SeattlePrintmakersCenter

vp150403 Considering a Charrette 

A fruitful meeting with a charrette leader 

After a get-acquainted meeting with a woman who is a charrette organizer and leader, the author notes the possibility that she is one who may help to shape the foundation of the Seattle Printmakers Center by looking into his family’s assets for valuation.

Mapping the future of Arts, Culture and Technology of Uptown

Left, Bill Ritchie in the Ritchie Family Art Gallery holds up a hacked Google map to show where he knows artists, designers and crafts people - the resources comprising the arts and culture asset of Uptown. He volunteered to help with the current assessment of these benefits, and he started by mapping out what he knows about the neighborhood creatives.

IP Developer meets RE Developer

This is to introduce to the reader a new kind of developer, one that develops intellectual properties that exist alongside real estate property development in the way that an MP3 download exists alongside a live performance—one who conducts charrettes in the urban planning, architecture and real property development sector may also conduct a charrette in blending IP with RE.

Her name is Debi, and she does charrettes

Charrette is not a common household word. In fact, when you type in Microsoft Word, it’s not in that app’s dictionary. Charrette is a French word associated with land use, architectural and property development. In English, we say workshop; but a charrette is specifically a design tool and the method is used by urban planners and real estate developers for project design.

In this Millennium, or the digital age, a new experience has opened up, thanks to the Internet and thousands of ways that real, physical things that once were the economic drivers are forced to bed with new technologies. For example, intellectual property (in the form of patents, copyrights, goodwill, etc.) has been liberated from the printed hard copy and, in digital communication, mobile computing and social networks, has become as valuable as physical property—and, sometimes, it is more valuable.

Those sometimes are occasions when an idea can be shaped by an individual working alone at a computer or linked with co-designers to produce a new video game without ever touching pencil to paper or posting a real letter. You can design, apply for a design patent entirely on your own and, along with an online payment of a few hundred dollars, get a design patent which can be worth millions. If properly marketed and an effective sales method be devised—all these also are processes that are entirely digital, secured by algorithms, and replicable worldwide.

Taking the example of a video game, for example, it is not far-fetched to think a new kind of charrette is reasonable—working to design a development with both intellectual and real properties at the core of its purpose. At the center of this shift in the property valuation paradigm is the charrette and the key person who designs the charrette.

IP Charrette

Intellectual Property (IP) can be turned into real property, as we know. Take Bill Gates and Paul Allen, for example, whose intellectual skills and adroit maneuvering can, today, be seen from my art gallery window, looking southward from Valley Street all the way down 5^th Avenue. I can see, on the east side of the avenue, the buildings of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; on the west, Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. What the past thirty years brought about is awesome, superseding what The Boeing Airplane Company brought about starting with the engineering work to build a little airplane factory decades ago where today we tall buildings housing amazon.com, Big Fish, and dozens of other technology companies, startups and incubators—not to mention the very appropriate MOHAI.

We, who live in Uptown Seattle, are lucky to be where we can see the result of innovative brain power taking shape as buildings full of workers. My personal goal is to help create jobs and fill another building with workers for the Seattle Printmakers Center—a multifaceted city asset like no other in the world. I have sketched out a meta-plan for a 19-part complex, http://www.vspc.xyz based on printmaking as the root of the new technologies which we enjoy. It was the invention of the template (a prehistoric handprint on the wall) that led to all the technologies of human invention and communication over time and space.

Ritchie’s property

After twenty years in higher education, I took what I learned in college and began to shape it for the 21^st Century. It has been like making a work of art, the shape, size, scope and monetary investment for which I could not conceive. Much like when I made my best artworks—I did not know what I was doing!

Someone who started RealNetworks quipped, “We succeeded because we started something that we didn’t know we couldn’t do.” It is like that in art, beginning with no end in mind and going over a wall without knowing what lay on the other side. I am certain that teaching is the main, viable industry for humans, and education is a prerequisite to sustain Earth’s human life sustainability. I knew not where art fits in this, but I was desperate that art, craft and design fit in my life plan.

Fifty years passed since I made my first artworks and taught my first classes in art and technology grown out of the root of printmaking. As I was a fully-tenured art professor for the first of those fifty years, I was able to hold on to most of my art. Not intentionally; I just wasn’t as interested in selling art as I was in creating new things which, unfortunately for my art dealers, didn’t always look like art to their customers—video art, conceptual art, computer art—that sort of thing in which Seattle’s museums had no interest.

Consequently, there are thousands of unsold pieces of art, craft objects, videos, data, applications, designs, and writings—my own and works by others—in the Ritchie Family Collection. These have value—and hundreds of my patrons agree. I plan to grow the Seattle Printmakers Center using these assets—these “magic seeds.”

We live in the digital age, and now a new experience has opened up, thanks to the Internet and the thousands of ways that real, physical things that used to drive the economy have been forced to bed with new technologies. What is needed now is a special charrette, led by a new professional, an IP Charretteur, using the tools that urban planners, architects and designers use toward innovation design, a fundraising project seeded with the Ritchie family’s property both the real and the intangible.