ABOUT BDNN
Black Design News Network (BDNN) is the premier black design content website and voice of black designers world-wide features four key service components: a news bureau, online publication, digital library and ‘workspace’ hub for designers.
Serving as a hub for black design and a social media network for black designers across the African Diaspora, BDNN focuses on creating awareness of black design, distributing news, content and information about Architecture, Interior Design, Product and Industrial Design, Fashion and Textile Design, Communication, Media and Graphic Design.
Launched in 2010, BDNN will take about a full year to complete its alpha version. We pre-launched in January as part of a strategy to cover the Haitian earthquake with a focus of how designers can contribute to disaster and shelter. Our website is at infancy stage – http://www.blackdesignnews.com and we will be spending Spring 2010 developing a fully designed web based platform that includes news bureau, press releases, digital studio space, on-line library and archive of portfolios, call for papers, on-line conferences, blogs, competitions, competition announcements, news from Historically Black Colleges and Universities about designers of color, collaborative design studios, featured designers, feature designs, leading articles by leading designers, with web-casts, pod-casts and mobile technology applications.
JOIN BDNN HERE
Black Design News Network (BDNN) is the black design professional’s power resource. This popular news portal is filled with insight from peers, advice from experts and timely information on a variety of cutting-edge design industry topics. Black Design News Network will soon rank as the “must-read” news portal for nearly 23,000 design members.
Black Design News Network will serve as the flagship news distribution source with a circulation well beyond the nearly 23,000 readers. About 50% of our readers will report that the issues to be presented in BDNN is what they will pass on other readers. It includes trend stories and member case studies, providing you a behind-the-scenes perspective on the design practice industry in the nation, region or locally.
MISSION:
The BDNN mission is simple.
BDNN is about thinking, critically.
BDNN’s time has come to promote a new design thinking that promotes aggressive actions for black designers to take the lead in making society more diverse, more inclusive, and more sustainable. BDNN asks tough design questions, critically; markets great design solutions creatively and makes rare design opportunities accessible to the highly trained yet often unsung black designer. Critical thinking is imperative for the sustainability of the world community. Coloring is imperative to health of the prism.
BDNN is about reporting, collectively.
BDNN is about information and information technology is the key to our evolution. Black designers face the challenge of ‘added-value’ like other designers. But, how we react individually to the information that we seek, directly affects the quality of our lives. And how we respond collectively to the opportunities that we find, affects the very nature of the global community. We have a lot to contribute, but no one knows who we are.
BDNN is about communicating, digitally.
BDNN has created an innovative web-based framework for seizing opportunities and providing digital feed and feedback for, by and about black designers, worldwide. BDNN is the only design clearinghouse that offers engaging sources and resources; knowledge and inspiration for, by and to black designers from a number of disciplines across the globe. BDNN is an on-line design community that engages one another and the others from around the globe about hot topics, hot issues, and hot buttons.
BDNN is our sizzle and our stake.
BDNN is about developing, culturally:
BDNN is about the new: aesthetics, anthropology, architecture, archives, articles, awards, bibliography, biographies, books , cities, communities, competitions, critique, culture, design, development, Diaspora, digital, disaster, economics, education, environment, essays, fashion, fellowships, film, gigs, graphics, HBCU’s, history, housing, jobs, landscapes, media, music, opportunities, organizations, partnerships, perspectives, photography, portfolios, research, scholarships, shelter, space, students, studios, travel, urban design, who’s who, work, world.
BDNN is about the new world re-ordered
BDNN is about banking, resourcefully:
BDNN is the new, hip, hot, black design clearinghouse. BDNN is a news bureau that only collects intellectual capital to invest in projects that bring fair return on cultural imagination as our greatest investment. BDNN is about the power of design ideas to change global attitudes, impact lives and sustain cultures. We yearn to learn and earn. We got skill.
