Camberwell Design Key Ideas

Questions by students during (you) Consume Event's Q&A session

2011-11-12T08:09:00.000-08:00

Has the reliance on design and consumer goods limited man’s natural instinct to reach and adapt to a justifiable form of design?
As an educator (to Neil Maycroft perhaps), do you feel that design education needs to be re-examined in light of the multi tasking definition of contemporary design?
How can a designer be creative if governed by the world of patents?
Who deserves credit for the design of a new technology?
Do you see an end to Planned Obsolescence in the foreseeable future?
The Ekovore Scheme seems to require an enormous infrastructure investment involving many behavioural changes, how would you (Faltazi) effect such an investment and behavioural change?
How do you (Faltazi) plan on making the Ekovores project a reality?
What happens to the Chilian farmer? (Faltazi)
If consumer design is about form giving, who is responsible for creating a pleasurable user experience?
I think that you cannot define a product as having a good design by how innovative the form ie.: Innovative form almost sounds like a contradiction.
The issue of consumption has a lot to do with the lifecycle of an object. So how about designing products to increase its lifespan. Could that be something (as designers) to look forward to on this issue?
Ekokook seems to take up a lot of space; can the everyday man afford it? Or even fit it in a small home?
The Agricultural ideas are great, how long until we can have these in our cities and towns?

(you) consume

2011-11-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

(you) consume is the first event of the 2011/12 Key Ideas Symposium series at Camberwell College of Art and Design- University of the Arts London. The day aims to examine an array of perspectives on consumption, design and how they relate to each other. The event will also explore fresh notions of how design can be instrumental in proposing less conventional routes for more sustainable modes of consumption.

The event seeks to disentangle subverting concepts that may influence the role of the designer in a critical context by igniting an unorthodox questioning of the creative practices’ challenges and opportunities within consumer culture.

Consumption may be regarded as negative production.

Alfred Marshall, Economist

In very simple terms it is conventionally accepted that the economic success of organisations, markets and countries is based on scales of growth. As a short term solution this may seem okay, but isn’t it an unsustainable approach to growth and consumption that is leading us to a major global concerns? Can we really expect to spend our way out of crises and somehow magically create a post-crisis economy that is sustainable?

If the current western financial crisis was partly caused by the belief that organisations and economies must grow through the stimulation of over-consumption of things we can’t afford through easy credit, the environmental crisis is being caused by the over-consumption natural resources and the health crisis is being caused by the over-consumption of foods we shouldn’t eat, (more calories than we can use, for example), then it probably indicates a bit of a problem with endless consumption.

Key Ideas (you) consume will begin with Dr Sansi-Roca examining notions on "the pleasure of expenditure", after Mauss's The Gift, and the influence he had on Bataille and Situationism. In these terms, Dr Sansi-Roca will follow Bataille in confronting the economic paradigm of scarcity and question the very idea of "consumption" as something opposed to "production".

Dr Neil Maycroft will analyze design (defined in a number of ways) and how it contributes relatively little to the so-called ‘consumer design’. The promotion of design as central to consumerism has a rather undistinguished track record and that instead of being the central player in the development of consumer goods it is, in fact, constantly wrong-footed by the world around it.

Laurent Lebot and Victor Massip from Faltazi will discuss the combined effect of climate, energy, social, financial, food and health crises and how it pushes us to raise questions in greater depth than ever before about local resources. They will also share their Ekokook and Ekovores proposals for a local circular resilient system for supplying the home and city.

Guided by their talks, the morning will be followed by discussions and a practical workshop. The aim of the day is to create an intellectual platform for students, creative practitioners and thinkers to cultivate a long lasting discussion on the current design landscape, its responsibility and opportunities.The span of Key Ideas: (you) consume is intentionally comprehensive whilst also hosting the particular areas of competence of our panel of speakers with practical proposals. It brings together international practitioners and researchers with a focused practical workshop to discuss and examine the value and power of exploring the past and stimulating future directions for the design sector.

(you) consume (you) use (you) reject

2011-11-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

Key Ideas 2011/2012 a series of three one day symposiums by Camberwell College of Art and Design - UAL

Man made paraphernalia find their way into every cupboard, display case, shop, home, gallery, museum, magazine, computer monitor and land fill site.

The collection and exchange of things play a vital role in our understanding of cultural value and are a powerful reflection of the kinds of societies and individuals we have become.

But can the design industry, broadly defined, critically de-codify and help to re-shape need, desire, value and sustainability?

The challenge is that ultimately all consumption fills some sort of void in our lives, at least temporarily. And by feeding the void in our lives, designers are providing the stimulus that keeps the modern economy moving. However, sometimes individuals reshape and adulterate the way something is used in ad hoc ways according to specific necessities. Nevertheless resources, food, materials, goods and people frequently fail to fit in this global machine and are discarded.

This series of talks and workshops intends to investigate a range of aspects that inform how we consume, use and discard today. These events aim to make available to students and staff potential perspectives to consider, when involved in making new things exist, through a variety of interpretations of the three themes.

(you) consume (you) use (you) reject

The events will explore a range of vital issues and topics relating to design, art and the route man-made products make their way into our lives.

Dates:

(you) consume 09.11.11

(you) use 01.02.12

(you) reject 09.05.12

SOCIETY

2011-05-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

Key Ideas: Society:

Society is the title of the 3^rd Key Ideas Symposium at Camberwell College of Art and Design_ University of the Arts London. The event will explore a range of critically important issues and themes relating to design, art and society.

The day will include talks, discussions and a practical workshop. The aim of the day is to create an intellectual platform for students, creative practitioners and thinkers to develop an interdisciplinary conversation on the role of the art and design in and for society. Through a series of provocations the purpose of the event is to bring to the table notions on the role of the artist/designer in the creation, growth and shaping of our built environment, communities and cities, through an exploration of theoretical concepts and practical approaches.

This occasion is intended as a space for critical debate, investigation and experimentation of ideas and concepts that relate art/design and their many contexts to society – in the public ream, environmentally, as notions, as a subversive tool, as utopias, on the streets and in communities.

As designers, we are largely concerned with how to create communication, product, or experience that fulfill their intentions. However, with globalization, digitalization, and virtualization, we begun to realize the need of a bigger question, which is, how artifacts (the facts of art) defines us as humans. As designers we have influence on how humans maneuver and shape the environments and rituals through implements _homo faber; how chairs alter natural ways of congregating; to ethical concerns of how participation in the design process empowers marginalized communities.

Perhaps there is a fundamental swing slowing underway redefining how artist and designers are recognized in and by society. Validation is being widened and is beginning to embrace practices which include ways of working that until relatively recently, were maintained on the boundaries of the accreditation narratives. Within a fluid social field new creative practices are negotiating their merits through interactions, collaboration and even frictions.

“The legacy of disconnection between contemporary art and society is being challenged by a wider rediscovery of the emancipatory nature of the art process (true of art’s function in the longer story of human societies), which is collaborative, participatory and communal, not limited to, or by, lonely agency of the individual artist.”

‘It’s art… but not as we know it! By Professor Declan McGonagle in Art of Negotiation, 2007, David Butler and Vivienne Reiss. Cornerhouse/Publications: Manchester

The scope of Key Ideas: Society is deliberately broad and ambitious. Our times demand nothing less. However, the day also embraces the specific areas of expertise of our panel of speakers with practical examples of ideas in situ.

SOCIETY / 11.05.2011

2011-05-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

The next Key Ideas Symposium is entitled SOCIETY.

Key Ideas: Employment

2011-02-01T22:58:00.000-08:00

The second Key Ideas event of the 2010-2011 Academic Year tackles the fundamental issue of Employment.

