Design

Last year, I had the opportunity to spend a semester at North Carolina State University as a designer in residence in the Graphic Design department. The Raleigh-Durham area is well known for its Research Triangle, developed nearly five decades ago as a partnership between the state’s government, industry, and academia to attract investment and employment in the technology and science sectors. Nearly 40,000 full-time employees work in the Research Triangle today in companies like IBM, Lenovo, Cisco, Red Hat, and BASF.

During my stay in Raleigh I had the opportunity to do a presentation to the Masters students in graphic design about the influence of design in cities. It took me six months to articulate some of those ideas a little better, which I’d like to share with you. In my presentation, we talked about how designers tend to concentrate in economically prosperous areas and how some cities develop a specialized work-force in design, while other cities tend to have a diverse design workforce. I mentioned the example of the Lombardy region in Italy, where various product and lighting manufacturers like Alessi, Kartel, Flos, and Artimede are concentrated. In contrast, other cities like Toronto, Canada, have a more diversified design workforce. I showed them the maps by Yale University professor William Nordhaus, who has paired economic activity with geographic areas. It was evident that the design powerhouses in Canada and Italy were located in the prosperous regions of both countries’ biggest urban regions (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figs. 1 and 2. Geographically based Economic data (G-Econ) maps for Canada and Italy. Peaks highlight the economic predominance of Toronto and Lombardy. Maps by Prof. William Nordhaus, Yale University.

Figure 1. Economic activity in Italy.

Figure 2. Economic activity in Canada. Governments have become big promoters of design and creativity.

Gordon Brown, Britain’s Prime Minister, recently asked the Design Council to find ways for Britain to enhance the country’s business competitiveness through its creative talents. A few years ago, India drafted its first national design policy, following other Asian countries. This year, the city of Turin was designated as the first World Design Capital. The city is proud of its diverse economy hosting a variety of industries, from aerospace to wineries. Seoul has already been designated as 2010’s design capital, riding on the success of its global brands like LG, Samsung, and Daewoo.

Design’s love affair with government perhaps began in the 90s. The Creative City book was released, following a 1995 article by Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini. Demos, the British think-tank began advising policy-makers to look at creativity as an enabler of regional economic prosperity in face of globalization. In 1998, Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization also built the foundation to what Richard Florida would later dub the “creative class,” a term that includes designers, as well as workers in IT, science, financial sectors, among others.

I have not seen how these design policies are drafted, but they lead me to believe that they are based on theories regarding the diversity of design activities in urban regions and their connection to regional economic drivers. As designers, we lack economic tools to draft these theories, so it is very likely that design policies are drafted largely by non-designers. Regional economic theories for design that include designers’ perspectives are needed.

I can only speculate on the content of design policies by doing some reverse engineering. To draft such policies, I would start by quantifying the contributions of all the design industries in the local economy such as graphic design, product design, and so on, and do an inventory of the local economic output. I would look at the design workforce, based on designers’ supply and demand, the annual number of design students graduating each year from local universities and new hires. If the number of design students exceeds the number of local design jobs, a city is likely to experience a “brain drain” of designers.

Based on an economic theory of design diversification and specialization cities could also invest in the development of new design areas and diversify their design economies. Concentration of graphic designers, for example, has a direct relation to the advancement of profession and the economic value that they create for a city. A desired concentration of designers, based on the number of institutions, organizations, companies, and gross domestic product (GDP) of a city could be calculated. I imagine the visual output of such estimate would look like slightly like a bell curve. (see figure 3).

Figure 3. Regional economic benefits of design are diminished as design workforce grows beyond demand. After a peak in optimal density has been passed, the addition of new graphic designers would not greatly benefit the economy of a city, nor the advancement of the profession. After the peak is passed, it would be recommendable for graphic designers to diversify their skills, or to specialize their skills even more, depending on the economic activities of the region. Graphic designers could focus on type design, or editorial design, for example. Designers could develop a new specialization, such as gene sequencing visualizations.

