Design

It seems too good to be true, but SF author Samuel R. Delany is speaking at the Walker on November 15th, in conjunction with the exhibition Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis. Of his mind-bending masterpiece Dhalgren, critic Kate McKinney Maddalena writes  “… [it] ranks Delany with Samuel Beckett; I would teach it as a Nouveau Roman alongside the work of Duras and Borges.” If you’re new to Delany, I might start with Babel-17, in which he manages to extend the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to it’s unnatural and delirious conclusion.

It seemed as good a time as any to post some of my favorite science fiction book covers. Many designers unconsciously scan bookstore shelves for the work of Fred Troller, or Penguin paperbacks in general (omg Penguin Books has an online dating service?), or maybe now it’s Jon Gray, but for me it’s this series of Bantam science fiction covers from the ’70s and ’80s. I’ve found maybe 10 of these guys and a whole slew of rip-offs from other publishers. (Don’t ask me why I assume this series is the original and not itself a ripoff—I just know it. In my heart. They’re better.) The combination of the retro-futuristic illustrations, the bastardized Futura Black, and the sobriety of the layout is a beautiful example of restraint in a genre that relies on the fantastic. ***One detail you can’t see here is that the titles are all printed in metallic ink. ***I also threw in the cover for A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr., which is another amazing post-apocalyptic novel.

They weren’t sure, but Bantam publishing thinks that Leonard Leone was most likely the art director for these books. I managed to talk to him on the phone a few months ago, but that’s a story for another day . . . (he seemed more interested in talking about some books he designed in the basement of the White House than these science fiction paperbacks, go figure).

And if you want to see a more recent interpretation of Delany’s science fiction novels, look here. Otherwise, make sure to check out the lecture!

The following is extracted from a series of lectures about relational design practices. A related article can be found at Design Observer.

A seemingly random selection of projects from various design fields with an underlying thread:

Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Hermitage Museum expansion plan, St. Petersburg, Russia, c. 2003.

An expansion strategy for the Hermitage Museum in Russia simply annexes the surrounding government-owned buildings in St. Petersburg, increasing the available space for objects from 629 to 1928 rooms.

Nucleo, Terra: The Grass Arm-Chair, 2000

A chair made of grass must be grown and then trimmed and watered by its owner in order to remain functional.

Worldbike.org, Big Boda cargo bicycle, Kenya, 2002-2005.

A worldwide group of bicycle enthusiasts borrow the open source model for redesigning and modifying inexpensive passenger bikes for transporting cargo in developing countries.

LettError, Twin, typeface for the Twin Cities commissioned by the Design Institute at the University of Minnesota, 2003.

A typeface designed for a city alters its weight and appearance based on changes in the reported air temperature.

Shared Space concept in England, c. 2005, most likely by Ben Hamilton Baillie after Hans Monderman’s schemes.

A Dutch city removes all of its traffic markings and signage in order to reduce collisions between motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians by increasing awareness among those sharing the roadway.

Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, Blur Building, Swiss Expo 2002

A pavilion on a lake containing thousands of jet nozzles adjusts to atmospheric conditions and dispenses a continuous mist around itself, the resulting fog both conceals and reveals the structure: a scaffolding with no “real” building.

Modernista! website, 2008

An advertising company launches its new “website,” which exists as a small navigation bar overlaid on any referencing page, directing users outward to preexisting forums such as Flickr and MySpace for much of its content.

THREE PHASES OF DESIGN

The history of modern design can viewed in three successive phases, moving from form to content to context; or, in the parlance of semiotics, from syntax to semantics to pragmatics.

This third phase of design—which could go by several names including relational, contextual, and conditional design—follows and departs from twentieth-century experiments in both form and content, which have traditionally defined the spheres of avant-garde practice. Relational design is preoccupied with design’s effects, extending beyond the form of the design object and its attendant meanings and cultural symbolism. It is concerned with performance or use, not as the natural result of some intended functionality but rather in the realm of behavior and uncontrollable consequences. It embraces constraints and seeks systematic methodologies, as a way of countering the excessive subjectivity of most design decision-making. It explores more open-ended processes that value the experiential and the participatory and often blur the distinctions between production and consumption.