Over the last twenty years the creative industries have undergone a period of unparalleled change. The growth of desktop publishing technology, the expansion of the internet into all aspects of our life, and the rapid development of a plethora of digital tools have meant that the production of design and communication media are more accessible than they have ever been before. As a result the average final year undergraduate student can now create something on their laptop that, to all but the trained eye, could pass as something that a team of experienced designers and a studio full of equipment would have produced even 10 years ago. At the same time creative subjects are more popular than they have ever been before and the numbers going on to study these subjects at undergraduate level has expanded exponentially.

As a result, when these students graduate they emerge into a world where there are many more graduates than jobs. Conventional career progression is extremely difficult to find and often can often only be accessed through unpaid internships and work placements. Meanwhile, clients have learnt that they can access this army of work hungry talented graduates through the internet and get them to work at a fraction of the rate demanded by more established studios. As a result we have seen a growth in ‘crowd-sourcing’ and ‘free-pitching’.

Established designers complain that our business model is being undermined, while others welcome a more fluid and dynamic market. Holly Willis from the University of Southern California said in her lecture, Embracing Flux, at the New Contexts/New Practices: Six Views of the AIGA Design Educators Conference. “Our current moment as unsettling as it is, and as unique and apocalyptic as it feels, repeats a host of previous junctures in recurring cycles of disruption and stasis that punctuate the previous 200 years of Western culture.”

Arbiters of Taste

2010-10-27T06:06:00.000-07:00

Some questions arising from the Key Ideas Taste Symposium Wednesday 27 October 2010.

Education /
Q.How much do art and design students look to their tutors and lecturers as arbiters of taste in terms of what they learn in college?

Q.Should they? Or is the point of being at Art College to find one's own way and 'kick against' the system?

Tourism /
Q. Are objets d'art collected on overseas travel more discerning and genuine than those from home soil?

Sense of place /
Q. If Venice is known for Murano glass what is Britain to become known for, beyond Royal Doulton or Waterford Crystal?

The Influence of Others /
Q. Does an individual's taste change when they start a relationship, live with a partner or get married?

Q. What does online social networking mean for Taste?

Q. Are blogs such as 'Its Nice That' and 'Ffffound' genuine arbiters of taste? If so, what gives them authority?

Q. How old is the person at Franklin Mint who makes the decisions to put fluffy felines on plates and then advertise them in the Mail On Sunday Magazine Supplement?

r-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-e-e-e-e

2010-10-27T00:17:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of here, thank you.
I just wanted to take a quick look at something like this and try to unpack how my judgement/ taste comes to affect an understanding of this. Taste by definition is about having a liking or partiality for something or seeing a level of excellence, sublime-ness in a thing or object. So I look at this image of Wayne Rooney - poor under-appreciated Wayne - and it grates with me on a visual level, because perhaps I think that the artists painterly affectation coupled with Pub landlord charicaturing is a gross and unnecessary fusion of visual language [I can rationalise my distaste because of my education and training]. Perhaps I am equally annoyed by the benign nature of the image, where is the biting satire? [being currently deeply annoyed at the greed of the Rooney's and their representation, so my taste is viewed through a political lens as well]- the soft focussing which makes a virtue of the odd proportions and the curiously idiotic expression - I pity Wayne because he has not had the advantages, educationally, that I have. Perhaps I secretly think that I am better than him? - so this is an issue of class, my distaste for this image is fuelled by a sense of superiority despite his millions.

Imanuel Kant and common sense

2010-10-26T23:57:00.001-07:00

This is Immanuel Kant, a philosopher.
I have borrowed form the wiki source so thank you -

"In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure which attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide that which is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment,^[64] "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is in fact subjective insofar as it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste, i.e. judgements of beauty, lay claim to universal validity (§§20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense."

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant [24/10/2010]

Kant describes the appreciation of an object or thing as a disinterested pleasure and that a thing can have a universal validity derived from 'common sense'. I think that this refers to a shared appreciation - a collective understanding of what is good and what is not. So whilst this notion of taste seems to oppose Bourdieu's - particularly the bit about having a 'disinterested pleasure' which would suggest that there are no social or political factors at play - no aspiration or desire to be perceived as more sophisticated or clever than you already are, there is the sense that the foundation for conformity and exclusivity - cementing class barriers through taste choices, is being laid here.

art skool

2010-10-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

This is an image from Daniel Clowes' 'Art School Confidential', its deadly accurate - describing art school types - wistful hippies, angry lesbian radicals, beatnik modernists etc etc - the fashions may have dated but the typologies remain.
So Art School - that process of education and transformation - did, I came to realise, imbue in me a set of values, ideas and tastes that have stayed with me ever since. The stuuf that I like to surround myself with [plaster casts/bits of coral/white things] refers to several traditions from classical sculpture and the process of drawing from casts to modernists ideals about form - even Peter Blake's Museum of the white. My taste for these things is not innate but acquired and carries with it associative value and pretence. Art School taught me how to use 'specialist language' - so that I could talk knowingly with other people in the know - I learned the codes, like never to use the word 'nice'. Although using the word nice now - is post ironic, acceptable - I now know so much that I can use the word nice to describe a piece of work in the full and certain knowledge that the person that I am talking with knows that I do not really mean that the work is merely 'nice'. So tastes and the way that I expressed them have moved away from the Edwardian semi in the midlands - they are now much more urbane and sophisticated, I am the product of several art schools - I have been through my reactionary phase [actively encouraged!] and come out of it the other side. This is simplistic - but my question is to what extent do institutions like the art school shape taste and values.

becoming institutionalised / the road to damascus

2010-10-26T20:54:00.000-07:00

I wanted to tell a short story about taste development and role [positive and negative] that institutions have to play in the process. But starting with three little kittens is as good a place as any.
My grandparents, like many I expect, used to collect 'objet d'art', knick knacks and ornaments and keep them on the mantelpiece and in a special, glass fronted, unit. My grandfather was particularly fond of three brands of these kind of goods. There is an example of one above from the Franklin Mint. The Franklin Mint usually advertise in the back of the supplement for the Mail on Sunday and each week there would be an image of a either a Georgian Lady on a swing, in soft focus, or a small, dewy eyed boy reclining in a pile of hay and invariably these things would find their way in to the cabinet in my grandparents front room.
I used to love these objects and seem to remember spending a lot of time looking at them - marvelling at the skill and dexterity of the artists.

They were also partial to Lladro figurines and

Porcelain from Limoges in France - although they never managed to acquire anything quite as spectacular as these vases with their magnificent cartouches depicting 'mythological scenes'. My appreciation of these objets was usually accompanied by the tortured crooning of Engelbert Humperdink or P J Proby on the casette player.

For a long time my parent appeared to 'sort of' share these tastes and the odd bit of Lladro would find its way in to our semi-detached new build.

It looked a bit like this only less grand and without the garage.
But then we moved to a house that looked like this:

An Edwardian semi detached house with a pantry and period features, like wood panelling and an authentic bathroom suite. It also had a leaking roof and ice formed on the inside of the windows in the winter. No more banal little semi for us -
With this transition came a marked change in the stuff that we surrounded ourselves with - every Sunday I found myself at an Antiques market - getting something authentic, with character. No more Franklin mint for me.
I'd even lost my taste for Engelbert.
I cannot say that this transition had anything to do with aspiration or an overt desire to be perceived as more sophisticated or clever on the part of my parents - but it was a distinct change. Naturally this had an effect on me - I am sitting in my own home surrounded by mid century modern furniture, Danish light fittings, formica tables [irony!]. I also have gonks and tringlements but they are 'tasteful' and reference working resources that I have seen/liked at places like Barbara Hepworth's studio in St Ives but I shall come to this.