A city like Raleigh already has most of the criteria found in the “creative economy” principles. Raleigh-Durham is the sixth city with most “creative” workers in the U.S. according to Richard Florida’s Creativity Index (2002). It also has a highly educated population. Masters and PhD programs in design are available at NC State University, for example. There is a large number of companies with large Research & Development budgets, as well as connections to global markets. I don’t know if the region will become a creative economy driven by design, like the ones I mentioned earlier, but if Raleigh-Durham does draft a design policy for the region, I wonder how involved designers will be. Can design organizations drive such change?

What is Marc Greene teaching ‘em at The New School Department of Media Studies and Film? Whatever it is, we’re happy to have made Nora Beckman’s “bad” list:

Stand Up Comedy

And of course the “good” stuff:

(more…)

In a world where writers strike for online royalties and internet radio (temporarily) escapes paying crippling copyright fees, UbuWeb is a rare bird. Founded in 1996 by artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith, it’s an extensive and entirely free online archive for avant-garde poetry, writing, film, and sound compositions. Remarkably, not one of the artists, obscure or famous, gets any financial remuneration for their work. Although much of the collection is out-of-print, the editors often post first and ask for permission later (or, perhaps, after the cease-and-desist letters start arriving). Their saving grace is that it’s primarily a site for the un-marketable--the aggressively avant-garde has never had much of a place in a goods-and-services economy. UbuWeb emphasizes free access to information, and in the process creates an online utopia for art and poetry.

[fig. 1 Edgar Varêse and Le Corbusier, Pôeme électronique, 1958]

UbuWeb’s interests are far-reaching, and the site acts as an umbrella for several curated projects. One portion is devoted to Ethnopoetics (where you can see Shaker visual poetry or listen to Inuit throat singing) while another section is called “Outsiders” (former title: “Found + Insane”).

[fig. 2 An example from Kenneth Goldsmith’s collection of Assorted Street Posters.]

Not to be missed is the complete archive of Aspen, a multimedia arts magazine published from 1965 to 1971. Each of the 10 issues, edited and designed by a different artist-designer team, came in a custom box filled with booklets, records, posters, and postcards. (And, in the case of one issue, a super-8 reel.) Contributors included Roland Barthes, Steve Reich, Ed Ruscha, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (One major drawback is that while a lot of the artwork was scanned in most of it remains at thumbnail size. However, someone did spend a lot of time re-typing the text so it could be read online.)

[fig. 3 Selection of Slides from ‘Northeast Passing’ by Yvonne Rainer, Aspen no. 8, 1970-71]

Last June, Archinect chief editor John Jourden conducted a great interview with Goldsmith, where they touched on a brief history of concrete poetry, “uncreativity as a creative practice”, and the origins of UbuWeb. A tidbit:

“I still believe what the Web does best is what it does originally, and that is just a way of getting things out and disturbing things. That is what’s new about the Web. Programming, you know, making computers jump through hoops isn’t really very interesting to me. UbuWeb is a flat HTML 1.0 site. There is no programming behind it, absolutely everything is written in BBEdit by hand. You know I want to keep the site very basic, because what really is new is this radical sense of distribution. We are in the business of radical distribution ... That is what it’s about! It really is about free and unfettered access for people to materials that were relegated to museums or relegated to a specialist. And now are available to everybody free of charge.”

[fig. 4 On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972, 1989. View it here.]

Who knows how many would end up seeing a video piece by Richard Serra, hearing the voice of Guilliaume Apollinaire, or reading crazy found street flyers from New York if these weren’t readily available online? There are many, many more artists on the site, both hugely famous and completely unknown, and the list is growing. Be prepared: wandering through UbuWeb is an addicting way to spend a few minutes, a few hours, or a few weeks.

