penultimata

(penultimate means, next to last day. antepenultimate means, the day before the next-to-last day.)

Read Gesche Joost and Arne Scheuermann, their Design as Rhetoric: Basic Principles for Design Rhetoric (Paper, Symposium of Swiss Design Network, 2007). The laser printer didn't cooperate when I sought to print a larger size, so you'll have to squint.
The paper is available through Joost's website, here — scroll down, right side — or directly here.

I will supply pages from Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric, and (maybe) of Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, and go through them with you. We may also consider — as our final read? — Gui Bonsiepe, his "visual-verbal rhetoric."
 

weds 10 april

Monday, we discussed
Steve Baker's "To Go About Noisily: Clutter, Writing, and Design" (Emigre 35, Summer 1995), here, and read (aloud) through Jane Graves, "What Is the Object's Secret," in her posthumous collection The Secret Lives of Objects (2010).

"Every object contains the history of its own making," Graves writes, "but there is another secret; what the 'other' sees in the object. These two secrets reflect and reverberate upon each other as a pair of revolving mirrors."

While we are developing our catalogues (of "things" in our lives), we're giving some thought to the design of things.

We'll be looking at a Bryan Lawson's discussion of the iterative nature of the “craft-based” design process — particularly the account of the design of the cartwheel, its downtilt (pitch) and forward-angle (foreway). The role of language comes particularly — and literally — into “play” in chapter 15 (Design as conversation and perception), in Lawson's How Designers Think : The Design Process Demystified (Fourth edition, Oxford: Elsevier / Architectural Press, 2006).

We will also look at chapter (4) on "exploration" in Karl T. Ulrich. Design: Creation of artifacts in society (2011), available as a pdf here.

discussion notes, Weds 27 March

our brief exercise, for Monday (1 April) —

Compare a chapter (or long treatment) in Cramsie, with a comparable discussion in any of the other design history surveys available to us. Discuss the parallels and differences, and what if anything is missing in either or both of the treatments.

We talked about collections.

1. Leanne Shapton
   Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and her
   Swimming Studies (Blue Rider Press, 2012) also,
2. Ilene Beckerman, her Love, Loss, and What I Wore (Algonquin Books, 1995)
   and
3. Bicycle Portraits (three books) and the associated website.

And tentatively agreed on the idea of cataloging a collection. The collection might be design oriented. But certainly some/all of the items in a collection, would be describable in design terms.

Walter Benjamin came up in this connection.

discussion notes, Weds 20 March

Wednesday last, we discussed design and "intention." What do we mean by "intention"? Is intention in play at every stage of our process? What about accident? Detours?

That conversation was much informed by Steve Baker's brief essay on intention.

We also looked at, and evaluated, designs selected by the Design Museum (in London) for their quality. See Guardian article here, and the gallery of 15 designs here. With the exception of brutally graphic cigarette packaging from Australia, none of the designs were "graphic."

We also gave some thought to Jonathan Gibbs's "design Blog" essay on the design of Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being, "published by Canongate in four simultaneous editions: hardback (price £20), paperback (£7.99), ebook (£7.99) and audio (£7.95 on iTunes).". Gibbs refers to design co-director Gerard Saint's explanation that "the exposed stitching at once references Japanese binding techniques, and emulates the fragility at the heart of the novel. The thing even comes wrapped in plastic, with a red sticker warning the reader ‘This special edition is fragile.’ Everything about it makes you want to treat it with the same care that Ruth, in the novel, treats Nao’s diary."
 

 
Gibbs writes: " While this is a perfectly apt response to the book, it does make me wonder about the future... All dilemmas that we may face more and more, as books come in bundles like this. The worst of all possible worlds, it occurs to me: the physical book becomes untouchable objet d’art, a sumptuous avatar of the text, an Alton Towers bumper sticker for the intelligentsia..."

For Monday, read Cramsie Chapter 15, "Commercial Modernism."
 

sleep, uses of.

Sleep plays an important role in the brain’s ability to consolidate learning when two new potentially competing tasks are learned in the same day...