The point here is that my own value system changed and evolved over time - my tastes changed. This may seem like an obvious point but it does reinforce Bourdieu's claim - in a way.
The next phase in terms of my own taste development happened when I went to West Notts.. College of FE - 'the art school'. Again it is an obvious observation but this experience exposed me to stuff/things and ideas that were so far removed from my own experiences that it was bewildering...and seductive. And it is this quasi-religious/erotic element to institutional art school education that I would like to briefly look at.

Martin Parr

2010-10-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

Martin Parr's documentary photography.
Martin Parr has consistently produced work that highlights the frailties of the British working class, perhaps?. This may be a crude description of the work - but I cannot help but feel ambivalent/troubled by the way of looking. We are presented with lurid images that seem to present a particular stance on the part of the photographer - is this sneering contempt or genuine empathy? there is a focus in Parr's work on the 'taste' of the subject - his clever use of objects/signs that connect you to the subject on both a personal and political level. Roland Barthes would call this the studium and the punctum, twin mechanisms by which we are enabled to 'read' an image - but there is inevitably an element of taste at play here and it is bound in to the culture and politics of the photographer and the viewer.

Class, Bourdieu and Mitford

2010-10-26T06:36:00.001-07:00

Taste and class.
Below a sketch featuring the Two Ronnies and John Cleese. In a way it is one way to explore the notion of Cultural Capital and the relationship between Social class and judgements of taste put forward by Pierre Bourdieu in his seminal work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste

Bourdieu said:
“Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in a legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices [museum visits, concert going, reading etc] and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely liked to educational level [measured by qualifications or length of schooling] and secondarily to social origin"

Bonjour Pierre!

So Bourdieu describes the acquisition of certain preferences as a result of upbringing and education. Interestingly - John Cleese's character, the impoverished Upper Class Male states that he has 'innate breeding [but no money!]. His claim being that his inherent superiority is hereditary - inborn, and arguably his taste [which will also be superior in every way], is natural and the result of genes. The idea of innate-ness [although not necessarily linked to Social class] runs counter to Bourdieu's theory of acquired Cultural Capital. The phrase Cultural Capital is well worn now and it is commonly accepted as the theory that best reflects how an individual develops, ideas, preferences and taste. Innate-ness is loaded with a class history and, at its heart, suggests that those in-bred qualities cannot be bought/read about/acquired through education or a set of favourable circumstances. When Ronnie Corbett, as the quintessential working class man, says "I know my place" he certainly does. However Bourdieu claims that Cultural Capital is learnt, that there is no such thing as innate-ness. He belongs to the 'accident of birth' camp which suggests that had Elizabeth Windsor been born on a council estate in the black country, to a working class family not only would her accent have been completely different, but her sense of purpose, superiority, duty and taste [so do I]. So, does this also mean that taste is learned? it would suggest so.

What is also apparent in the sketch is an element of aspiration on the part of the character who represents the middle classes, Ronnie Barker, - the arriviste. This debate was illustrated in the article produced by Nancy Mitford in the 1950s describing 'linguistic' differences the U and not U [the U here standing for the Upper Classes] where social breeding [not innate-ness] is typified by a certain use of language for instance saying what? instead of pardon? and calling a fireplace a chimney-piece. It outlined a difference - the working classes being largely neglected form this particular discussion. So aspiration, the appropriation of language, behaviour and perhaps more particularly from our point of view objects/images/things that describe an approach to taste and therefore locate us in terms of our class and social standing.

So taste can perhaps be learned, can perhaps be acquired, can also be appropriated and adopted. Taste can become an affectation or badge to distinguish us from or align us with a particular social group.

Stephen Bayley on taste and class:
"Taste is a merciless betrayer of social and cultural attitudes"

Taste and Duchamp

2010-10-26T05:35:00.000-07:00

The subject for the first Key ideas symposium this year is taste.

We will be using this opportunity to examine ideas around the notion of taste. This is one of the things that Stephen Bayley has to say about it:

“Everyone has taste and yet it is a more taboo subject than sex or money. The reason for this is simple. Claims about your attitudes to or achievements in the carnal or financial arenas can be disputed only by your lover and your financial advisors, whereas by making a statement about your taste you expose body and soul to terrible scrutiny”

Bayley.S, P.13 General Knowledge, Booth Clibborn Editions [2000]

Taste – or personal visual and aesthetic preference - is a contentious and difficult subject to tackle head on. We realized this at a previous Key Ideas symposium when a ‘light’ element of the overall discussion around Image became the dominant talking point. It was apparent that Stephen Bayley’s assertion that Taste is a problematic subject was correct. The discussion that developed ranged broadly across a variety of cultural assumptions, issues around social class, politics and aesthetics. It was impassioned and well informed but inconclusive and has prompted us to make Taste the subject for today’s discussion and activities. The aim of the symposium is to firstly talk about Taste and its development as an idea and secondly to ask all participants to consider what this thing Taste is, where is comes from and what it means. Everybody in the room is connected to design, in most cases as practitioners and cannot help but apply a personal sensibility to the processes that we engage in. Taste plays a part in everything that we do, everything that we buy, everything that we produce, it is integral to our visual lives and therefore worthy of further scrutiny.

This is Marcel Duchamp talking about his approach to taste and Art. I wonder who the laymen who are so desperate to be pleased are? So, Marcel Duchamp equates being pleased or deriving pleasure with Taste. Is Duchamp here signalling his distaste for vulgar pleasure seeking in Art - his indifference could be interpreted as the ultimate disaffected 'pose'. Suggesting that to offer an opinion one way or the other is beneath his dignity or perhaps that the obvious and crude desire for pleasure is the terrain of those less refined or sophisticated. This, broadly speaking, describes a notion put forward by Bourdieu - sublimation.

"The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile - in a word, natural - enjoyment which consitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social difference"

Ah,ha another old chestnut…

2010-05-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

Graphic Designers, often like to assert their skill, training, taste and 'eye' by claiming moral high-ground in being able to identify and associate with 'better' cuts or digital versions of fonts. Two classic fonts that have become ubiquitous with the PC and Mac are Arial and Helvetica.
Some background information — provided by
http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica/
Helvetica
Designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger, Helvetica’s design is based on that of Akzidenz Grotesk (1896), and classified as a Grotesque or Transitional san serif face. Originally it was called Neue Haas Grotesque; in 1960 it was revised and renamed Helvetica (Latin for ~~Switzerland~~ “Swiss”).

Arial
Designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype (not Microsoft), it’s classified as Neo Grotesque, was originally called Sonoran San Serif, and was designed for IBM’s bitmap font laser printers. It was first supplied with Windows 3.1 (1992) and was one of the core fonts in all subsequent versions of Windows until Vista, when to all intents and purposes, it was replaced with Calibri.
In the 'soft copy' digital age, is this argument or plain snobbery redundant?

TYPOGRAPHY NOW

2010-05-11T17:25:00.000-07:00

It is almost twenty years since Rick Poyner & Edward Booth Clibborn released Typography Now. A publication which has enjoyed several re-prints and certainly for a number of years was a source of inspiration to students of Graphic Design and typography.

The early 1990s represented the real emergence and integration of Computer platforms and software page layout programs into the design process. This new technology was stretched (as was some of the type of the era) in a spirit of unabashed experimentation and expression. The restraint of previous eras and the technologies they worked on, were challenged. INdeed many of the trades and crafts associated with page layout for printed outcomes were seriously challenged.

Some ten years after Typography Now Ellen Lupton summarised in her essay Fluid Mechanics: Typographic Design Now*, that as a society and specifically communications industry, we were in an era of 'soft copy'. An expression Lupton observed was defined by Nicholas Negroponte and Muriel Cooper working at MIT’s Media Lab, as far back as 1978. “Soft copy,” referred to the linguistic raw material of the digital age. The bastard offspring of hard copy, soft text lacks a fixed typographic identity. Owing allegiance to no font or format, it is willingly pasted, pirated, output, or re-purposed in countless contexts. It is the ubiquitous medium of word-processing, desk-top publishing, e-mail, and the Internet.