On December 7th, the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, The Netherlands, hosted "Research on Research III", the latest in a symposium series aimed to stimulate debate on the role of research in art and design practice. Last Friday, five guests (Ǟbäke, Sara de Bondt, Luna Maurer, Ksenija Berk, and Christoph Keller) were invited to respond, to poke and prod, and otherwise make provocative statements about the relationship between a design practice and research. To quote from the program guide:

Can research be defined independently or does it simply arise from and belong to practice? Is research a way to think about and redefine the position of the designer?

As a current design researcher at the Jan van Eyck, I’m working on answering these questions for myself. I’m crafting another post that will collect some of my notes and remembrances from the day’s events. In the meantime, Daniel van der Velden, one of the event organizers and also the moderator, has kindly agreed to allow us to post the excellent introductory remarks he made at the beginning of the symposium.

Images © Sea Shepherd, www.seashepherd.org

Design Practice Research
Daniel van der Velden

The unpleasant picture shown here is important for a number of reasons. Ecological, environmental and ethical ones--yet just one of those reasons concerns us today.

What are we looking at? In fact, the picture's taken from aboard one of the ships of an organization called Sea Shepherd. Sea Shepherd is a radical conservation society, founded by Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace.
Sea Shepherd, contrary to Greenpeace, when it encounters a ship hunting for whales, it will warn once, and upon ignorance of that warning, will attempt to disable it. And that's what is about to happen here. This picture was taken while Sea Shepherd was pursuing a Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean. The targeted ship was the Nisshin Maru. It was the last remaining one of the so-called factory ships. These ships are used to process whales into canned meat while at sea.
Now since commercial whaling is forbidden, the Japanese had tried to do something to prevent their mothership, the Nisshin Maru, from being targeted by the international treaties. They had painted a text on the ship's side. The text read:

Research.

Now I would wholeheartedly agree if you would claim that this is far from the ideal way to start today's symposium about graphic design. However, what I want to isolate from the case just outlined is the particular usage that the term 'Research' is getting here.

It is of course used as a sign or logo that lets the ship, its crew, and its fleet, be exempt from rules and laws that define commercial whaling as a punishable crime.
It is a way to dissociate the ship and its crew from their true intentions.

This is, I think, comparable and analogous to one what is at risk of happening in art and design practices today. That risk is that we start naming them 'research' practices while what's going on below the surface is 'business as usual'.

Not every practice is a research.
On the other hand: not every research is a practice.
If we want to describe how design practice at present tends towards research, or defines conditions for it, one way to start is by looking at what it is designers are doing, and how they bring their interests and their obsessions into the work they do, and how their working methods are changing, and how, in fact, all-embracing definitions of design practice are increasingly hard to draw.

It is still quite normal to assume that actually, designers are pragmatists and all they want to do is solve problems.
But under the influence of the information revolution, graphic design is set adrift and has begun finding new mandates and possibilities: simply because the computer has brought typesetting into the designer's studio, and that computer has email in it and is connected to the internet, many different faculties of and in designers are potentially being activated and developed.

For example, many graphic designers nowadays are writers and work extensively with forms of discourse and written exchange as part of shaping practice. The works they produce visually, as designers in the classical sense, cannot be seen independently from these writings. In that, they are not unlike some of their avant-garde predecessors from the modernist movements.

Some designers have changed what used to be the common design practice of stealing from each other's work: they have started referencing their visual sources instead, which is indeed a meaningful departure from the implicit notion of competition and appropriation that underpin design as a fashion and trade.

The agency of designers in other fields than their own craft, results in many designers being invited into their context with a clean sheet, no agenda, a carte blanche. Here, in a way, they can design their own role from scratch. Rather than being asked to serve a pre-defined objective, designers often become wildcards, chameleons, adaptively changing color by the minute. Solving a traditional design problem is just one out of many roles that the designer is performing simultaneously.

One of the other consequences of our changing tools is that we can set up a studio now anywhere we want. There is no need to be contained within the four walls of an expensive metropolitan office space stuffed with Vitra chairs.

