It was a great start to Insights this year with 301 people attending the Marian Bantjes lecture. Come see Work Worth Doing on Tuesday, March 11, at 7 pm in the Walker cinema. Buy tickets here.
Inspired by their shared experience as part of the inaugural team of designers at Bruce Mau's Institute without Boundaries program and its Massive Change project, Lorraine Gauthier and Alejandro Quinto formed their interdisciplinary studio, Work Worth Doing, in 2004 with the simple yet complicated goal of creating positive social and environmental actions for corporations, governments, and communities. Recent projects include: Now House, a demonstration project for green housing, which will turn a post-World War II house into a near-zero energy home; an installation and research project that asks the question "What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?"; a proposal for civic participation in discussing democratic solutions to terrorism in Madrid involving text messaging and public projection; and Hyperborder, a research and book project about the U.S.-Mexico border in collaboration with architect Fernando Romero. Prior to Work Worth Doing, Gauthier operated her own successful communications design studio for more than 10 years, and Quinto studied new media and design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at the University of Brighton, England, and recently served as designer-in-residence at North Carolina State University. You can see more of their work here.
On a side note, Alejandro is a former Walker Fellow and MCAD alum; we met at MCAD and have been friends ever since. Alejandro is also a contributor to our blog and wrote the entry below on design and regional economic development. To see what they have been thinking about recently, we asked them a few questions:
1. What have you been obsessing about?
The interdependence of North American countries; design methods applied to sustainability problems; the economic and geographic dimensions of design activities in urban regions
2. What’s your most prized possession?
My passport and visa(s)
3. What are you reading?
Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind
4. What’s one of your guilty pleasures?
BBQ eel sushi
5. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Justice
6. What is one of the most unexpected influences on your design?
Statistical analysis of opinion surveys
7. What were you doing before you responded to this questionnaire?
Wishing late happy valentines day to a friend
8. What question do you wish we’d asked you?
Do people in Canada really live in igloos?
A recap of Work Worth Doing - Insights 2008
The business of possibilities.
The other night, Lorraine Gauthier and Alex Quinto of the Toronto-based studio Work Worth Doing presented unique, playful and personal responses to global issues that, as they put it, will take a multitude voices and initiatives to solve. They describe themselves as an "interdisciplinary design studio creating positive social and environmental actions for corporations, governments, and communities." Gauthier and Quinto construct an array of possible responses that allow themselves and external organizations to better understand extremely complex socio-cultural situations.
The organizing theme of this year's Insights Design Lecture Series is the idea of reinvention. Arguably the practice of graphic design has always labored in the creation of possibilities--the reinvention offered by Work Worth Doing, however, is an enlargement of the range of possibilities that graphic designers typically address. One such case is when they had to inform a potential client asking for a new logo that they were not interested in developing a logo, but rather wanted to initiate a conversation to suss out exactly what the client's communication issue was.
Their project process is also a bit of an anomaly. Rather than begin a project from well defined, client-directed brief, Gauthier and Quinto self-initiate projects that tend to be exploratory and nebulous in nature. Projects are initiated based on personal interest and a perceived rather than an explicit need.
After a scripted presentation of their work, Gauthier and Quito offered the opportunity for the audience to ask questions. The first couple of queries very quickly raised the questions burning in everyone's mind: How is this work possible? And how do you financially support this work? The format of the presentation already implicitly answered the first question--they begin with an open-ended question that they explore a number of responses to. They generate visual material that functions to further clarify their response and equips them for conversations with external partners as they search for an opportunity that will enable them to actualize the project. Often, the initial opportunity is a competition that then offers a number of divergent paths for the project--some leading to financial sponsorship (as in the case of the Now House project), others (as in the Shipping Greenland' Water to Africa) remain momentarily undefined.
The question and answer session also provided a glimpse of their "non-traditional" daily activities. Non-traditional in that a seemingly large portion of their work lies outside of what can be comfortably labeled graphic design. They often take on roles that stretches the very definition of who they are and what they do. In the Now House project they found themselves acting as community organizers, general contractors and government lobbyists.
Just as their practice tends to offer more questions than answers, the presentation left me challenging a number of my own assumptions about graphic design concerning the nature of professional practice and the future of the discipline. How can graphic design reinvent itself? And more importantly, how will each of us define our own work worth doing?
Comment by Jon Grizzle — 3/19/2008 @ 9:03 am