This digital age has, we can see from recent developments such as the iPhone and iPad now become event further complex in terms of the nature of the soft copy now being able to be adjusted beyond the point of receipt by the end user. So in some sense, has the designer gone the way of the typesetter?

Is the designer's role being redefined, perhaps more closely akin to editors?

* published in Donald Albrecht, Steven Holt, and Ellen Lupton, Design Culture Now: National Design Triennial. New York: Princeton Architectural Press and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2000.

Ah,ha the old chestnut…

2010-05-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

So, here we go, how many typefaces should we work with?
How many is enough?
Want to hear Massimo Vignelli's — seven minute — take on it?

http://bigthink.com/ideas/19591

I Love Typography

2010-05-11T16:26:00.001-07:00

Returning from a recent trip to Berlin, I realise that, €36 lighter of pocket, I have once again indulged my compulsive obsession with typography. Three editions of Typographic Journal slanted in my bag, within three minutes — why?. Approximately 160 pages in each edition — 480 odd pages of stuff dedicated to type — I may never read all of them!
Is it for inspiration? Is it to inspire others? Some of the articles are in German, a language I can't get to grips with, BUT I can appreciate the careful crafting of individual letter forms in groups called words, in very close relationships with one another in sentences. This is something learned with metal and wood type in letterpress at Newcastle Polytechnic — in the first year when Mac SEs arrived and later at Central Saint Martins, at the time of Typography Now. Somehow this sense of crafting with type has remained intact through almost twenty years of digital based work.
Is it right for the new era?

http://www.slanted.de/

http://www.ilovetypography.com/

Image and Consumption

2010-02-02T16:03:00.001-08:00

This is Tim Westwood aka 'Big Dawg', Radio 1 DJ and son of the Anglican Bishop of Peterborough, deceased. He has just done his shopping at Tesco and in his twittered words was "just gettin my shop on - big ballin and shop callin!". Tim was brought up in Norfolk and attended the Norwich School, one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in the country. Arguably Tim's image, his appropriation of a culture which is not his own, including vernacular speech, clothing, the spinners on the wheels of his very pimped up ride is a construct.

We are here looking at an image of Tim Westwood, selected by him to go on his Twitter site - in itself this is interesting because it is possible to 'read' the picture - this is deliberate we are meant to be able to read it. Big Dawg is quite clearly telling us that he is part of Hip Hop culture and he needs a lot of Loo rolls.

This is Tim eating one of his favourite breakfasts, waffles. Note the products featured in the background, Aunt Jemma's buttermilk waffle mix and maple syrup. I am not sure if Tim set this photograph up deliberately or not - it is unlikely, but what is interesting are the objects and products that surround him, that he identifies with, that go some way towards describing him.

Tim Westwood is an extreme example but the question we are exploring is to what extent are we defined by the images that we consume - I have chosen to include objects and products because they could be constituent parts of a bigger picture/image. Tim Westwood clearlymakes very deliberate choices - his decisions are considered and very particular, he definitely surrounds himself with stuff that amplifies the image that he wants to project. Additionally we are thinking about the extent to which the cultural shift from words to pictures has enabled these readings and altered the way that we consume.

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are examples of this shift perhaps, enabling anybody with a digital camera and home computer to quickly construct an open and globally available [visual] persona in minutes. Easy to maintain and update the online identity can be changed and evolved rapidly, adapting to trend changes describing recent experiences - projecting out to the world the individuals experiences/taste/preferences or favourite things. But perhaps more indicative of the desire to articulate a set of ideas visually, to project a visual identity, particularly for designers, is the blogosphere - this aspect of online culture has become one of the major ways that we can express ideas/opinions - show the world what we like/dislike - describe our unique visual perception - display our network of connections and monitor our/our ideas popularity in the process. It is an environment which encourages discussion and encouragement for the blogger and some more successful sites have become arbiters of taste providing the signpost to vistas of new visual experience for hungry followers.

And everything that we see is reproduced, our experience here is via the mediated image. All design practitioners, graphic designers, product and object makers and illustrators use the medium [and the subsequent mediated imagery] to talk about their ideas/interest/identity - the imagery that we select and 'publish' to promote these facets of our practice are, arguably, key - so, in the image saturated world, who regulates this process? I suspect that we are both passive consumer and image retailer in one and the proliferation of image in our culture is an inevitable consequence of the development of technology - will it shift our means of communication permanently and as designers and visual communicators what part do we/should we play in that process?

Image and Taste

2010-02-02T13:18:00.001-08:00

So, Otto Neurath known primarily for the development of Isotype, a "method of showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial form" and the desire to create a system of Universal Silhouettes in an attempt to produce a Visual Language that communicated Universally - his claim that word separate and pictures unite is an interesting one if, as David Crow suggests, the system is fundamentally a linguistic one and relies on the viewers ability to create visual sentences from the 'grapheme' like icons. This may seem unrelated to the broader argument of image and taste. However Neurath's project was an attempt to bypass the 'problem' of Art, its readability and the necessity for prior knowledge and [cultural] education to understand what was being said. Bourdieu [cultural capital] claimed that our ability to understand the image was not innate but the result of upbringing, so [good]'taste', the sensibility/understanding and acquired cultural capital, is something that can be learned/owned by those priviledged with access to the 'right' kind of experiences. This suggests that taste generally is dependent on social class? This also suggests that how images are read is dependent on class related sensibilities.

So taste:

This is the front page of the clothing company Old Town's web site. It is interesting to look at, Old Town specialise in sourcing old clothing patterns and recreate them - the garments invariably are re-makes of workers clothing although some are more refined with names like Fitzrovia.

The 'Fitrovia'.

When Stephen Hayward spoke at the last key ideas symposium he mentioned the 'aesthetisization of labour' - Old Town arguably typifies a taste for clothing that signifies something - it is retrospective, indicative of a 'lost' quality, perhaps.

The Front page of Labour and Wait's web site - a similar visual flavour - utilitarian, austere and institutional. At Labour and Wait you can buy things like this:

A school writing tablet?

I generally find myself liking the things at Labour and Wait, but it is interesting to think about why, as a shop it is an astute exercise in the curation of nostalgia - although it is a kind of nostalgia that is not really true, there is a apparent authenticity and 'quality' to the products, Breton sweaters, workers smocks, enamelled Japanese coffee pots, Brady bags, brands that have been around for a long time, we are conscious of the lineage....somehow, without really having an actual recollection or direct experience of them. Perhaps I think that I am making an educated choice, perhaps I respond well to the almost niche nature of the shop; I subscribe to its ambience and image because I think that it reflects well on me?

This is a spread from a book produced by Sara Fanelli - a very talented Illustrator. She has produced numerous childrens books - it is difficult to ascertain exactly how commercially successful these books are - however they represent a type of work that is the acceptable face of a world that is driven by the commercial 'bottom line'.

A spread from a book by Michael Foreman, a very successful children's book Illustrator - for the sake of comparison.

Taste is a contentious topic, particularly for designers. We spend time cultivating a sensibility, seeking out imagery/objects/things that we find interesting and inspiring, things that become part of our identity, beacons of our taste. Often guarding these 'things' closely, synthesizing and processing them and releasing them in to the world piecemeal, tantalising visual sweetmeats that describe a sophistication in our thinking. So the question is about how and why we make taste decisions. Kant claimed that our taste in images and things was innate, we would say genetic, nature not nurture, Bourdieu that it is a symptom of our experiences and education, nurture not nature - the latter is probably the popular and most commonly accepted view. Stephen Bayley, in his book 'Taste. The Secret Meaning of Things', claims that taste is a bigger social taboo than sex or money and that "making statements about taste expose body and soul to terrible scrutiny". So Thinking about Neurath's notion of division and unification and the issue of image and taste - it is interesting to explore the rationale that we employ [or not] for what we decide to like/dislike, perhaps to think about what sits behind those choices and whether images will ever unite.

