Sol of the City


You might think the idea of designing solar powered products in the shadowed canyons of New York to be, well, misplaced. But Amelia Amon sees the city's density as environmentally positive as well as a source of connections, both professional and electrical. And if you get your Cherry Garcia cone from a solar powered ice cream cart at your next Phish concert, you'll be seeing one of her designs.

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The Digital Body Builder
(or, Dances with Keyboards)


Starting out as a designer of science fiction book covers, Shelley Eshkar is now creating digital interpretations of the human form – stuff that itself could have been the subject of a sci fi novel. His recent works, with collaborator Paul Kaiser, interpreted the dance forms of Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones. Now he wants to digitize the movements of regular New Yorkers.

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The Full Circle of 360 Design Group

The Duchamp of Dumpster Diving

I Know What You Bought Last Summer

From a designer's perspective, there is no other place like New York. The constant stimulation, the fast pace, the lack of space, the creativity all make New York an exciting and difficult environment to be a designer.

Like few other places in the world, we have a density and critical mass of people working in virtually every known – and some unknown – areas of design.

Through an interview format, Visual Seltzer will look at and talk with members of that critical mass: industrial designers and graphic artists, architects and fashion designers, animators and jewelry designers. Not the standard "what do you do?" interview, but more specifically a look at what the intersection of the artist and the city means. Would their work be different (or there at all) if they were working some place else? Is it the resources of the city? Is it the people? Is it the urgency and survival?

We're going to talk with some of the people who aren't yet on the covers of ID or New York Magazine; and some people and ideas that are maybe still below the radar.

We're going to look not just at individual designers, but at the intersections of the designer and the city, and at designer and community as well. Collaboration, influence, support.

The medium of the web will let us present the interviews in varying forms. In addition to print style interviews, we'll be bringing images and drawings, animations, links and audio as we get this all figured out.

We'll try to present new interviews every few weeks. If you have suggestions for interviewees – designers you'd like to know more about – please let us know.

Editors:
Lori Greenberg (lori@visualseltzer.com)
David Bergman (david@visualseltzer.com)