Many examples of cutting edge design are now being produced by collectives and entities who are not studios in the classical sense, and who operate from the unlikeliest of places, often mobile, sometimes unglamorous, and even at times from remote natural resorts where life is still good and affordable.

Other designers have started expanding their skills to formulate models and speculative scenarios. As such, they are bringing design thinking into areas off-limits to the strictly productive reach of what it is designers do, into a more strategic understanding of what design might become. They actively seek for an involvement in issues which are 'none of their business', in which they are introducing an outside perspective.

We can say that a lot of conditions to speak of graphic design as research are in place. Writing, agency, authorship, mobility, post-studio field work, new collaborations, strategic and theoretical activities, are all transforming design into a knowledge-intensive 'multi-disciplinary discipline'.

But just like the commercial whaling 'Research' shown here entails a risk, so does what I just briefly spoke about. The manifold positions which designers find themselves capable of occupying, eventually bring the risk that there's no time left to actually make work. We may become so incredibly smart that we will be left in between all our knowledge-intensive networking activities with nothing to show.

Let this never happen. Do research. Make work. And let's talk about it.

En route to (and from) a press check in Brugge, Belgium I took time off in Arnhem, the Netherlands (to visit friends — and previous Walker designers — who are currently at the Werkplaats Typografie). In downtown Arnhem there is a newly opened store — Coming Soon: Arnhem — that sells Dutch-made design goods (books, magazines, fashion, products, art, etc). The identity was designed by the Amsterdam-based design studio Experimental Jetset. Below are a few examples of the system in use:

I was inspired by Silas’ Seeing 20/20 posting to write this entry, as it briefly addressed some of the issues i’ve been thinking about in relation to graphic design. In recent years, our profession has been transformed by the influence of other disciplines. Four years ago, during the inaugural class of the Institute without Boundaries, our class spent one year studying the question “What is the future of design?” The Massive Change book, one of the results of this post-graduate design program, opened up by stating that “design is invisible until it fails,” referring to the infrastructures that sustain modern life as objects of design (i.e. transportation systems, the internet, cities, etc.) By opening up design conversations beyond 20th century models of production, broader understandings of the profession that embrace design within larger systems emerged as a result of this project. As Silas mentioned, the graphic design profession was coined nearly a century ago. For the most part of last century, the graphic design profession remained fairly stable until the last couple of decades.

First spread of Massive Change book. Photograph shows transmission towers crushed and power lines downed by freezing rain in Boucherville, Quebec, January 1998.

Second spread of Massive Change book. Photograph shows burned-out control room of Reactor 4. Chernobyl, Russia, 2001.

Although the notion of a “designer-less design office” makes no sense at first sight, it raises a lot of issues that graphic designers are struggling with today. Rapid technology changes have swept the industry and drive some of the major innovations in the field today. Design businesses are constantly required to add value to their products and services in face of global competition. Many of us are left wondering what just happened to our tidy understanding of graphic design. I believe that a more engaged design practice could be a way forward for graphic design to continue being relevant.

My design studio, Work Worth Doing, might be a designer-less office. However, I do not seek autonomy as Silas’ concept suggests. Instead, our office seeks a more direct engagement with the world. Even though I am the only “design-trained” designer at the office, we operate as a design studio. Our focus is on systems designs often born out of our own initiative that are parsed through inter-disciplinary inquiry. The resulting outcomes address social or environmental challenges. For example, our Now House project involves the design of a home retrofit system for a wartime house that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 6 tons on an annual basis and could potentially be applied to millions of existing wartime houses in North America. It is through a direct engagement with architects, engineers, and energy specialists that this project emerged. Other projects have required us to engage with political scientists, economists, and sociologists. My roles have been paradoxically those of a graphic designer and generalist designer.

As designers, we often forget to look at the past for answers to our profession’s current ontological struggles. Buckminster Fuller, designer, architect, and inventor, strived to find an answer to the relevance of design in the world, or how design can “address humanity’s present and future needs.” The legacy of his work is now articulated by the Buckminster Fuller Institute as design science, a design practice that is comprehensive, systematic, anticipatory, ecologically responsible, able to withstand empirical testing, and replicable.