Key Ideas: Image

2010-02-02T01:51:00.000-08:00

Key Ideas: Image discusses our understanding of the image in its many forms; from its role as signifier of status and thing to be consumed to barometer of good taste and vehicle for communication. It is trite to say that images are everywhere – that their effect is unfathomable and that our experience of them is virtually uninterrupted so; Key Ideas: Image will attempt to address the multiple readings of imagery in contemporary society, exploring the image via three themes:

Image and Taste/ The social and cultural associations & readings of imagery, Image and Consumption/How we curate our identities through the consumption and creation of images, Image and Aesthetics /The role of beauty in image-making...

Image and Taste – The social and cultural associations & readings of imagery.

“Whereas the idealogy of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education”

Bourdieu, P. Distinction – a Social critique of the judgement of Taste, Routledge and Kegan, 1984, p.1]

We learnt in the ‘Object’ symposium that our terms of reference for the ‘readings’ of images and objects is borrowed from the study of language [linguistics] and signs [semiotics] and that images like objects are a ‘kind’ of speech. However Otto Neurath said that "Words separate" "Pictures unite". Neurath’s idealised/systematised modernism suggests a solution to the problem of qualitative readings of images, and an attempt to transcend the hierarchy of perception that is synonymous with Western Visual Culture. In a world where choice of image and matters of taste are part of complex social and cultural hierarchies do images really unite or do they atomize?

Image and Consumption – How we curate our identities through the consumption and creation of images.

“Images come to us more than we go to them” – [paraphrased from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.]

“The trend of all mass media is toward the visual – from the fairly recent replacement of the cash register in fast food chains and cafeterias with computers with icons and keys, to the proliferation of computer games”

Seward Barry, A.M. Visual Intelligence – Perception, Image and manipulation in Visual Communication, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997

Arguably the proliferation of transmitted and broadcast imagery has shifted the emphasis in mass culture away from the word towards the image.

To what extent are we defined by the imagery that we consume and in an image-saturated world how much choice do we really have?

Image and Aesthetics - The role of beauty in image-making...

Aesthetics [its numerous readings and misappropriations] and the idea of the viewer’s sensibility, or gaze, has been the subject of Artistic and Philosophical debate since the 18^th Century. Aesthetic, the word, can mean: "to perceive, to feel," and according to Immanuel Kant: "the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception."

Bourdieu claims that our ability to read/appreciate/quantify an image or object is the result of ‘upbringing and education’ but Kant argued that there were Universalities – things that everybody agreed were ‘beautiful’. As designers and image makers we all have very different sensibilities, very different ideas of what is and is not ‘beautiful’, in short a unique and particular aesthetic.

Where does communication/function end and seduction begin? Who decides on beauty and is the notion of direct communication in commercial image making redundant?

2009-10-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

The Camberwell Design Cluster Key Ideas - Object symposium will take place on Wednesday November 11th. Speakers include curator of the recent Telling Tales exhibition at the V&A Gareth Williams, artist Neil Cummings, designer Ralph Ball, design historian Stephen Hayward and editor of Crafts magazine Grant Gibson. The day will include a screening of the new film from the makers of Helvetica, entitled Objectified, which reveals the methods and people behind the design of everyday objects.

Utter nonsense

2008-12-17T00:26:00.000-08:00

This film forms part of the cannon of BMW vanity projects. The notion is that you commission an eminent artists to 'paint' the shell of the car. It is described as a 'difficult and demanding job'. The rationale given by the artists is at best flimsy: 'I wanted it to look good in the daytime' for instance. It flags up an inability to describe the structure in thinking, the reason for the selected imagery seems arbitrary/random, perhaps with the exeption of David Hockney who wanted to take away the surface and see the inside of the car on the outside, an indication of his mawkish sentimentality about cubism and Pablo perhaps? These artists were commissioned because of their fame and renown at the time, a shrewd investment by the motoring giant no doubt. Beyond this the reason for the work is sketchy. Style over communication?

2008-12-16T09:27:00.000-08:00

src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RrZxw1Jb9vA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425">

early abstractions by Harry Everett Smith, another pioneer.

The true avant garde? Rhythm 23 by Hans Richter.

More extraordinary imagery from Alejandro Jodorowsky a polymorph genius/madman.

Touching Cloth

2008-12-16T08:48:00.000-08:00

This is Holy Mountain. Truly avant-garde?

2008-12-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

This is war in 2030 according to E McKnight Kauffer. This image was one of nine produced by McKnight Kauffer in response to 'The World in 2030 A.D.' written by the conservative politician FE Smith (Earl of Birkenhead). some quotes:

'In 2030 women will still use men as the media by which
their greatest triumphs are wrought; they will still be able,
by their wit and charms, to direct the activities of the
most able men towards heights which they could
never otherwise hope to achieve.'
ouch!

"If the next century is tranquil and prosperous,
life in 2030 will be adorned by cultured and urbane
amenities in excess of the pleasant accompaniments
which our contemporary civilisation can exhibit."

Witness the Future of the Avant Garde. This is the subject of our next key ideas debate.

2008-12-12T13:40:00.001-08:00

'Early morning' [1825] by Samuel Palmer.
Vivid, intense and extraordinary, Palmer's sepia ink landscape drawings are his attempt to describe the majesty of creation. There is a manner of visual description that he is developing here, a stylised language that is both naturalistic and abstracted. The treatment of organic form is systematic, creating a 'patchwork' of texture/pattern/line. Unpicking and rationalising the information, representing it in a semi-abstracted way, stylising but communicating.

style over communication

2008-12-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

“There has never been any design without style”

David Pye, in his book The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, explains that, “ shape, for us, is what gives individuality to things. All of us are extremely expert in recognising the individual. Character of shape in closely similar things, such as human faces and hands of writing, the individuality of shapes is the stuff of art, whether in design, painting, or any other field.”

We learn to become extremely sensitive to these differences.

These three houses are generic models of their particular time yet all stand out clearly as belonging to a particular style.

(Georgian terrace, Victorian terrace, 30s semi)

Indeed when people try to mimic style it can go strangely wrong

(neo Georgian house)

miffy from 'miffy's birthday' and 'miffy at the art gallery' by dick bruna

It can even go wrong when someone tries to imitate their own style old and new miffy, Mr Nencini would now direct you to examine the ears, shape of the head, feet and size and quality of the mouth. Where is the wabi sabi?

Shaker chair , boxes, tools and storage hooks

The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) by all accounts a particularly modest bunch, it is suggested that they might become upset if buttons on their clothes got too exuberant, they designed their objects with a minimum of expression, yet still made furniture that stands out as designed by certain people at certain time period. You could argue that they do not have a style but a design methodology, it only became a style later when it was imitated. People buying into the look but with out the religion. Likewise with minimalism the tenets of which travel from art to architecture to some watered down expression meaning white walls rather than wallpaper

John Pawson London appartment 1984 & somewhere claiming to be a minimalist interior
So even though they tried to ignore style inevitably they created one. Some others are not so reticent

Here we have some work by the architect and designer Zaha Hadid, shoes for shoe label Mellissa, aura sculpture for the 2008 venice biennale based on the theories of palladio, interior shot of proposed opera house in dubai, Nekton stools. It seems though her style is her design method, so much so that its elasticity knows no bounds. In that she can move freely from architecture, art, furniture and clothing with the same fluid movements.

