those dot drawings, and it was a photo, I still have it, a picture of a puppy in dots. And you look, you put it far enough away and it looks like a puppy, and it just blew my mind, and ever since then I've wanted to be in the arts and in a creative field. Okay. We're being urged to speak louder. I think maybe it was because of waiting. All of us. Oh, yeah, just so you guys can hear us. Can everybody hear us? Everyone loud and clear? Yeah. Perfect. All right, bouncing off what you guys said about building skateboards with your friends and making entire ramps. How deeply do you feel that having that friend group that was into the creative industries and arts affected you? I don't know that my friends were necessarily into the arts and design. I think they were enlisted by me because they wanted to skateboard. I can put them to work, and they were handy. No, I mean, I think towards later in high school, some friends emerged as a group that took arts and design seriously as something we might want to pursue as a job, not just a way of getting to the ends of the other things we wanted to do as kids and started to think, what does it mean to go to college for this? And so, yeah, by mid-high school or early high school, I was already spending a lot of time asking questions with my teachers and practicing drawing, and I think if there's one essential skill, you don't have to be able to draw the perfect likeness of a face, but practicing visually, communicating, practicing drawing is good all the time. And so, from that, it gets into building a portfolio of photography and some sculpture and some drawings, and then I applied to RISD, who's here in the back room, and ended up spending five years there as a student and then another 10 years as faculty, so it was really important during those years to start drawing with friends. Yeah, and I mean, I was telling some students earlier that if you... For me, I was involved in cultures that needed a lot of graphics. At the time, it was punk music and skateboarding, it was a classic 80s cultural moment, and it needed all kinds of stuff. It needed zines, it needed t-shirts, it needed graphics on skateboard, so to satiate that demand, you just ended up making stuff, and it almost complicates it now to call that design. When in reality, I was just making stuff for my friends. So if you can't... I was telling a student, if you can't make a t-shirt that your friend would wear, no one will wear it. I was starting in that macro zone where it was this inner circle, and you're working to just satiate a need, because there's stuff that needed to get made seemingly. Bands needed flyers. Bands had logos. I don't even know why a band doesn't need a logo, but you decide our band needs a logo. So then you volunteer, like, I'm the one to make it, and then is that a design practice? I don't know, but you're entertaining your friends, and then the circle gets wider and wider. So it's like friends of friends. Friends of friends of friends, other cities, other parts of the world that it goes and goes. And I think that's really essential, and you can call that design, you can call it whatever you want. For me, like, calling things design, at a point, it became totally empowering, because it was basically saying, I can do anything. Like, I can make an animation, I can make art, I can do a logo for you. So it was this kind of, like, powerful tool as a description of myself. What about you, Daniel? Yeah, so in high school, I did not have any friends that were in the arts at all. The closest thing was music. Everybody was into, you know, new wave and connection that I had with my friends. But really, for me, I was forging new ground with myself, like, learning what the arts was and just being out there. That's what I was doing. And I barely understood what I was doing, but I just tried to push forward. Alright, moving back to what some of you guys mentioned about school, do you think it's really a wise decision to get a degree solely in design? Like, do any of you have degrees or licenses that allow you to do other things or other practices? So, in high school, I continued not having a lot of friends in the arts, because I went to San Jose State University in San Jose. It was a general education college. I purposely chose to do that because I wanted to get a broader education. I studied fine arts, and I ended up landing in textile arts. I was the first textile major, but I was doing installation art. So I was just thinking about art and design as this one big blob. I think in political science, I was doing everything or planning. So it was just... What I loved about not going to art school was that I got a much broader education. I think you can go both paths. I ended up after undergrad going to the GSD at Harvard and studying landscape architecture, and then going to Berkeley and finishing in landscape architecture, and then I became a interior designer. So, you know, there's no perfect path that really is up to you. And I think if you are super passionate, you know exactly what you want to do. I think art school is great. Sometimes I wish I'd gone to RISD or something like that. I took my path, and it got me where I got to go, kind of like this, but... Yeah, that's great. And a lot of the designers that we work with and some of the best designers that I know started off with general education, and you found that basis in philosophy or in social sciences or even cognitive sciences very useful. Even doctors who then decided they wanted to be engineers afterwards. I did sort of the opposite path where I started knowing that I wanted to do fine arts pretty quickly realized that that for me actually meant industrial design because I was really interested in providing something that was reliably useful to people, not just for self-expression, but also to provide people with new ways of engaging with the world and manufacturing. And then later started working on a project that was a medical project for a simulator and then found myself studying medicine for four and a half years and then being on the federal disaster medical team and even taking