Monday, February 11, 2008

Welcome to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Design Observatory

This blog is dedicated to research about the design enterprises of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Students of the "Design and National Identity" senior seminar, taught by Dr. Jilly Traganou at Parsons The New School for Design in New York, will update this page with news and critical assessments of the Beijing Olympic design.

Here are some links to start with:

Official Web-site of Beijing Olympics is:

http://en.beijing2008.cn/

Information about design can be found in pages:

http://en.beijing2008.cn/spirit/beijing2008/graphic/
http://en.beijing2008.cn/cptvenues/
http://en.beijing2008.cn/funpage/

Two other particularly helpful websites with current research material on the Olympics are the following:

Culture@the Olympics: issue, trends and perspectives
by Beatriz Garcia and Andy Miah

http://www.culturalolympics.org.uk/2007.html

and

the website of the Olympic Studies Center of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

http://olympicstudies.uab.es/eng/index.asp


Please let us know your thoughts about the Beijing Olympic design.

Jilly Traganou

2 comments:

Carissa Knapp said...

great information. have been researching the world cup designs in germany in particular and it has been interesting to see similarities and differences.

stephania said...

The Mexican newspapers are showing many opinions about the Olympics. Most of them charge a fee to read, however, I found www.eluniversal.com.mx has a section dedicated to the Olympics. I saw images of the new airport and how one of it's roofs was built to symbolize a dragon (China's lucky animal) and how the airport expects 64 million visitors this year. I also found a blog explaining the logo, the animated characters and the symbols agnd message that China wants to give all in one of Mexico City's oldest newspapers. Their web address for this blog is : http://www.oem.com.mx/esto/beijing/simbolos.htm
(all in spanish, sorry) It says their motto is One world, one dream. I'll leave it at that... :)