Join the Corzo Center for the Creative Economy and DesignPhiladelphia, in partnership with the University of the Arts, for our annual spring lecture series, Creating with Constraints. The series features Diana Lind, Executive Director and Editor in Chief of Next City (February 19); noted author and consultant Medard Gabel (March 5); and designer Aaron Goldblatt, with urban designer and planner Leah Murphy (April 16).
In an affluent society like ours, we seem to have lost the ability to invent with limited resources. After all, when you’ve got money, natural resources, and the authority that comes from being a world power — perhaps “the” world power — we assume that muscle and resources will be enough to buy us out of a problem or solve a crisis. Since the Second World War, we have not had to live with constraints — the limit of resource, money, and authority. We’ve begun to forget, and we are not teaching our young how to create using limited resources. In fact, we’ve too often built on the principle that only the “great” was worth doing and the merely “doable” was not good enough.
That’s the theory we will explore in Creating with Constraints. It seems, in fact, that the new energy for creation and invention is now often found in developing countries and emerging economies where Robinson Crusoe-like, those inventing and creating take the fragments of the past and repurpose and reshape them to build something new.
We are now entering a resource weak economy. The generosity of resources that fueled our economy over the last 70 years is rapidly fading. If we are to regain our purpose and renew our ability to invent our future we’ll need to relearn how to work with limited resources, often building a model that illustrates the idea before attempting to build the “grand” version of it.
Program descriptions:
Events will be held on Tuesdays from 6pm – 7:30pm at The University of the Arts, CBS Auditorium, Hamilton Hall, located at 320 South Broad Street (at the corner of Broad and Pine Streets). The series is free and open to the public; registration is encouraged.
February 19
Diana Lind
The Resourceful City: How Cities Flourish Despite Constraints
Next City executive director and editor in chief looks at cities that have developed unusual responses to their financial, spatial or social constraints, becoming paragons of design, culture and creativity.
March 5
Medard Gabel
Designing for the Planet
Author and co-founder of The World Game Institute with Buckminster Fuller, Medard Gabel discusses an interactive program that transforms audience into problem solvers. You are in charge of a very large spacecraft. And something very serious has gone wrong. What are you going to do?
April 16
Leah Murphy and Aaron Goldblatt
The Making of a Viaduct Green
Urban designer and exhibition designer examine how two former railway lines — a stretch of fifty city blocks — can become a future garden, a civic project that can enhance the quality of life, cultural landscape and economic vitality of Philadelphia. For information about a tour of the proposed VIADUCTgreene project, visit corzocenter.uarts.edu.
