Lined & Unlined

1. BASKET
The Gift came, as gifts often do, without my asking for it. Its cover flashed up on my computer screen by way of an Amazon.com server that drew upon a collective memory of what customers like me had already purchased when I logged in one afternoon looking for a particular book on Shaker design. The cover, probably designed in part by The Gift’s author, Lewis Hyde, caught my eye because it featured a drawing that Hyde, who is an English professor at Kenyon College, credits inside as “Basket of Apples.” The drawing, however, is more properly credited as “A Little Basket Full of Beautiful Apples” and was made 150 years ago by a self-taught Shaker woman named Hannah Cohoon, who would have called it a “gift drawing.” I had first seen it several days before, in an article from The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik on the Shakers titled “Shining Tree of Life,” where he describes both the drawing and the circumstances of its making:

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“There are five rational pirates, A, B, C, D and E. They find 100 gold coins. They must decide how to distribute them. The Pirates have a strict order of seniority: A is superior to B, who is superior to C, who is superior to D, who is superior to E. The Pirate world’s rules of distribution are thus: that the most senior pirate should propose a distribution of coins. The pirates should then vote on whether to accept this distribution; the proposer is able to vote, and has the casting vote in the event of a tie [since this is the right of the proposer]. If the proposed allocation is approved by vote, it happens. If not, the proposer is thrown overboard on the pirate ship and dies, and the next most senior pirate makes a new proposal to begin the system again.” A classic of Game Theory in Economics, the results of the Pirate Game’s simple rules may surprise you.

Scribbles that aren’t. Maps of soccer games, air routes, kinetic energy while driving, and the internet itself.

Who knew? Make your own View-Master.

William Lamson’s series Flight (2005-2007) shows some of the dark beauty involved in our attempts to become airborne. I like how reductive—almost childlike—his scenes are, with an almost Magritte-like sense of the surreal.

Apartment Therapy shares some of Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob’s mesmerizing Gardens-in-a-Petri.

“Rewatching ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ 12 years after its debut, it’s striking to note how the show’s style of primitive low-budget animation, which looked so crude and fresh in 1993, has become a part of our tele-visual language. To achieve cult credibility, it’s now de rigueur for new animated shows for adults to look scruffy and hastily drawn (South Park and Aqua Teen Hunger Force are just two examples). Wonky animation used to signify outsider status (along with, in Mike Judge’s case, a charmingly limited ability to draw); now it signifies mainstream cool.” Slate’s excellent Dana Stevens reviews “Beavis and Butt-Head.”

Always pushing the envelope, Lars von Trier pushes movies ever closer to games with his newest film, “The Boss of It All.” As The Guardian reports, von Trier’s new film was filmed using “Automavision: a new way of filming without using a cameraman,” and plays a game called Lookey, which sends viewers on a visual treasure hunt, looking for imperfections or elements out-of-context in the film. “Von Trier has offered 30,000 Danish kroner (£2,700) to the first person in Denmark to identify all the film’s Lookeys, along with the opportunity to be an extra in his next film.”

A place for everything: Apartment Therapy does a great little piece on Shaker wall trim. One of my favorite Shaker marks is visible here.

From Sasha Frere-Jones’s recent New Yorker column on Scritti Politti: “the covers of Scritti Politti’s first singles foregrounded the means of production, so to speak, by listing the records’ manufacturing costs and the addresses of local pressing plants […]” This technique was adopted for the spine of Dot Dot Dot 9, which Rick Poynor reviewed for Design Observer.

David Means is one of my favorite writers, and a modern master of the short story. “Assorted Fire Events” is his best book to date, though I am sure there are many more to come. When the book came out, he did an interview with Powell’s.com where he observed, “All really good short stories are open-ended. The bad short stories are the ones that resolve and wind up in a nice neat conclusion. You don’t have room in a short story to close things down. You just have room to give a narrative push and let the reader move forward with whatever happens.”

Conway’s Game of Life: 1) Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by loneliness. 2) Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding. 3) Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation. 4) Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life.

Words make rooms (via SpeakUp).

Urban Outfitters serves up some hip hometown stickers. Great contributors including Adam Michaels from Project Projects and Jon Santos from Commonspace. (Thanks, Dmitri.)

Above: Detail from the cover of “This is Not a Manifesto.”