Some examples of design as they move from form to content to context:

fig. 1 fig. 2 fig. 3

fig. 1: Peter Eisenman, House series, c. 1970, a formal language in which architectural elements such as columns and walls were separate from a “functional context,” used instead as part of a “marking or notational system;” fig. 2: Content analysis of vernacular architectural languages, in this case the meaning and symbolism of “movie star mansion” iconography applied to bungalows around Los Angeles, 1975 (analysis by Arloa Paquin); fig. 3: Estudio Teddy Cruz, as part of Manufactured Sites, 2008, a prefabricated metal framework, a designed element, is introduced into the ad-hoc, indigenous building practices of Tijuana’s suburban shantytown sprawl.

fig. 4 fig. 5 fig. 6

fig. 4: Dieter Rams, Braun Aeromaster 10 Cup Coffeemaker; a classically modern approach to simplifying the visual form of the product and process of coffeemaking; fig. 5: Michael Graves, Tea Kettle for Alessi, 1985, the bird connoting the sound of the whistle; fig. 6: Naoto Fukasawa, Rice Cooker for Muji, 2002, which has a rice paddle rest on its flat top, solving the problem of where to place this utensil after use. The rice cooker’s form is a result of its relationship both to the paddle and to the behavior of the user.

fig. 7 fig. 8 fig. 9

fig. 7: Karim Rashid, Dirt Devil Kone vacuum, 2006, in a form so refined “you can leave it on display”; fig. 8: Dyson DC15 vacuum cleaner, 2005, the articulation of the “ball,” the pivoting wheel of the vacuum, as well as its color-coded parts, imparts and expresses its functionality; fig. 9: unlike its predecessors iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner, 2002-, maintains a relationship to the room rather to the hand of its owner and uses various algorithms to complete its cleaning tasks.

fig. 10 fig. 11 fig. 12

fig. 10: Vignelli Associates, New York City Subway Map, c. 1972, a classic of modern information design and the belief in the clarity of abstract form in communication; fig. 11: Durst Organization, The National Debt Clock, New York, NY: “a symbol and metaphor, particularly highlighting the fact that the clock ran out of digits when the U.S. public debt rose above $10 trillion on September 30, 2008”; fig. 12: Laura Kurgan, Spatial Information Design Lab, from Million Dollar Blocks project, c. 2006: informatic mapping of individual incarceration costs to inmates’ former neighborhoods in the hopes of shaping public policy.

CHARACTERISTICS OF RELATIONAL DESIGN

In relational design, the role of the designer is closer to that of an editor or a programmer, not an author but an enabler, while the consumer is recast as a more creative agent (in the guise of the designer, DIY-er, hacker, or “prosumer”). It prefers pragmatism over post-structuralism, or Dewey over Derrida, and the prosaic and banal over exotic vernaculars. It is governed by social logic and the network culture of the many to the authorial culture of one. It embraces generative systems over formal iterations and contingent solutions to variable interpretations.

Some examples from one strand of the diagram: open-ended processes and generative systems.

OPEN-ENDED PROCESSES AND GENERATIVE SYSTEMS

Experimental Jetset, John&Paul&Ringo&George T-shirt, 2001, and variations from others: the archetype as meme.

Luna Maurer and Jonathan Puckey, workshop with kits for poster-making using game-like, rules-based instructions for participants. Graphic Design in the White Cube exhibition, 22nd International Biennale of Graphic Design Brno, 2006.

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ASDF’s For a Brief Time Only… is a purchasable exhibition of 24 artists available at a photo developer near you. You can find it at any store that allows file uploading via the internet (including most major US drug-stores). The image files will be sent to the closest location near you, and within minutes you will be able to walk in and pick them up as prints.

This exhibition contains 24 small 4×6 photographic prints contained within the packaging provided by each store. Also included are a contact sheet with all the artists’ information, and a letter to the store employee reassuring that there is nothing wrong with the order.