William Harms, UChicagoNews, 20 March 2013
here

currents

For Wednesday,

1. refresh/replenish memory of Rick Poynor, "Art's Little Brother" (2005)
   in Alex Coles, ed., Design and Art (2007)
2. Cramsie, chapter 20,
   Printing with Pixels : Digital Expressionism & Postscript: The Digital Future, c.1984 —,
   and
3. Read Brad Troemel, "The Accidental Audience," posted at The New Inquiry on March 14, 2013
   on what we do with art (and other) images, on tumblr and elsewhere
   here.

   also

4. give some thought to concluding/packaging your prospectus to design exhibit, one that argues an idea.

errata

Errata from Alexander Stewart on Vimeo.

Errata (16mm, 2005) is an experimental film in which I used a photocopier to generate frames of animation. Each frame of the film is a photocopy of the previous frame. Both black & white and color photocopies were used to make this film, approximately 4,600 copies total.
 

via
7/8.tumblr.com

experiment/experience.
 

post break

read

1. Walter Benjamin —
   "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and
   "Unpacking my Library."
   reading notes/comments on both at the archived Design Stories blog for 2010, here.
    
2. three essays in Alex Coles, ed., Design and Art (2007) —
   Alex Coles, "Introduction // Beyond Designart,"
   George Nelson, "Good Design: What is it for?" (1957),
   Norman Potter, "Is a Designer an Artist?" (1969), and
   Rick Poynor, "Art's Little Brother" (2005).
    
3. the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) entries for
   "experiment" (noun and verb), and
   "experimental" (adverb and adjective).

The Benjamin readings pertain to the aura of the work of art — its loss in (his) modern times, and curiously, it's rediscovery (in "Unpacking my Library"), in the collection. The collection — the series, the multiple, even different iterations of the same. Where meaning/significance is shunted along, from one item to another, the encounter of each object with each other, and all with the beholder, all participantd in the unfolding narrative (or conversation?).
(But I digress.)

The essays in Design and Art pertain in part to "process" — the designer's process. This connects with Donald Schon's thinking about design as conversation.

Finally, the dictionary entries on "experiment" may help us think about the idea of "testing" in design.

We'll start on Monday with the Benjamin. Please take notes (or annotate your copies) as you read.
 

other

Tumblrites among you may be interested in two recent essays in/at/on The New Inquiry —

1. Brad Troemel, "The Accidental Audience" (14 March 2013) —
   on recycling art on tumblr (here), and
    
2. Rob Hornung, "Escape from Love Jail" (7 March 2013) —
   on social media — and sociality — in general. Very good links worth following up, particularly one to a paper (on "escape") by Mariann Hardey and David Beer.

And please think about experiment/experience, experimental/experiential, and how these might pertain to design process/practice.
 

design as a reflective conversation with the situation

"The situation is complex and uncertain, and there is a problem of finding the problem."
Donald Schön

1

The heading of this post is the title of an essay by Donald A. Schön, in his book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983). At the center of that chapter is the story of a student (Petra) and professor (Quist), as they talk about Petra's design ideas for an elementary school on a hillside setting. In his analysis of the exchange, Schön talks about how the problem is framed (and reframed), about the early "what if" (try something) moe, followed by the later "musts" that a selected "what if" entails.

"Each move is a local experiment which contributes to the global experiment of reframing the problem." (p94)

"The designer's moves yield systems of implications." (99)

Schön discusses the role of language in the exchange, also the situation's "back-talk" as one moves through — and reflects on — actions.

We also read pages 88-90 of Schön's conclusion ("What can be learned from the experience of the architectural studio") in his The Design Studio: An Exploration of its Traditions and Potentials (1985).

2

We are joined on Monday morning by film maker David Gatten, who will show three films (probably The Secret History of the Dividing Line (detail above, 20 minutes), The Great Art of Knowing (37 minutes) and Moxon's Mechanik Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing (26 minutes). We'll be discussing stories, finding stories in the material (that sort of thing).

