I had a great team giving a talk about Mass Made Soul this week, hosted by the Industrial Design and MDes Product Design programs at University of the Arts, as part of the DesignWeek Philadelphia program. In addition to a slideshow and talk, I had quite a few of the products featured on the site on hand for the attendees to check out in person. A lot of them were students and therefore younger, and it was their first time experiencing almost all of these objects in the metal or plastic, which was great to see.

What made the event even more special was having the chance to catch up with one of my first design professors, Tony Guido, who’s been teaching at UArts for 20+ years. We reconnected after I moved to the East Coast, and it was great to spend some more time with him in Phily.

Tony was an industrial designer at frog design, where I later worked also, but he was there when the pioneering work for Apple was happening. He then had his own design consultancy for a while. So it was also a treat to bring along a product that arrived on my doorstep literally 5 minutes before I got in the car to head to Phily: an Apple IIc in excellent condition. In fact, I still hadn’t opened the packing box by the time I got to Phily, so we had the “grand opening” right there in the presentation!

The IIc was one of the first products to fully embody the Snow White design language that frog created for Apple, in 1983. Tony hadn’t worked on that one personally but he was tickled to see it in person after all these years.

(Check out our feature on the Apple PowerBook to see some artifacts from the Snow White work.)

DesignWeek Philadelphia talk