The artists featured in this exhibition are Ken Ehrlich, John Sisley, Martin John Callanan, Miranda Lichtenstein, Lucky Dragons, eteam, Jim Skuldt, Mira O’Brien, Joshua Kit Clayton, Matt Keegan, Emily Mast, Brian Kennon, Lukas Geronimas, Amy Lam, Paul Pieroni, Moyra Davey, Graham Parker, Paul Branca, Penelope Umbrico, Lucy Raven, Bik Van der Pol, Emilie Halpern, Tim Ridlen, and Vlatka Horvat.

No money is being made by ASDF in this exhibition. You will purchase the show directly from the store (unless you can acquire it another way), which will probably cost around $5. So far this show is available throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. If you live elsewhere, and know of a store that meets the necessary requirements, please email ASDF and we will send the show near you.

The show is on view from November 6 to December 4.

For instructions on how to view the show at a location near you, please visit:

http://www.asdfmakes.com/nearyou

Crit Face Button Set

Alberto Rigau created a set of buttons to keep his fellow NC State University graphic design graduate students perky during marathon critiques. They spread like a viral video… appearing on the t-shirts, lapels and bags of undergrads in my classroom. I too coveted the buttons. It may be superstition, but crits seem to go smoother when I rock a crit button.

The phenomenon spread to SpeakUp, Design Observer and Alberto even gave away a set of 50 free buttons on his website now long gone. Keep your eyes peeled to his site, I’m sure these will be making their way to a design classroom or client meeting near you…

fig. 1 fig. 2 fig. 3

On my way out of the Walker Library the other day a little red spine caught my attention. I grabbed the hardback book off the shelf and started paging through and was immediately charmed by what I was seeing and reading. What was bound between those two red covers was a small sampling of the Great Bear Pamphlet series. Each pamphlet is simply produced with black printing on colored sheets of paper (each pamphlet a different color) except for Cage’s poem DIARY: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued Part Three (1967) [fig. 1, and 4] which uses multicolored, and shifting type-faces to help realize his idea. The overall affect is a beautiful stack of reading.

fig. 4 fig. 5 fig. 6

The Great Bear Pamphlet series was published by Dick Higgins, Something Else Press, from 1965–67. Numbering 20 in total the thin-little pamphlets represent some of the seminal themes of the avant-garde and cultural scene of the times. Each pamphlet, except the Manifestos issue [fig. 2, 5, and 6], features a single author, with some notables being John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Claes Oldenburg, George Brecht, Jerome Rothenberg, and Jackson Mac Low. The pamphlets represent a sampling of artforms from concrete poems, and plays to happenings/events, and collages.

Higgins himself was a composer, poet, and early Fluxus artist. He studied under John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and was married to artist Alison Knowles (who also contributed a pamphlet). Many other students of Cage’s ‘Experimental Composition’ classes  would later contribute to Great Bear. In describing the aesthetic of publications from Something Else Press Higgins seemed to make some decisions based on themes of chance learned from Cage:

“I set poems and short chapters flush bottom on the type pages (usually they are set in the middle). I used larger and bolder running heads at the tops of pages than is customary in order to tie the page together and because I liked the legibility it gave to a sometimes rather scattered or unorthodox page. Since I did not wish to develop favoritism among typefaces, I used whatever faces a particular supplier had, often making my selections by means of chance operations, using dice… [this] gave the Something Else Press books their look of old-but-new.”

fig. 7 fig. 8 fig. 9 fig. 10 fig. 11 fig. 12

fig. 1–3: Sampling of covers from Great Bear Pamphlets, 1965–67

fig. 4: Spread from John Cage’s pamphlet DIARY, 1967

fig. 5–6: Spreads from the Manifestos issue, 1966

fig. 7: Spread from Allan Kaprow’s pamphlet Untitled Essay and other works, 1967

fig. 8: Spread from Robert Filliou’s pamphlet A Filliou Sampler, 1967

fig. 9: Spread from Dieter Roth’s pamphlet a LOOK into the blue tide part 2, 1967

fig. 10: Spread from Luigi Russolo’s pamphlet The Art of Noise (futurist manifesto, 1913), 1967

fig. 11–12: Spread and back cover from Philip Corner’s pamphlet Popular Entertainments, 1967

Please join us on Thursday, November 6, at 7 and 9 pm, for two screenings of Typeface. After the screening will be a conversation with its director, Justine Nagan; Bill Moran, St. Paul-based designer and letterpress guru who cowrote a book documenting Hamilton; and Greg Corrigan, designer and Hamilton technical director.