3

It is my hope (and expectation) that the Schön reading (and our discussion thereof) and David's films (and our discussion thereof!) will feed into our thinking about design practice, theory, history and, specifically, that they will help and/or encourage us with the experiment I assigned orally in class:

1. a prospectus, eight frames (squares, pages, but needn't be thought of as a book, necessarily, and could certainly be a website)
2. presenting selected material from Cramsie (chapters 10 The Style of the Street and 10 The Simple Art of War), possibly mixed with material of your own, or from other sources, that gives an "experiential" sense of moving through space in an exhibition.
3. select some images, or theme, could even be a detail (matches at page 166, but also pp14-15, or "lines" — same pages, but also cuneiform...) that you want to argue something about.
4. you may extend out beyond these chapters, within and beyond Cramsie. it is interesting that he discusses the technologies of design (specifically, of printing) far less in these two chapters, than elsewhere in his book. why?
5. the panels are not so much "helps" to move through an exhibition, but rather a suggestion of how that would feel, of the experience. something large (a detail enlarged), followed by something else (and so sequence matters, scale matters).

think "movie."

This exercise/experiment needs time to evolve. It may move to other areas of Cramsie, periods we've not yet touched on.

4

We are reflecting on the connection of practice (which tends to be messy), with history (which tends to smooth over the rough edges, and to have little to do with the immediacy of design practice), and with theory.

We are interested in modes of working, in the dark, sometimes; and with design as conversation.
 

infrastructure

Regarding the designed city, language all over the place, on every wall, plans being carried out in every street — consider the London views of George Scharf (1788-1860).

By induced accident, stumbled upon a scientific lithograph by Scharf — described in three tumblr posts, the last here. Follow the links. London, design, infrastructure is a long way from the long extinct Hybodus basanus, but I make no apologies. Will discuss in class.

Assembling an Ikea furnishing is like assembling a sentence, one article or noun or connective at a time. Some rooms have Ikea written all over them. What's made invisible?

In the IDEO reading — David Kelley, Design Adopts Technology — "He started his design consulting business in Silicon Valley in 1978, when the engineers and entrepreneurs were so focused on chips, printed circuits and software... David saw the opportunity to integrate the human design disciplines of industrial design, human factors, and interaction design with the technical disciplines of mechanical, electrical and production engineering." (Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions (2007) : 301

IDEO / IKEA.
 

design, escaped from the lamp

 

 
from Punch 79 (October 30, 1880) p194 and here.

reading

• Adolf Loos. "Ornament and Crime" (1908), in Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside CA: Ariadne Press, 1998).
• Hal Foster. "Hey, that’s me," a review of Bruce Mau’s Life Style (Phaidon, 2000), in the London Review of Books 23:7 (5 April 2001): 13-14; and later reprinted as "Design and Crime" in Foster’s collection of essays (same title, Verso, 2002).

emblematics 1

For Monday 28 January we're

1. reading Cramsie, The Story of Graphic Design, his introduction and chapter 1, Design and Sign (origin of alphabet); and
2. building two emblems: image + two units of text, whose combination yields an opportunity for meaning. As we discussed Wednesday, our own extensions of the Phaidon Archive — descriptive and discursive text wrapped around an image — might be thinned and repurposed to emblematic ends.

getting underway

This exercise may extend beyond next Wednesday, but it’s a start.

something personal

We will be using the Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design throughout the semester, and hopefully will gain some familiarity with a good portion of the 500 examples/instances of design contained in it. But that's not enough, we’ll be making our own, extrapolating from their format, and extending the archive.

Select some object, designed or not, that meant a lot to you as a child (age 0-12, or so). Remember it, describe it. Measure it. Learn about it. Describe it. Document it. If from fallible memory, so be it. And, for Wednesday 23 January, develop a sheet on that item, same format as the Phaidon Archive sheets, two sides.

specs

(appears to be metric)

sheet size   :   238mm w, 314mm h
column widths   :   10mm + gutter 4mm + 10mm
column height   :   283mm (measuring top rule to bottom rule)
margins   :   top 14mm, right and left 17mm, bottom 17mm
(check   :   14 + 17 + 283 = 314; 14 + 100 + 4 + 100 + 14 = 238)

font   :   Helvetica (10pt, approx, top info + body copy)
 

the uc.logo imbroglio, and design criticism.

For Wednesday 23 January, read:

1. Christopher Simmons. The UC logo controversy: How 54,000 people, the mainstream press and virtually every designer got it wrong. posted 9 January 2013 at AIGA blog.
2. and a better presentation (with visuals) of Simmons’s essay, at his own blog.
3. Michael Bierut. Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport. posted 14 January 2013 at Design Observer.