time away from design to just be paramedic and it can go both ways. I think design is a pretty good base for finding the logic and observing things in the world and finding needs and then going out and specializing later gives you the opportunity to apply it in a more focused way. Yeah, I mean, I had a broad commercial art. It was called Commercial Art Program. And then I went to Cal Arts to go to grad school. But for me, I feel really lucky. I think there's one really important factor is I went to a local art college. I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. And so my undergraduate education was basically free. And I think that that is also really critical. At that time, I wouldn't have been ready for a Cal Arts undergraduate education or a RISD education. I would have got a fantastic education. I don't know what would have happened at that time. But the crippling student loans would have meant that I wouldn't have been able to go to grad school. And grad school, there's more scholarship money available. There's more kind of, you've kind of grown into an ability, I feel like, to choose more specifically what you're doing. Like, because like I say, design, if you're interested in design, it's super broad. And so I feel really lucky of the path that I just happened to take. It wasn't orchestrated that I was able to graduate without these huge student loans so that I could basically start my practice immediately. And I could start doing what I've known what I just wanted to do since high school and I could just do it instead of like, okay, I'm going to take a job and like wait to do this thing I want to do, which is basically run my own studio. I think too, it's worth, even though it's not as plentiful as it should be, there are a lot of financial aid and scholarship programs in the world that we're very lucky to have. I mean, I had to take three years off between high school and college and keep making my portfolio. But because the first time I applied, I got accepted, but it was going to put me in debt forever. And I ended up going to a bachelor's, a fine arts at RISD, a bachelor's of industrial design at RISD, totally without tuition, and then a master's degree in Umeå, Sweden, again without any tuition. But it took really, really working hard and constantly having my portfolio looked at by friends and teachers and being very entrepreneurial about my own and being able to go to school and have to take it on as your own business. Yeah, approach education as an entrepreneur, not as a customer. Looking at YouTube, and YouTube, everyone's talking about how they took, how they look at these different approaches. All of us are trying to decide, should we be focused? Should we think about all these different forms of design, like you said, be broad? What do you guys think is really the smartest in this day and age for teenagers like us? I mean, I think it's, I think it's every person is different. I think you have to have a personal awareness of when to work to your strengths and when to challenge yourself. There are times when you should not take on a huge challenge. You should just do what you know you're great at and follow that path. But if you just follow this thing like, I only want to design streetwear, you know, like you're going to be like, your world is going to be closed and the world is not like that. We don't live, I think more than ever, the world is becoming more diverse and foggy. So I think it's like, it is, I think it's just, I mean, I'm basically like reading what you're saying. It's just difficult. But you know, I think it's, that is like an essential skill set. It's like knowing yourself and being able to decode your interests and your passions and to be able to put them in motion, you know? I think it's incredible opportunities to self-teach these days. There's all kinds of great online programs but also just even in the world of software because I work a lot with computers. If I want to learn a new program, I don't go back to school. I sign up for $39 for lynda.com for a month and I just start studying and I come out the other side knowing how to use Rhino. In a week. In a month I've built everything in my apartment and I can go out and show people, you know, I might not have a... Honestly, people who come to us looking for jobs don't lead with, here's my college degrees. They lead with, here are some of the things that I've made. And if those things are great and they feel like a really good culture fit and they're going to drive themselves to become better and contribute, it doesn't matter if they went to high school, frankly, while you should all graduate. I didn't graduate from high school and I got a GED and then... You have to just dig it out, but it's possible to build a very proper, very highly creative vocational practice without having it go through a regular academic process. Yeah, I would say if you absolutely know what you want to do, then go for it. But I'm definitely biased because I took that circuitous path and I feel like it really influences the way I look at interior design, the way I look at the arts in general and the life in general. So, and I would... If somebody asked me to tell them what to do, that's what I would say, is learn as much as you can about all the different arts. But again, I think everybody has his own path and I also like to hire people that aren't just interior designers, that they have some other passion or some other creative outlet, like maybe they're a welder or a writer. We have a writer on our staff that writes novels and we try to help them find time for these other creative outlets because I think that fuels and feeds a more creative discourse within interior design as well. But as a junior designer, I would say I would hire somebody that has a skill, like something that you might learn on a linda. So, there's a balance that you have to do here. You have to definitely get skilled in what you want to do. I mean, that means learn Rhino or learn SketchUp or learn Revit or AutoCAD. But also, don't do that with blinders on. Look at the world and see, there's inspiration from