Typeface documents the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, the only such institution dedicated to the preservation, study, production, and printing of wood type. With 1.5 million pieces and more than 1,000 styles and sizes, the Hamilton’s is one of the premier wood-type collections in the world. The museum, however, is not just host to static holdings of preserved artifacts behind glass, but rather is an active educational center for letterpress workshops for designers and artists from across the Midwest and around the country, and a place where the last generation of skilled men and women who once created these intricate fonts—now in their seventies and eighties—can share their knowledge of this enduring craft.

In anticipation of this sneak preview, we interviewed Justine Nagan about the process of making Typeface.

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WALKER: How did you get involved with this film? Was your entry point the museum, the craft, or the people?

JUSTINE NAGAN: I’ve always had an interest in design and preservation, but my introduction to the museum was fairly random, and serendipitous! My husband Matt and I were coming back from a wedding in Door County and saw the sign for Two Rivers’ Ice cream sundaes… We stopped and stumbled on the museum.  Once inside we were just blown away by the collection and the space and I thought—this should be documented. After looking into it further, things clicked into place and it seemed the perfect collaboration for my first film.

W: Why make a film about an obsolete technology?

JN: I became fascinated with exploring the changing importance of analog technologies in our digital age. There is this theory that as we as a society sit at our computers all day, in the off hours, tactile and sensual experiences become all the more important. People are craving things with texture that they can hold in their hands—whether it’s knitting or playing guitar… Then there’s the whole nostalgia factor: LPs vs. ipod, film vs. video, letterpress vs. inkjet.

W: What kind of research did you do in preparation for the film?

JN: I reached out to people in the graphic design, letterpress, printing history and craft communities. I spent a lot of time on the internet. Paul Gehl at the Newberry was a wonderful resource.

W: Seeing as how you’re making a documentary about a museum which is already a very didactic source of information, how did you go about drawing the subtext out of the place?

JN: We use the museum as the locus and then follow several strands out from there. Through our cast of characters across the Midwest, all connected to the museum in some way, we are able to weave a thematic narrative that covers the various ideas we’re interested in. Among other things—how the value and purpose of older printing methods has changed as our society has transitioned into a digital age?  How is contemporary graphic art influenced by the history of the artform itself?  We try to raise questions about what to preserve, how to preserve it, and why it’s worth the effort.

W: Some obsolete technologies manage to take on a second life by addressing a different need or being adopted by a new (sub)culture in a different context. Do you think a revival or re-interpretation is inherent to any successful preservation movement?

N: I think evolution is key to preservation. Re-imagining and adapting technology, while maintaining the elements that made it interesting in the first place, ensures longevity of the medium. I think the new interest in letterpress and craft is sustainable. The current styles of letterpress may fade, only to be re-invented again by some future generation.

W: It’s hard to talk about your film’s potential impact in the design community without bringing up the immensely successful Helvetica — do you think Helvetica has opened any doors for your film, and how do you compare the two? Do you see them as complimentary films?

JN: I had been working on Typeface for years when Helvetica was released. At first, I was worried that they would compete, but then as soon as I saw Helvetica (and enjoyed it) I realized they were totally different works. I think Helvetica has shown what a voracious audience there is for films/discussions about type and design and that both films raise points about the prevalence and importance of type in society, but in the end they cover very different ground.

W: I was excited when I realized that Kartemquin Films, known for films such as Hoop Dreams and Stevie, was producing this. How is Kartemquin making this film differently than someone else would?

JN: Our films take a very long time to make—largely because we follow subjects over time and are invested in getting the story right. I think we worked to flesh out the documentary beyond just a film about type to be more of a discussion about the state of our culture in its current frenzied state. We try to show the opportunities and obstacles inherent in preserving a collection like Hamilton. I hope it resonates with audiences—both designers and laymen alike, and that it gets people thinking about how to take care of the things in their lives, jobs and communities that they value.

Nick Sherman