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?