every... I was talking to Amir and I was saying that I'm inspired by fashion. So, you've got to look at everything. Now, we've been talking a lot about learning and taking these different routes. But have any of you guys had a backup plan? How do you even feel about the idea of having a backup plan? And I could answer that. I'm a little... I'm conflicted because my backup plan was landscape architecture which ended up kind of taking me in a whole other route and coming back. And one of my biggest regrets was the guts to go for an MFA to just do fine arts. It scared me too much not to have a degree and not be able to go out and get a job. So, I think... I don't know. I guess I'm not really answering the question. But I guess what I'm saying is if you're conflicted and you don't know, then that's okay. Yeah, I don't think it's really a backup plan a supporting plan was even when I was in my last years of college I started teaching continuing education night classes to people who just wanted to pick up a new skill like Photoshop or Maya or something like that. And that helped me to pay my rent as I finished college. And then when I finished and we wanted to start a company at least for the first few years my partner and I were able to pay ourselves very little the people we were hiring were making much more than we were but we were able to feed ourselves luckily we didn't have families and a lot of responsibility in the world but we taught classes. So, for two days a week for ten years I taught studios at RISD and used that money to feed myself and took very little income from our company that slowly gradated into a normal life where now I teach four or five weeks a year as supplemental, as pleasure and exploration and socially fulfilling. I mean I had a very definitive moment when I was in high school for my summer job I took a job doing picture framing and I took that I had this sensation of like picture framing was my license to do whatever I wanted for the rest of my life because I could survive as a picture framer and they need picture framers all over the world yeah it's expensive so I just took it on it's like that's it I can do so as much as it was like a backup plan and then the next summer though I got a job in an art department in a t-shirt shop like doing separation like well printing so then I was like that's my new backup plan but then I went back the next summer and they gave me a job in the art department like actually drawing the t-shirts and then suddenly my backup plan was like oh that's just the plan like I'm just drawing t-shirts now and then I could continue on I think there's that and then also I think like you know do jobs for $20 like start like oh like my soccer team means a logo 20 bucks I mean I did a job last month and it was $200 like I my rate is the same as it was when I was in high school basically like I think the first band I did a logo for paid me $200 and I did that last month and I think it's like really essential like get in the habit of like this is the plan like I'm doing it already like sell like make a shirt and don't give it away like you could charge a dollar you know and just make it like this is like that was a type of commitment to that of participating and then everybody then your friends are invested in their participating as well and whatever that takes I think this is a really important point I think a friend of mine Jack just a tiny little thing to say just my friend Jack just says if you want people to hire you to do something just start doing it yeah don't prepare and worry about how to get there just start making that stuff and people will start thinking of you as the guy who makes t-shirts yeah backup plan is the plan thank you guys for that little end clip I hope you guys have enjoyed hearing them talk and you've been taking notes hopefully amazing people to learn from thank you so before you go I gave Amir an opportunity to ask all of his questions but we do have mics up here and I did want to open the floor so that any of you who have questions for the panelists would have an opportunity to ask so we've already talked about sort of how to prepare how to get started right now not focusing necessarily on one thing and having a backup plan that becomes your plan or plan that becomes your backup plan so I wanted to give an opportunity to you to also ask the questions that you might have burning deep inside so don't be shy there's a mic here and a mic here and we have time for just a handful of questions so this is your one opportunity to ask a national design winner in front of a group of people a burning question please come up to the mic and just say your name and ask your question hi my name is Elijah Brown and I have a question what's the hardest thing that you guys had to overcome in designing as a designer anyone in particular for me I mean it's like the difficulty came because like I was saying I was doing what I was doing I was doing what I was doing already in high school and so there was a point when I graduated from college is that I realized I was already doing what I was doing and that there was no way I wasn't going to get bored of doing it so that's when I chose to go to grad school and I just completely stopped doing everything I was doing to rethink and so it wasn't about who I worked for or what my work looked like but I decided I had to totally change my frame of reference and my thinking and that was an internal challenge but a challenge I guess I started I just fell into your design and here I am today it's kind of amazing and I fell into it by just starting my own company and I think that was the hardest thing I've ever done but I didn't know that it was because I didn't know any better so just work and do it and don't worry about if it's hard or not just do it I think having our own companies I think can all sympathize with them at some point and better at design and then you have something to offer people and then you realize that you have to run a business too and that you need to learn something about business and I think my partner and I went on for years feeling like there