User:Mikelemay/scottburnham

Scott Burnham is a creative director, strategist and author specializing in design and urban innovation. Burnham often identifies innovative activities and draws inspiration for his work from the margins of contemporary culture.

Burnham created the Urban Play project for the city of Amsterdam in collaboration with Droog Design as part of the Experimenta Design Biennale. As Burnham described the project in an interview with the EU Institute for Urban Research and Practice, Urban Play was created to "explor[e] an approach towards open source urban design - creating urban objects and areas that exist as the starting point, the catalyst, to enable a direct, open and creative dialogue with people and the design of their city. The project gained a certain infamy after the installation "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better", a design created from 300,000 Euro cent coins by Stephan Sagmeister, which took a team of 150 volunteers over a week to create was swept up by Amsterdam police.

He is the author of “Finding the Truth in Systems: In Praise of Design Hacking”, commissioned and published by The Royal Society for Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (RSA), London, October 2009. . Burnham is also the author of the Urban Play book, a contributing author of “Visualising the City”, Routledge Press, and editor and co-author of SuperCity. He also contributes regularly to numerous periodicals including CITY: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, ICON Magazine, and AZURE,.

His public talks and lectures frequently focus on finding new sources of innovation and creating catalysts for engagement. In 2008 he was a keynote speaker at the World Urban Development Congress in Riga, Latvia