Her ‘style’ has become a self promotional tool, it is fairly recognisable and I guess if you commission her you kind of know what you are in for, she could be described as a vending machine in Alan Fletcher terms as mentioned in the design process debate, but maybe she has a point.

As Peter Dormer describes: “ artists do not need to be in tune with societies values (on the contrary much art criticises or subverts those values), but it is essential for designers to be in sympathy with the times, or to at least echo them, because much of the designers usefulness to a manufacturer is in his or her ability to identify current popular taste”

Barcelona chair Mies van der Rohe
Stephen Bayley believes that if you review the history of design and the opinions of those that have written about it, it seems that, there are agreements in approach to design.
And although the style of an object may differ, the items that stick out and become admired by successive generations have certain qualities in common, which he believes to be:
an intelligibility;
a coherence and harmony between form and detail;
an appropriate choice of materials to the function
and an intelligent equation between construction and purpose, with available technology exploited to full.

caveman club?

I suppose years ago a caveman/woman designed through necessity chose furs on their thermal insulation properties, picked up sticks and tested them for there ability to crack bison skulls
later we he/she was preoccupied in preserving food; less than 100 years ago preserving foodstuffs was still of primary importance to health, nutrition, longevity and ultimately survival.
Today our primary concern is not to find a solution to the method of preserving foodstuffs, but the colour of that solution, is it available in a brushed stainless steel finish
So what do you do? go for the solution you want, in the style that most suits your own.

style = choice (?)

MOD DOT COM

2008-12-04T01:34:00.001-08:00

Eek. Comments to come.

Just stockpiling pictures for next week...

Techniques at a Party

2008-12-02T10:13:00.001-08:00

By Saul Steinberg, subject of a current show at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Comments to come...

The Stylist

2008-12-01T16:52:00.000-08:00

In three-dimensional design, the style over communication issue might be read as style over functionality, or usability.
Early industrial designers in America were dismissed as 'mere stylists' by their Bauhaus-influenced European counterparts because their role often involved only the design of the external skin of the product, and did not consider its internal workings. However, when functionality and complex components are reduced to a minimum in the design of, say, a fruit bowl, as opposed to a camera, the intuitive, formal aspects of design (“styling”) naturally become the focus of the designer’s activity. Conversely when the object becomes too complex for one person to grasp (as with car design) the division of labour results in the designer's role again being reduced towards the 'cosmetic'.

2008-12-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

Our next subject for discussion is 'style over communication'. The 'issue' of style is a sticky one for designers of all hue's but particularly Illustrators. Those of you studying at Camberwell will know that the 's' word has become virtually outlawed because of its association with momentary trends/aimless uses of particular, fashionable technology/superficiality and a lack of rigour in process. We have chosen to supplant this word with an idea of visual language. Perhaps it is time to revisit this thing called style, the thing that we associate with individual designers and practitioners. The thing that [sometimes] helps identify ways of thinking/making/producing with a period in time and to see if it is indeed in conflict with an idea of communication or if it operates in tandem with the ebb and flow of visual language development.

2008-11-20T04:31:00.000-08:00

DOG!
this is how you would answer [in English] if I asked you what this was. It is a sign and the thing that is signified is a four legged, domesticated, omnivorous mammal. But if I wrote the word dog on the screen and asked you to visualise something in response you would all construct a different set of images and visual associations!
This is the eternal paradox that is the subject of semiotics.

2008-11-20T03:56:00.000-08:00

The Holy Trinity by Tommasso Cassai aka Masaccio is the first painting to use linear perspective. This was a system devised by Masaccio to create the illusion of depth in a two dimensional image. This painting has been the subject of much scrutiny by artists and designers alike because it also utilises a system of visual hermetics [apparently]. The notion is that if you look at the painting your eye is deliberately taken on a journey from one 'invisible' point to another. It is a contrived and deliberate tool used to make you see the image in a particular way, the 'hierarchy' of visual information, what is more/less important, is determined by the producer while the viewr passively receives information in a pre-determined way. It is visual communication/dictation/indoctrination.

This is an image depicting a scene from the memoirs of Babur, a Prince from Samarkand in the Uzbek province. The image seems free flowing/dynamic/organic and almost baroque. But if you look more closely it is systematic. There is a hierarchy evident in the arrangement of the figurative elements and the characters who appear are generic, stripped of individual personality. They represent something, arguably they are abstracted. This enables the informed viewer to read the image accurately. Again this is systematic, a language, an agreement between producer and viewer.

2008-11-20T03:41:00.000-08:00

The Tangram is an ancient Chinese game which comprises of seven pieces derived mathematically from a square. The object of the game is to put the pieces together to form something recognisable. The pieces must touch but not overlap, this means that each shape retains its integrity but the whole forms a shape with a specific meaning. Like words in a sentence, almost.

2008-11-20T02:51:00.000-08:00

"Words separate" "Pictures unite" claimed Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath was a designer/philosopher working in Vienna in the early 20th Century. His Universal Silhouettes form the basis for most of the ideographic wayfinding and information systems in the world today. He strove to achieve a "humanistic visual austerity" and claimed that "those who drew educational pictures as servants of the public and not as its masters" were superior in every way. He rejected Art for Art's sake. He attempted to develop a picture language as an alternative to written script. Paradoxically his ideas and work coincided with the development of a Universal spoken language, Esperanto.

2008-11-20T02:28:00.000-08:00

Hello Miffy.
Miffy is Dick Bruna's most famous character. Thinking about the notion of a rationalised visual language and referring back to Norm there is something austere and efficient about the way that information/narrative/character is communicated in Dick Bruna's work. It is systematic. This poses an interesting question about visual language because this is most definitely a way of working that we associate with one person, it is his style or a personal visual language. What do we mean by 'personal visual language'? and is this a contradiction in terms?

2008-11-20T00:28:00.000-08:00

Here are examples of signs from the British road signage system. They were designed in 1963 by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. This is a visual language that most of us are familiar with. The system uses key indicators that tell us how to behave/react to what we see, for instance imagery placed in a triangle is warning us of a potential danger or a situation that we need to be wary of and prepare for. Who decided that a triangle should mean such a thing?
This is an example of how we collectively agree on the meaning of something, it is an example of meaning becoming detached from seeing, of abstraction, of language.

2008-11-19T23:58:00.000-08:00

This is an image from one of the remaining Mayan Codices, possibly it is familiar? The Mayans used ideograms [although this is a debatable description as the term grapheme or morpheme may be more accurate]to document their history/religion/science/prophecies/agricultural cycles/culture etc. The scribes who produced these works were said to be communing with the Gods often using an imagined spiritual realm as the frame of reference. The point is that this is an almost lost visual language, it is specific to a culture and therefore highly problematic for us to decipher but it is image based. How can this be if we aspire to work with a language that is universal? Perhaps visual language is inextricably linked with spoken language is inextricably linked with era or epoch?

2008-11-19T22:53:00.000-08:00

I am interested in the complexities and paradoxes of visual language and the difficulties that we inevitably encounter when attempting to make images that communicate to a mass audience. Numerous approaches have been tried and various systems implemented with more/less success but the relationship between speech based language and visual language is a complicated one. Above is the cover image from Norm's book Die Dinge [The Things]. It is worth looking at. Norm attempt to rationalise the communication of visual things by developing a grid based system to reduce all things to visual icons/ideograms/heiroglyphs. Whether or not you agree with this approach is academic the fact remains that as human beings we know that imagery has the power to communicate in a much more sophisticated and powerful way than can be quantified by words but we wrestle with its inefficiency and ambiguity and its reliance on the interelationship between subjectivity and objectivity on the part of the viewer.
I said to David when we looked at this book, "look, its a speech bubble" he replied " or a wingmirror!"