BDNN is a private enterprise with two African Diaspora women co-founders at the helm:
- Atim Annette Oton, based in Brooklyn, New York
- Renee Kemp-Rotan, based in Birmingham, Alabama
BDNN is about spreading design ideas to change the world, positively…
FOUNDERS:
BDNN is a private enterprise with two co-founders at the helm:
- Atim Annette Oton, based in Brooklyn, New York
- Renee Kemp-Rotan, based in Birmingham, Alabama
Bios of Founders:
- Atim Annette Oton: Nigerian-born, U.S. and British educated architectural designer, is a cultural writer/editor/publisher and the co-Founder of Black Design News Network. In 2006, she stepped down from her role as the Associate Chair of Product Design at Parsons School of Design to concentrate on creating a bi-monthly lifestyle publication about black Brooklyn home décor, fashion, culture, and lifestyle, Calabar Magazine. Atim was born in Calabar, Nigeria where she spent her formative years before coming to the US to study architecture at the City College of New York in Harlem under the influential black architect Max Bond (who she later worked for) and the Architectural Association Graduate School in London, England. She returned to New York in 1994 to work with the architecture firm, Davis, Brody, Bond Architects and various other firms in New York. In 2000, she was part of the design team that won the African Burial Ground Interpretive Center. She also worked as an executive producer and design consultant on the Underground Railroad Experience, a cultural education website from 2000 – 2004; and won an Independent Grant from the NYSCA on her work, the Black Hair Salon in 2002. Oton served as the editor-in-chief and executive vice president for Blacklines Magazine, a quarterly magazine publishing features on black designers in architecture, interior design, construction, development and the arts from 2000-2002. Her design work has been published in Architecture Record, Design Build Magazine, Design Architecture.com, Oculus and Blacklines magazine and exhibited at the Architectural Association, London, and in New York at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Institute for the Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC), the Bronx Museum of Art and the City College of New York. She has been profiled in Office.com and Diversity.com for articles on Blacklines Magazine. She has been featured for Calabar Imports on CNN, MSNBC, The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. BCAT’s NeighborhoodBeat and CUNY TV. She is a Board Member of Community Board 8 in Brooklyn, a Vice President and co-Chair of Economic Development Committee, a member of the City College of New York’s Architecture Alumni Group, National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) and was a member of the National Association of Minorities in Communications (NAMIC).
- Renee Kemp-Rotan: US-born, African American trained as an architect, practices as an urban designer, artist, author, painter, musician, scholar, aesthete. She is the co-Founder of Black Design News Network. Kemp-Rotan is also the Director, Capital Projects Mayors Office, Birmingham, Alabama; and was Former Chief Urban Design/Urban Development; Director Economic Development, Atlanta GA. She has a B. Arch from Syracuse, cum laude; a MSUP from Columbia University; a RIBA II Architectural Association, London. She came to the South from London, New York, Washington DC around 1996 to work for Corporation for Olympic Development, Atlanta and now oversees $175 million dollars of bond/non-bond construction projects for Birmingham’s Mayor. As a master of architecture/imagination, she consistently blends urban design, heritage, and media savvy design with economic development projects on a major scale. Her work on The Grand Egyptian Museum Competition, Cairo; Pullman Porter Museum, Chicago; Railroad Reservation Park, Birmingham; Fort Worth’s Evans Rosedale; Auburn Avenue National Civil Rights Street Museum, Atlanta’s First Aquarium Initiative with daring exhibition designs for Urban Sea Academy, ENN-Environmental News Network, and Re-creation of the River Nile prove her theory of “African Americana”: that strong urban heritage statements create major destination tourism dollars. She has served ten mayors of major American cites on issues of urban design, economic development and master planning (i.e. DC. NY, ATL, Bham.) She has directed more than 30 major master plans for predominantly African American communities over the course of her career. Kemp-Rotan was recently recognized by both Harvard University and Oxford University as a leading urban designer in their jointly published African American National Biography. References to her work reside in the archives of the African American Studies Center, Oxford, England and the W.E.B. Dubose Center on African American Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts.
Black Design News Network (BDNN) is a news bureau, an online publication, digital library and 'workspace' hub for designers. African Diaspora, BDNN focuses on creating awareness of black design, distributing news and information about Architecture, Interior Design, Product Industrial Design, Fashion/Textile Design, Communication and Graphic Design. BDNN is the 411 of the Black Design Diaspora. 
