Wednesday, July 18 - Your Letters to Phil Knight (Lismary)

Dear Phil Knight,

The situation with the workers in Nike sweatshops is just really painful and disappointing at the highest level of unfairness.

The poverty is just really depressing in Indonesia. As a human being it’s hard to survive with this economic situation that is happening because your workers are not getting paid fairly enough.

I never thought that behind the amazing shoe company (Nike) there’s a horrible history and truth.

Please try to stop this unfairness. People in Indonesia die every day because they can’t afford a decent meal.

Children are starving and dying because of poverty.

Please...

Make Nike better...

Make the world better.

Sincerely,

Lismary Tejeda

Wednesday, July 18 - Instructor Seth Rader Interviews Jim Keady

Seth spoke with Jim Keady after his presentation. Check out the interview here.

Wednesday, July 18 - Jim Keady from Educating for Justice Visits

Caption: Lismarie, Tiffany, Jim, Yan Yan, Glen and Mauric in the front.


Today it was raining buckets and Jim Keady visited our group to discuss why he left his coaching job at St. John's (he didn't want to wear the Nike logo).

After Jim founded Educating for Justice, he traveled to Indonesia with Leslie Kretzu to investigate the Nike corporation. Nike wouldn't let Jim and Leslie visit their factories. So they decided that while they were living in Indonesia, they would live on $1.25 a day -- the same salary received by a Nike factory worker.

Discussion questions:

1) Describe something specific you learned from Jim's documentary, Behind the Swoosh.

2) Describe your favorite part of Jim's talk.

3) Now that you know what you know about Nike, how will you respond?

4) Listen to Jim's audio comment posted here. Tell us what you think about this comment.

Tuesday, July 17 - Your Logos and Design Work

Just a sampling of your design work.

Wednesday, July 11th (PM) - Cool Interviews

After learning that design is not only used to create cool, but also to help make people's lives better in significant ways, we conducted a few interviews at Cooper Hewitt.

Here's Felix's interview with instructor Seth Rader, posted on Radio4All.

Check back later for more!

Also, here's Leanne's interview with the Crossroads company (Felix, Glen and Malachi).

Check back later for an explanation of this project.

Wednesday, July 11th (AM) -- Cool by Design

Today we visited the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Our tour guide took us to the garden where we explored the Design for the Other 90% exhibit. Cooper Hewitt's website tells us that "this exhibition highlights the growing trend among designers to create affordable and socially responsible objects for the vast majority of the world's population (90 percent) not traditionally serviced by professional designers."

We participated in a hands-on demonstration so we could see the value in certain designs that allow people in Africa to effectively pump, filter, and carry water.

Below are three inventions we used:
1) a ceramic water filter coated with silver;
2) a bamboo treadle pump;
3) a q-drum for carrying water

After we pumped water into the q-drum, we had a relay race, so we could see which was faster -- moving water with two clumsy buckets or moving water with a q-drum. Here's a picture of Malachi pulling the q-drum.

Tuesday, July 10th (PM) - Cool Hunt!

In the afternoon, we toured Hunter College and ate in the Hunter cafeteria.

After this break, we were ready to hunt for cool online. We used Mac laptops (loaned to us by the tech center in C104) to search for the items we found most desirable. Here's a sampling of items we found and why we liked them:

I think this shoe is cool because it has a CD player in there. (Yan Yan)

Side kicks are cool because you get to text message your friends, talk on the phone, play games, and get on the internet. (Mory)

These Dr. Jays show how I like different styles and also how I love jumpers. I think they are really cool and cute. (Rita)

I love crazy fashion. I just like being my own self, being a leader not a follower. (Brittney)

Tuesday, July 10th (AM) - Ranking Cool

Today we were joined by professor Jessica Hochman from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Jessica studies the media and is an expert on cool.

To begin the day, we looked at a series of cool (iPods!) and not so cool (Birkenstock sandals!) items assembled by Jessica. We each chose our own top five. Then we worked together in two teams to create our Cool Lines (we ranked the items from most cool to least).

Here's team 1's cool line:

Here's team 2's cool line:

Later in the day, we watched the Merchants of Cool, a six-part video about teens and trends. Lunch was rubbery pizza (for the last time!)

Niketown: Felix, Mory, Tiffany

We saw clothing from Malaysia. (Mory)


The countries that the most clothing was made from was Malaysia and Korea. The most interesting interview that we did was the one with Nelson. He was a crazy guy who looked like he got in a big fight. He had a black eye and was obsessed with saying that all rich people were fake. I liked that at least one of the people that we were interviewing actually guessed the country he was wearing. (Felix)

Listen to Felix's interview with Jimmy Lee.


Most of the people we interviewed had shirts made in Korea, Malaysia, Italy, Indonesia, China, and Thailand. The most interesting interview was a Chinese guy named Jimmy Lee a Chinese that worked at the Nike store. He was very nice and he folded the clothing very well. He was 20 years old. His shirt was made from Malaysia and his sneakers were made in Vietnam. He describes his personal style as unique. (Tiffany)

Central Park - Glen, Lizmary, Brittney

The clothes we saw when we were interviewing people were from Sri Lanka, Portugal, Mexico, China, and Turkey. The interview that I liked the most was a girl from Germany. She had things from all over the world. Her shirt was from Portugal, her skirt was made from Tokyo, and her shoes were from China. It was interesting because she was from out of this country and had things from out of this country and she purchased all her clothes from the U.S.A. (Glen)


My group met this really nice guy. He really didn’t know how to speak English and he was 37. The guy didn’t really care about fashion and his shirt was from this company named Turkey. He told Mr. Seth that he was homeless and found any shirt. (Brittney)

Listen to Brittany's interview with Andrew (not described above).

My group and I met an interesting man that was from Cuba and asked him what kind of clothes he wears. he sincerely reponded that he didn't care about fashion and that he was okay with the fact that he couldn't afford much. I asked himw where his shirt was made and found out it was not made in the United States -- it was made in Turkey. The countries I saw the most were China and Vietnam; it was interesting that people didn't know they wear clothes from other countries. (Lizmary)

Madison & 72nd: Rita, Yan Yan, Chris

I really liked two interviews; one was about brothers who were on vacation. (Rita)


What I like most is to ask people where their clothing was made and asking them what they think their personal style is and taking the picture of them. In this activity, what I liked least is finding the people who would let us interview them -- most people don't want us interview them. (Yan Yan)


My most interesting interview was a young man whose name I forgot. I found it interesting because my style of dressing and his style of dressing were similar in some ways. He described his style of dressing as kind of a school boy look. He was dressed in a green baseball cap, green dress shirt, fitted jeans, and green Nikes. The young man told me in the interview that everything he had on was made in China which I seriously doubted. I wanted to check his shirt, but he was in a hurry. (Chris S.)


I thought this woman was a tough interview. She didn't answer our questions immediately -- she just wanted to know why we were out in the street talking about clothing. (Leanne)

What Did You See?

Where did you go today?



What kinds of tags did you see (what countries were they from)?

What was your favorite interview? What did the person look like? What kind of style did they have? What was the most interesting thing they said?

Welcome, everyone!

Your instructors for this

course are Leanne, Seth,

Edwin, and Jessica.