scribed by Collective Next

Well, we had a great Friday night. As we warned you Friday morning, we participated in a First Friday event at the Design Museum Boston Store, along with Taza Chocolate, Cocobeet, and DJ DayGlow. They supplied the chocolate, the juice, and the music, while we scribed on the outside windows and engaged people inside and outside the store in questions about design and other exercises.

The exercises inside the packed store were fun and provocative: We asked people to mash up two very different businesses into a joint hybrid product. There were two choices: a mix of glasses maker Warby Parker and real estate website Zillow, and a blend of online magazine The Huffington Post and travel website Kayak. Some of the responses were provocative, some were silly, and some we didn’t quite get. But some were gems. Among our favorites: “The Huffing-Yak, the place to hear of the best ticket prices based on popular gossip,” and “Zillow Parker,” which offers a map of where the best sunglasses are available. Someone also wrote “Huff the Magic Kayak” without any further explanation. We’re pretty sure that person used “huff” as a verb, but who knows?

ideas from our design challenge

people filling out the design challenge

a snippet of an answer

Outside, our ace scribes Kris HenryGretchen Ruppert-Allen, and Liz Ball depicted and connected the many ideas about design that people on the street shared with us as they stopped for some chocolate or a chat about design with our Mason Smith. It was an unusual environment for our scribes, who don’t often get a chance to show their work on a major city street during rush hour. 

As you’ll see below, the questions and the proposals were all over the place. Everyone has his or her own idiosyncratic definition of what design is and what design can do; it was exciting to see those definitions and proposals bounce off one another.

Thanks to Sam and Brooke at Design Museum Boston for including us, and we hope to get in trouble with them again real soon. And here’s a bit more of what it looked like …  

 Liz and Mason collaborative scribing

 

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