2008-11-19T22:42:00.000-08:00

There is another way to explore ‘language and design’ which is to consider what is meant by that word ‘language’. This word is sometimes used to describe pictures and objects but more often to describe something else. A quick Internet search gave 14 definitions of language most of which described the ‘something else’, for instance; “communication by voice in the distinctively human manner, using arbitrary sounds in conventional ways with conventional meanings; speech.” However there is another way of defining language, one that sets itself in opposition to the abstract and arbitrary nature of speech and is in concert with a means of communicating familiar to designers and image makers. It is one that has its roots in the earliest forms of communication and belies [or so some believe] deep rooted structures of ‘signs’ that we subconsciously use to say something to each other or make ourselves understood. “the system of linguistic signs or symbols considered in the abstract (opposed to speech ). “any set or system of such symbols as used in a more or less uniform fashion by a number of people, who are thus enabled to communicate intelligibly with one another.”

Quick, Quick, Slow…

2008-11-19T15:10:00.000-08:00

The act of describing ones work, or more precisely the ideas behind it presents opportunities for how to pace your description. If we consider the typical novel, the author has certain expectations of how we, the reader might, encounter their work. More often than not sitting or laying down and dedicating a period of time of concentration to read the work. We can of course also consider the untypical novel, such as James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. In this the final chapter of the book has no punctuation. It forces the reader to change reading speed and create their own pauses and pacing. In terms of how this translates to printed language examples within design we can cast our vision back to the early 1990s and West Coast America. A certain David Carson. But how many of his immense army of fans realise just what he was attempting, behind the revolutionary graphic language?

2008-11-19T14:08:00.000-08:00

Maxim Gorky:
"An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning to them, and how to express them in a convincing form." 

Tell it like it is

2008-11-16T20:09:00.000-08:00

Adrian Shaughnessy:"The great immutable law of making a design 

presentation is this: tell your audience what 

you are going to show them and then show 

it to them. That's all there is to it."

 

2008-11-16T19:40:00.000-08:00

So why look at Language and Design? Well simply put, and in anticipation of sparking a debate, I strongly believe that the skill of explaining one's design work and being able to offer a rationale for the concept(s) behind it, is as important, if not more so than being able to come up with an idea in the first place. Armed with a stack of ideas but lacking the vocabulary to articulate them (verbal or text form) could render the designer effectively redundant, certainly in terms of answering a design brief.

OK, so not very accommodating of the 'inner fine artist' but the subjects of the Design Cluster are firmly placed in the service of the public, whichever public that might be.

So once you have your design idea, the first thing you 'design' is your rationale to explain it to your audience. To do that you need to think about the language(s) that audience understands.

The 'thingness of things'

2008-11-16T19:07:00.000-08:00

In terms of children's language acquisition and development, James Britton in 'Language and Learning', suggests that as they grow and their vocabulary and understanding increase, a fundamental change takes place. Namely, there is a shift from 'what is essentially play to what is essentially work'. This is marked by a change from the potential delight in (and of) things, with words used to describe them that 'stay close to' those things, towards a proper 'respect' for words which moves them away from the things they represent. The inference being here, that something is lost.

The Author-Designer and the Reader-User

2008-10-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

Umberto Eco:
“In a narrative text, the reader is forced to make choices all the time...the model reader of a story is not the empirical reader. The empirical reader is you, me, anyone when we read a text. Empirical readers can read in many ways, and there is no law that tells them how to read, because they often use the text as a container for their own passions, which may come from outside the text or which the text may arouse by chance...If you have ever happened to watch a comedy at a time of deep sadness, you will know that a funny movie is very difficult to enjoy at such a moment...if you happen to see the film again years later, you might not still be able to laugh.”

“Any narrative fiction is necessarily and fatally swift because, in building a world that comprises myriad events and characters, it cannot say everything about this world. It hints at and then asks the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps. Every text, after all, is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work.”

Folksonomy

2008-10-30T05:03:00.000-07:00

More to come but this is a point I want to make about the Web and process.

"The organic system of organization developing in Delicious and Flickr was called a 'folksonomy' by Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an information architecture mailing list (Smith, 2004). It is a combination of 'folk' and 'taxonomy'. An important aspect of a folksonomy is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms."
(from Adam Mathes)

Wabi Sabi, incompleteness, imperfection

2008-10-30T04:40:00.000-07:00

“Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” wrote Leonard Koren in his book 'Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers'. It is a beauty of things modest and humble, and of "things unconventional". Peripherally associated with Zen Buddhism, wabi-sabi values characteristics that are rustic, earthy, and unpretentious, involving natural materials which are used neither representationally nor symbolically.

A drawing by Dick Bruna from 1975. Early Miffy editions show a greater tension between his will to achieve elementary form, almost geometry and the glitched impossibility of achieving this by hand. Somewhere in this impossibility is the best bit. The wabi-sabi.

Deep Play

2008-10-30T02:42:00.000-07:00

In order to improvise, to break our habit, to provoke serendipity in process, do we need rules? Diane Ackerman, in her 1999 book Deep Play, she describes Play as having "its own etiquette, rituals and ceremonies, its own absolute rules. As Johan Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, a classic study of play and culture, play 'creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, limited perfection.'"

Also that "Play always has a sacred place– some version of a playground– in which it happens. The hallowed ground is usually outlined, so that it's clearly set off from the rest of reality.”

Is The Grid a kind of playground? This is from Armin Hoffmann's book 'His Work, Quest and Philosophy'. In 'anti-form' (see Eva Hesse image in earlier post) terms the grid's resistance fosters invention and nuance.

Bas Jan Ader's funny, sad-happy falls. Ackerman notes that "Play's original meaning was quite different, something altogether more urgent, more abstract. In Indo-European, plegan meant to risk, chance, expose oneself to hazard".

Allan Wexler, in a very similar way to Miranda July and now Daniel Eatock, works to hard-and-fast rules which bring both economy and absurdity. The virtues of limitation.

Jake & Dinos Chapmans' exquisite Exquisite Corpse series of etchings were processed according the game as conceived by the Surrealists in 1925, out of physically induced parameters which would allow the subconscious, for transgression, to become visible.

Henri Matisse at work. The colour image shows him at 83 years old. Somehow immobility and disability made his work more apparently 'his'. For me, HM's judgement of colour, composition and what-not-to-do are the ingredients. Aesthetic judgement is classically to do with standing back, object-subjective balance. The ageing HM overcame his limitations by using an elongated brush. He cut and then worked with an assistant-collaborator who would paste-up on the wall with him as onlooking instructor. Made his work more 'his'.

Destruction and Creation

2008-10-27T05:47:00.001-07:00

Last year my Illustration group were discussing the impulse to 'destruct', especially when one is young. As a kind of creative-play-process. Some had been reading 'The Destructors', a short story by Graham Greene, about a gang of boys who systematically destroy a house from the inside out:

"Smash all the china and glass and bottles you can lay hold of. Don't turn on the taps - we don't want a flood - yet. Then go into all the rooms and turn out the drawers. If they are locked get one of the others to break them open. Tear up any papers you find and smash all the ornaments. Better take a carving knife with you from the kitchen. The' bedroom's opposite here. Open the pillows and tear up the sheets. That's enough for the moment. And you, Blackie, when you've finished in here crack the plaster in the passage up with your sledge-hammer.' 'What are you going to do?' Blackie asked. 'I'm looking for something special,' T. said. It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation."

A clip from 'Steamboat Bill Jr.", Buster Keaton's classic of 1928. You may know artist Steve McQueen's appropriation of this moment. Keaton performed all his own stunts and this had to work. There is some connection surely between the visceral enjoyment of making and un-making.

Steeplejack Fred Dibnah's chimney demolitions gained a cult following until his death a couple of years ago. Again the process is essential viewing; as Tim cites below, the relationship between planning and on-the-hoof-reactive decision-making is fundamental. As this documentary suggests, the 'live' gathering had a similar motive to that which congregated for public hangings.

