Design Nerds brainstorm in geeky green

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      Most designers thrive on constraint. It's a natural part of the mindset, whether the goal is to put together a house or a chair or the proverbial better mousetrap. As with chess diagrams, the thornier the problem, the bigger the buzz from an innovative solution.

      In that respect, the members of the Vancouver Design Nerds are typical. They're an informal but deeply committed network of more than 50 young designers and artists””architects, industrial and graphic designers, engineers, photographers, and sculptors, among others. And they like to raise the level of difficulty by turning their diverse, often lighthearted projects toward the big challenges of sustainability and green design.

      These themes aren't always explicit in their collaborations, as product designer and Design Nerds cofounder Ruben Anderson points out in conversation with the Georgia Straight. There's “nothing overtly about composting” , he says, in such undertakings as the Urban Mobility Mapping Project, the brainchild of fellow founder Eesmyal Santos-Brault in which members of the group traced their patterns of movement around the city over the course of a month. Nor is there much environmental polemic in the Urban Video Intervention Project overseen by graphic designer Alex Grunenfelder””the third of the group's original members””which threw vast figurative and abstract projections onto the structures of the Law Courts and the Sears building in downtown Vancouver, during the annual 30 Days of Sustainability festival in March. (Images of these and other Design Nerd projects can be found at www.flickr.com/photos/vancouverdesignnerds/.)

      Even so, Anderson says, such works “are very much about place and connection to it, which I consider to be kind of the core of sustainability. You can't have sustainability unless you're connected to the place.” 

      That goes, too, for the project that was lying in pieces on the floor of Anderson's living room when we chatted in his East Vancouver home a few weeks ago. At that point little more than a small two-wheeled platform and a jumble of narrow, custom-cut aluminum tubes and joints, the parts were eventually assembled into an eye-catching mobile display unit, a kind of roving billboard for promoting active lifestyles, made from 100-percent recyclable materials. Its purpose is to draw public attention to One Day, a municipal campaign to make Vancouver the world's healthiest city. (The group has another contract to build an identical unit for Better Environmentally Sound Transportation, a local organization with a self-explanatory name.) Once completed, the whole thing can be disassembled and carried to various sites in a satchel smaller than a hockey bag. This summer, you might also see it being towed by a bike at events such as Critical Mass””just as you may have seen the Design Nerds' humorous Car Park (perhaps at the Commercial Drive Festival on June 18), a '70s-era Pontiac Le Mans that's had its roof and hood sheared off and its frame filled with a small flower garden.

      Like all Design Nerd projects, the features of these projects took shape during the group's open, improvised “design jams” , where up to 25 members gather at one of the Nerds' homes and, over the course of an evening and a beer or two, spin out ideas in a kind of multidisciplinary free-for-all.

      “We basically come from our day jobs that are extremely homogenous””an architecture firm full of architects, an engineering firm full of engineers””and we go to the Nerds where it's very heterogenous, so there's a huge amount of richness in that,”  explains Anderson, whose workdays are spent designing such household items as table lamps. “We don't have a statement or a manifesto. We often ask, 'What are we about, and what are we doing?' And we never come up with an answer....I think jazz references or whatever are kind of inevitable. Just getting together and jamming things is really strong, and actually trying to expand that into how we build things””leaving things a little more flexible and kind of nebulous, and making decisions when we get to the point where we need to make the decision, as opposed to trying to have a drawing done. It takes us from being executors of someone else's design to being participants in a kind of living design.” 

      And none of it, of course, is done for immediate promises of cash or career advancement. Instead, the work is about reclaiming and enhancing the joys of creativity and problem-solving that often get shoved aside in the world of professional work.

      “Jobs are jobs, with an established order of things that you need to accomplish, and so the Nerds, instead of being task-driven or client-driven, tend to be really idea-driven,”  Anderson says. “There's pressure from the market and the client in trying to get things out in an affordable manner and make your paycheque. Whereas with the Nerds, someone comes in with an idea and we run with it as long as we want to run with it, and whatever tangential thing comes off, we explore. So it's entirely unrestricted....It doesn't work very well if by well you mean 'fast' or 'the same as what you would get if you call “Project”  in the Yellow Pages'. But if what you want is something that is a unique take on something or has a different value set to it, then that's what we do, that's how we work.” 

      The result is a unique, self-built arena for brainstorming, where the pleasures of ingenuity mix with our environment's most serious business.

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