Above: Yelena Avanesova’s project focused on a book she decided to read for the class, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which imagines our planet after the last human has died off. Yelena’s underlined passages combined with imagery from vintage National Geographic magazines in this unique presentation of a world and text remembered. More + 10 to 20 projects below.
Above: Isaac Weeber’s book centered around sorting predictions about the future into three categories: plausible, possible, and impossible. These were color-coded and these colors showed up on the outer margins of all the content he chose to reproduce depending on his personal opinion.
Above: Yu Chung Lim’s book was a catalog of existing experimental architecture projects that she felt pointed a way toward the future of building and urbanization.
Generate a book about the future. This future should not be hundreds of years away, however: I’m interested in what you think about the immediate future, within your own lifetime, no more than 10 to 20 years from now.
Some ideas on where to start:
RESOURCES:
http://www.massivechange.com/
http://www.ted.com/
http://www.poptech.org/
http://www.iftf.org/
http://www.wired.com/
http://www.longnow.org/
http://www.gbn.com/
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/
TOPICS:
Economies & work
Sensory perception & mapping
Imagemaking
Habitation & the environment
Politics, power & government
Religion & belief
Information, knowledge & computing
Biology, bioengineering & life science
Physics & the universe
Sociology & social organization
Prediction & legacy
Your book should be designed in A5 format. It may be color or black and white. It should be booklike in length, 60 pages or more, and it may begin by asking a question, picking a year, looking closely at an image, defining a topic, or some other technique.
It must include the following:
- A cover
- A table of contents
- A short statement written by you
- A sequenced set of images with captions and credits
- A collage
- A collection of quotes
- A list of words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, definitions, etc.)
- 3–5 supporting documents (articles/excerpts written by other people)
- Suggestions for further reading
WEEK 1: Gather materials. Write a draft statement and print two copies. Print out images and tape captions to the back. Bring in quotes highlighted from their sources. Write lists. Print supporting documents. I will conduct desk crits this week so please bring things to work on as I make my way through the class. (Starts first week of class)
WEEK 2: Continue gathering materials if necessary. Begin layout. Construct a grid and bring printouts showing the grid alone and the grid as used in several sample spreads. Using the edited materials you brought in last week, sequence as much of the book as you can, even if the design is very rough for now.
WEEK 3: Finish layout and create a comp of the finished book along with flat spreads to share with the class for critique. In addition, burn your digital assets on a CD organized as follows:
- Images (all images in a folder along with image captions in a text file that correspond to image names)
- Quotes.txt (all quotes in a text file)
- Lists.txt (your lists in a text file)
- Documents (your documents in a folder)
I will collate all these assets and bring a DVD to class which everyone will copy or download for later use.
At the suggestion of one of my students, we in fact used the amazing application Dropbox instead of the method described above. It worked like a charm, even as collaborations between students got increasingly elaborate and assets became increasingly numerous. Read more about Dropbox here. —RG
This assignment is from the class Publication Design: Dispatches from the Future. The list of required elements was inspired in part by the Independent Group’s 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow.