Work together to produce 16 copies of a printed journal. Each of you will get 1 copy. Send 1 copy to me at the address below by the due date. The remaining copy will be filed with the office.

The journal’s pages will be in 6 x 9 inch format, tape- or glue-bound. Each student will be responsible for 12 pages plus a short contributor bio with email/contact info. The content of your pages must include at least 2 and not more than 6 of your individual assignments from this class. You may also use portions of your reading responses, graphic/visual experiments from other classes this semester, and other students’ assignments from this class with their consent.

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Above: The red team’s blog, “Red is the New Black.”

Divide into two groups and create a blog each. One blog supports the color red. The other supports the color blue. The two are competitive. Create 10 new postings per day, minimum. Information need not be accurate and will likely be propagandistic. When possible, use Alexander Theroux’s essays from The Primary Colors to construct your posts.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Michael Trovela’s response to the assignment, which made use of on-screen PDF footnoting software. Spread from “This is Not a Manifesto.”

Using one of the essays from this week, add 50 footnotes (or annotations) derived from your personal experience of design education at RISD. Your notes may be visual, verbal, sonic, cross-referential, etc.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Meg Dreyer’s response to the assignment, in which she compiled the data on the designers and then put the same questions to a professional attorney. His answers were often surprising. Spread from “This is Not a Manifesto.”

In 2 days, work together to compile 100 responses to Milton Glaser’s 12 steps. Ask for yes/no responses and ask respondents to provide additional comments where they’re willing. Prepare a results report using the quantitative data, an condensed set of qualitative responses, and supporting real-world examples of Glaser’s hypotheticals.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Hoon Kim’s visceral response to the assignment. Pages from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”

1) Describe a FedEx slip through the eyes of a Modernist in 250 words.
2) Describe the same FedEx slip through the eyes of a Postmodernist in 250 words.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Two of Elana Wetzner’s beautiful objects. Pages from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”

Bring in a box marked “Beautiful” and another marked “Ugly.” Place five graphic design artifacts in each. Come to class prepared to explain your rationale for the placement of the objects.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Lauren Mackler and Philipp Rumpf’s response to the assignment. Lauren took an inventory of items in her schoolbag. Philipp returned the inventory to her with his own set of six modifier adjectives and asked her to make sense of his choices. Spread from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”

Find a partner. Over several days, generate a list of ordered items that are significant to you. Keep this list a secret from your partner. At the same time, generate a deck of cards where each card contains an item from your list. Give this deck to your partner, and take your partner’s deck for yourself. Make a new list using this deck. Come to class ready to compare your lists and your experiences.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: For his response, Philipp Rumpf offered a detailed Marxist reading of the Arm & Hammer box. Spread from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”

Select an object available at the supermarket and write a museum-style wall plaque to describe it. Include artist, nationality, life dates, official title, year of creation, materials, purchasing information, and a 250-word description of the object in an art historical context.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Talon Gustafson’s response to the assignment involved picking books whose titles could be used for making a concrete or Dadaist poem. Spread from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”

Pick 12 books from the library by intuition and write an essay which relates them.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Huy Vu’s response to the assignment, which includes the hamburger recipe he used to cook for his group and the decorative bags he designed to present the meal. Spread from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”

Form four small groups and spend time together this week. For next week’s class, give a gift that will evoke an emotional response when given.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Hoon Kim’s response to the assignment, in which he provides a tour of the studio based on specific textures from outside and in. Spread from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”

Write and photograph a simple tour guide to your studio for a stranger who is coming to meet you for the first time.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Above: Jen Magathan’s response to the assignment, which re-examined a set of drawings made along a street in Assisi, Italy during the course of a single day. Spread from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”

Make a record about an event from your life that you have a particularly strong memory of. Gather visual evidence and secondary supporting information as well. The record should fit entirely in the manila file folder that I’ve provided for you.

This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.

Preamble
How do ideas become visual? How do emotions take shape? What do we assume about the things we see? What do we take for granted? What are our expectations for communicating with others? How do they communicate with us? How should information be organized? In what form does it pass from one person to the next? What are the boundaries between the precious and the everyday? How do we evaluate beauty? When do visual things become ideological? Which kinds of communication are information and which are propaganda? Which kinds of communication are ethical and which are unethical? Who decides? What should learning about design require? How should we do it? What does criticism have to teach us? Who can make design? What kind of rights and authority can those people lay claim to?

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