was something in this magical black box that business people knew that we didn't know and we were sort of amateurishly going about selling and paying people but it turns out that we did fine and it was 20 years ago and we have 45 employees and of course we asked a lot of questions and we made some mistakes but I think realizing at some point I thought have I stopped being a designer to be a sales person but actually what I was doing was talking persuasively with people about something I was passionate about which was design and so you constantly come to if you take an entrepreneurial route you have to balance both the business side with the active making and now luckily we've been in business long enough that I can go back to just fooling around in the office most of the time and sometimes I have to do proper adult stuff Hi, my name is Joyce nice to meet you guys. I know that with technology advancing and everything there are like a lot of apps that allow you to just like sketch on your tablet or do creative things on like technology. How do you think technology has like influenced the way you channel your creativity? Simply I just think that any tool or material that we use to make anything leaves some mark on the thing that we make as much as we'd like to think that we're just focusing on the end user and their needs or the thing that we want to make you have to kind of be careful and very aware of the tools you use. Digital things are just as material in a way as a hammer or you know a chisel or something like that. They have a very direct effect and we just have to stay conscious of them and maintain a level of craftsmanship that we know how to control that so it doesn't get away from us. Yeah, I mean my for me like starting like I was very lucky that I wouldn't be able to do what I did if computer didn't the computer didn't come out basically when in the early 90s and so that I could just be me and produce the amount of work I did in the way I did just in my living like my bedroom basically and that technology is now completely changed but for you that technology will completely change again by the time you become a professional so you just are going to change with it and it's going to become for me it was about autonomy even I don't even know how you could become more autonomous because now you can then share that work instantly. I was like oh I'm lucky I can send this stuff to print now it's just like send so that will be it'll be exponential for this generation. For me it's kind of about technology serving as a library like I have so much stuff like visual images and articles and references to some designer or some product or something and so just keeping all of that organized is where technology really helped me a lot and also I work a lot very much analog and I love to bring things into the computer and see what happens and try to take something farther through some program and so those are the two ways I use technology. Thank you. Well I heard from you guys that one of you guys was designing we're designing on skateboards of your friends that like that take you somewhere that like you continue on your materials and stuff like that and how did it work out? Well yeah I mean it just happened right away because it was like I drew on my friend skateboard and then he became a pro snowboarder so then he told that company oh this guy will draw on my snowboard and I was just a kid but I drew the snowboard and then that company said oh when you make all our snowboards so I made all their snowboards and then I did it again for another season and I was still just out of high school so when I met the guy he was like whoa you just a kid but through that process it was basically like in one project I learned the process of making everything because I learned about silk screening I learned about printing dye inks on surfaces how to send stuff FedEx like I didn't know how to so I learned how to send stuff so like through drawing felt pen it just I quickly went to drawing things on a huge illustration board and then the next year I did it all digitally which was one of the first snowboards ever made digitally it was in the I mean it was 1980 something and it crashed all their computers because no one had done it but I didn't know because I thought how else do you make this stuff and so but yeah so that's what I was saying like if you do something small but it resonates it can resonate very quickly and that you know like like the free like the free bag is printed with the same technology as like a Gucci jacket or a Kanye West t-shirt it's all made with silk screen the same way so it's like context and you know velocity of how you're getting the culture but everything is made like basically in the same way by the same kind of group of people so it's just how you participate and how you put yourself in that world so I hate to interrupt because I love when these conversations start to happen and I think that if we had more time we would have more time for more questions from all of you I'm actually going to cut Tommy off I'm sorry I hope you forgive me and actually thank all of you for coming today especially all of the designers I hope we can give our panelists a round of applause for being such good sports thank you and I hope you'll give a mirror a round of applause for asking such great questions I want to thank you all for coming today if you don't know about the teen programs at the Cooper Hewitt please check us out on our website it's cooperhewitt.org backslash design prep that's where we have free teen programs where we work with awesome designers like the ones in this room all the time so they're for you to sign up and participate I just want to say thank you so much for spending your time here this afternoon please don't forget to take everything with you that you brought and enjoy the rest of your evening so please give one more round of applause to the designers I'm going to end with a thank you to Target for their amazing funding and a thank you to you for putting up with what was a little bit of a hot room today thank you and have a great afternoon