Welcome to Visionarc.org

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A couple of months ago we passed the one year mark since we began operating out of our New York office as VisionArc. We thought it was about the right time to create an online presence for ourselves.
Welcome to VisionArc.org.

The idea is that this will become a place to communicate our ongoing work as we aim to embed design practice into places where it isn’t usually found. What we’re also interested in is that the site function as a platform to communicate some of the issues we try to wrap our minds around each day. Here is the first of many discussion posts that we hope will become a regular way for us to talk informally about our own ongoing projects and partnerships, as well as loose ideas, emerging research, publications and current events out there in the rest of the world.

As this is our first post, we wanted to fill everyone in on the last year.

In the last year, VisionArc has reached out to a broad network of partners from around the world. We have connected ourselves to a diverse spectrum of issues ranging from design, to climate, energy, water and technology as well as different educational and institutional agendas. Last summer, we were fortunate to have had the help of Nora, Derek and Julia, who were invaluable in assisting to research and develop a project entitled Design Blind Spots 2050. Later in the year the project went to Singapore and was presented at the 2009 ICSID World Design Congress. Shortly afterward, we were asked to complete a mapping study in which to reorganize and re-conceptualize the Council area of The World Economic Forum’s 2009 Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai.

2010 has been an exciting year as we have embarked on and wrapped up a number of different collaborations here in New York and beyond- from partnering with the Brooklyn Public Library for the unique challenge of reorganizing their materials circulation system, to developing a new institutional model to support research and investment in offshore energy technology with the Ocean Energy Institute in Maine. As we continue to engage different environmental advocacy groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, we anticipate many other opportunities to test how design strategy can become an increasingly integral function within complex environmental challenges. Oh, and did we mention that we recently opened an office in Tokyo? Watch out for VisionArc news from across the Pacific!

As summer is just about under way, we’d like to welcome Arielle to VisionArc. She’s coming to us from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and will be collaborating with us for the summer to help develop a new project called Water Guide 2010. Stay tuned for more posts on this as we develop it further.

So with that, here we are, and stay tuned!

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