In face of current scientific knowledge that indicates humanity’s current lifestyle can not be sustained for the remainder of this century, I find Fuller’s design legacy very relevant. Recent studies suggest that climate change, the result of human activity is of great concern, warning that if the earth’s temperature were to raise by two degrees celsius, irreparable damage to the world’s biosphere, societies, and economy would be caused. However, recent studies by WWF and UNEP suggest it is still possible to prevent such damage if we act today simply by scaling what we already know how to do. In other words, existing technologies and knowledge would suffice to solve the world’s climate change problem.

Embracing complexity with the world at large remains a challenge for our profession, but some designers –not only graphic designers — are beginning to address this issue. The evolution of our profession is a complex process, but I believe that a commitment to engage beyond traditional notions of graphic design and addressing broad challenges is a positive step forward for our field.

Scott Ponik and Alex DeArmond here reporting under the joint pseudonym Van Arnhem. We thought that in addition to contributing under our own names it would be nice to have a separate persona that we can use for a series of posts about ideas and observations from Arnhem, the Netherlands. We’ll start our first experiment in cooperative blogging today. Hope you like it.

Yours from Arnhem,
Van Arnhem

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of addressing the AIGA national convention from it’s main stage. But only for 60 seconds. I and 19 other young designers had to present of our idea of “what’s next” for the graphic design profession. Each of us were nominated by an established practicing designer. I was nominated by AIGA Gold Medalist Lorraine Wild, a speaker in the Walker’s Dis-Contents: Insights 2007 Lecture Series. I’ve had the good fortune of working for and being a student of Lorraine’s in the MFA program at California Institute of the Arts

My presentation entitled Towards the notion of a Designer-lessâ„¢ Design Office or a (micro)theory of graphic design evolution is a parody of the recent trend for graphic designers to create more self-initiated briefs. In 60 seconds with this chart and several supporting examples I argue that

Designers want creative freedom. The Designer-lessâ„¢ want the ultimate autonomy: to design themselves out of practice. If designers can thrive without clients, then the next natural step would be a design office without designers.”

To see some field examples starting to evolve into the Designer-Lessâ„¢ see Butt Magazine, Virtual Paula Scher + HP and the graphic design result ofOtto, an artificial design intelligence entity.

The notion of graphic designers striving for autonomy was actually forecasted four years ago by the Walker’s very own Design Director and my former boss, Andrew Blauvelt, in the famous Rant issue of Emigre magazine. In his essay, Towards Critical Autonomy or Can Graphic Design Save Itself? Andrew urges that graphic designers should create work that is aware of and critiques it’s social, cultural, economic, technological contexts.

I didn’t create my parody to make light of Andrew’s essay. I extended the kernel of his idea to a ridiculous, but possible conclusion to coax the graphic design profession to be open minded and adaptable in a constantly expanding, shifting discipline that is perhaps out growing the term “graphic” design.

The Walker Design Department’s endeavors into curation, event programming, and now critical writing (in addition to their roles in exhibition, catalogue, publication, and advertising design) are but one possible model of nuanced and multi-faceted practice that deserves a different, more evolved nomenclature than a perhaps obsolete term coined in 1922.

Scott Ponik and I were Walker Design Fellows from fall 2004 through fall 2006. When asked to stay on for an additional year [amidst the grand-(re)opening of the Walker expansion in 2005] we were left with a print budget from what would have been the 2005-2006 Design Fellowship poster (someone at some point will post these in the Flat File section, hint hint). In lieu of the poster we were asked to design a promo announcing the Walker’s new graphic identity: Walker Expanded. One late-night brainstorming session found us re-aligning the “strips of tape”�--from the recent print collateral--along the walkways of the (temporary) Walker offices. The assemblage ended at Andrew’s office door and the real-life sketch was later re-enacted for its printed (and more mailable) form.