The Aesthetics of Process

2008-10-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

Daniel Eatock's new monograph Imprint elicited the following comment in a review at Core77:

"For any designer struggling to find a place to start, reading Imprint should be ample proof that almost any starting point will look brilliant in retrospect, provided that enough work, practice and repetition went into the final product."

Eatock's prolific ouput includes many projects that rely upon painstaking or time-consuming processes such as allowing a complete set of Pantone markers to bleed through a stack of paper (see image).

2008-10-26T03:21:00.000-07:00

Wim Crouwel's 'New Alphabet' from 1967. Timeless and lean in it's form I think because the process was determined by constraint. Namely, at that time, embracing low-resolution-screen-limitation of typography. It was a theoretical exercise, as he says below. We are still talking today, though, about the inclination of type-design towards print rather than screen. His underscored m's and w's and single case character set still feel like a better substitute for the incumbents.

Mr. Crouwel is a young old man. I saw him talk a year or two ago and it was clear that he has always used a total grid in one way or another but in order to free himself compositionally. Something within which to improvise. Never heard anyone before or since make a search for Neutrality sound soulful.

Imagined, Observed, Remembered

2008-10-26T02:45:00.000-07:00

Peter Blegvad: "I began doing comparative drawings of subjects Imagined, Observed & Remembered, in 1977 in New York City, pursuing a line of enquiry which grew out of my first commissions as an illustrator and my struggle to evolve a style suitable for that genre. At work, I was often required to depict things which I could not, without recourse to a model, render 'realistically', but for which I could usually invent recognizable hieroglyphs (as a cartoon is a hieroglyph) by basing these on an eidetic approximation of the particular item which I could "see" with that undissectable organ, the "mind's eye."

In my immaturity, I sometimes experienced a kind of vertigo when drawing, for a client, things purely as I imagined or remembered them to be. Would a picture of the idiosyncratic eidolon or phantom in my imagination be legible to the public as a sign for the thing intended? I doubted it. Often I destroyed the unity of my illustrations by populating, for instance, a stylized cartoon with items (the 'props' of the scene) which I'd copied in an academic manner from life or from photographs in my compulsion to 'get them right'.

Primarily as therapy, therefore, I began drawing sundry items thrice - first as I imagined them to be, then as I actually observed them to be, and lastly, after a suitable interval, as I remembered them to have been. I accorded no less a degree of 'reality' to the item as it appeared to my imagination or memory than to the item as it appeared to what Blake called the 'vegetative organs' of sight."

Anti-Form

2008-10-24T13:49:00.000-07:00

A detail from Eva Hesse's 'Untitled' drawing (1967), more or less A4 in size. It beautifully encapsulates something of the loosely grouped 'Process Art' of the late-60s and early-70s. Robert Morris contemporaneously "posited the notion of 'anti-form' as a basis for making art works in terms of process and time rather than as static and enduring icons".

At a future-of-graphic-design-type-discussion at the RCA last year it was interesting to hear Rick Poynor question the lack of pursuit of 'form' in prevailing recent work.

IMMEDIACY VERSUS PRE-PLANNING

2008-10-24T09:52:00.000-07:00

"The critical characteristic that distinguishes one kind of workmanship from another is at what stage creative choice is introduced into manufacture." Peter Dormer

"In craft production, conception and realisation are linked and coordinated by the interplay of hand, eye and materials."John Heskett

This film shows Isaac Button, one of the last potters in the UK to practice as a tradesman rather than an artist. Although Button's pots were probably pre-planned, the film shows that design decisions can be made with instant effect upon the end result. The process allows ideas to be tried on the spot and the results considered, like the making of Martino Gamper's chairs below. This sets craft activities such as these apart from production processes that use pre-defined jigs, moulds, dies or presses.

Mythical Process

2008-10-24T08:23:00.001-07:00

An Apple advert, aligning itself with Picasso's 'process' (from Paul Haesaert's film, 'Visit to Picasso'). I think he knew exactly how to create an aura around his process which surely had very little to do with reality. Apple continue to associate themselves with a kind of lateral approach and free-jazz individuals who 'think outside the box' (sorry). Microsoft have recently countered with their 'I'm a PC' campaign.

A similar treatment, this time by Pritt and using Michael C. Place (Build). Here though there is more sense of the 'kit' he uses and an implication that the image is planned.

Put on a Pair of Pants

2008-10-24T04:27:00.000-07:00

Ivan Brunetti says: "One of the most difficult parts of being a cartoonist is being your own editor, since every line affects every other on the page. Perhaps the single most difficult part, however, is just starting a page. One trick is to make sure you draw something, even one panel, before going to bed; it will raise your spirits and 'carry' you over into the next day's work. Do not wait until you are 'in the mood' to draw, or until you 'snap out of your funk'. You must force yourself to draw even if it feels joyless and pointless. You will feel better the next morning. Feeling follows behaviour, not the other way around, as my therapist constantly has to remind me. Finally, both Seth and Chris Ware have told me this, and I have grudgingly come to realize that they are absolutely right: when you sit down to draw, you should 'dress for work'. Have respect for your craft. Put on a pair of pants."

Martino Gamper: Confronting the Chair

2008-10-24T03:39:00.000-07:00

Martino Gamper's process for his 2007 project '100 chairs in 100 days'. "Using a stock pile of discarded and donated chairs Gamper creates his new chairs from elements of existing ones. By deconstructing the chair he gains a new insight into its construction and use of materials which informs the creation of the new design. The process is immediate, spontaneous like sketching in three dimensions" (from Design Museum's exhibition).

Sister Corita's workshop

2008-10-24T00:58:00.000-07:00

'Sister' and Activist Corita Kent's screenprint workshop at Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles (c. 1967). Buckminster Fuller described his visit to this department as "among the most fundamentally inspiring experiences of my life".

Camberwell Design Key Ideas

Questions by students during (you) Consume Event's Q&A session

(you) consume

(you) consume (you) use (you) reject

SOCIETY

SOCIETY / 11.05.2011

Key Ideas: Employment

Arbiters of Taste

r-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-e-e-e-e

Imanuel Kant and common sense

art skool

becoming institutionalised / the road to damascus

Martin Parr

Class, Bourdieu and Mitford

Taste and Duchamp

Ah,ha another old chestnut…

Graphic Designers, often like to assert their skill, training, taste and 'eye' by claiming moral high-ground in being able to identify and associate with 'better' cuts or digital versions of fonts. Two classic fonts that have become ubiquitous with the PC and Mac are Arial and Helvetica.

Some background information — provided byhttp://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica/

HelveticaDesigned in 1957 by Max Miedinger, Helvetica’s design is based on that of Akzidenz Grotesk (1896), and classified as a Grotesque or Transitional san serif face. Originally it was called Neue Haas Grotesque; in 1960 it was revised and renamed Helvetica (Latin for Switzerland “Swiss”).

TYPOGRAPHY NOW

Ah,ha the old chestnut…

I Love Typography

Image and Consumption

Image and Taste

Key Ideas: Image

Utter nonsense

Touching Cloth

style over communication

MOD DOT COM

Techniques at a Party

The Stylist

Quick, Quick, Slow…

Tell it like it is

The 'thingness of things'

The Author-Designer and the Reader-User

Folksonomy

Wabi Sabi, incompleteness, imperfection

Deep Play

Destruction and Creation

The Aesthetics of Process

Imagined, Observed, Remembered

Anti-Form

IMMEDIACY VERSUS PRE-PLANNING

Mythical Process

Put on a Pair of Pants

Martino Gamper: Confronting the Chair

Sister Corita's workshop

Some background information — provided by
http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica/