Lined & Unlined

Remarks from The New School, 28 June 2012

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:04:00 -0500

This talk was given at the Tishman Auditorium, The New School as part of the event “Project Projects Project Projector,” sponsored by AIGA/NY. As a prompt, Adam, Prem and I were asked to speak about how our passions informed our practice. My comments about “computational poetics” (for lack of a better phrase!) follow below.

I want to start with this familiar image of Google auto-complete. It’s interesting how the web is a kind of machine for generating and organizing text — you put text in, you get more text out. And there are algorithms that structure the text output, so when you make a search, you expect something specific to happen as a result.

Here’s a website we made last year for an exhibition at Harvard that takes its name from Dante’s famous epic poem — it has a different kind of search bar.

You input text, but the field doesn’t behave as you’d expect — rather than searching the site, it searches the entire web. And rather than behaving consistently, its behavior changes, cycling through a series of searches from Google Images…

…to Wikipedia…

…to an Italian translation of your search phrase.

This isn’t anything new — machines have always changed the behavior of text, and the creation of a new tool often alters the usage of an existing one.

This is a great interest of mine, especially in my critical writing. This is a slide of a series of re-printed artefacts I organized for the Italian magazine Mousse last year all about how machinery affects the speed at which we read — it was called “Time Warp.” The article started with idea of time as a pliable, formable material.

On the left we see how photography altered language. This image depicts George Demeny, one of the early experimenters in chronophotography mouthing the phrase je vous aime in an effort to teach deaf patients to speak.

On the right we see how the typewriter altered language, and specifically poetry, in a poem by Alan Riddell. The poem is called “hologrammer,” itself a new technology, from Peter Finch’s collection of Typewriter Poems — the poem consists of one phrase “the exposure and reconsititution of an image” blasted into particles and then recombined.

The sestina is a poetic form dating back to 12th Century Provence that works in a similar fashion to Riddell’s poem, breaking apart a fixed set of parts within the poem and then reconstituting them — it’s composed of six six-line stanzas and one three-line stanza. The words that end each line of the first stanza are rotated algorithmically to complete the endings of each line for the following five stanzas. All six words are then used, two per line, in the final triad of the poem. This is a diagram of the sestina algorithm.

This is a different kind of diagram of the sestina, which I designed for the Yale Literary Magazine, where Prem and I first met, in fall 2000. It’s a color sestina in which the black values of CMYK are rotated according to the sestina algortihm — in the final triad, two black values are added together, which is why those lines are so dark in color.

I made this poster a few months after the color sestina. The headline of the poster, “Senior Project Exhibitions,” is made from the names of the artists who are part of the show — one letter from each name is installed on a wall-like elevation.

Though I wasn’t yet familiar with it, this poem was destined to become a major influence — you can see the similarities to the poster I showed a moment ago.

This poem is called “sweethearts” and it’s written by Emmett Williams, who was a Fluxus artist, a Concrete poet, a theater critic, and a publisher. Williams was the editor of Peter Finch’s collection of Typewriter Poems that we saw earlier, where “hologrammer” was from.

“sweethearts” behaves a bit like “hologrammer,” taking a single word — “sweethearts” — as its entire structuring device. But unlike “hologrammer,” where only one phrase is discerneable and the rest of the poem is more about pattern and shape, “sweethearts” is an entire book-length love poem about a “he” a “she” and a “we,” all of whom inhabit this single word. Because the phonemes are not rearranged, the words rhyme both verbally and visually — this page reads, “ears that hear her swear her heart.”

Williams used the form only once. When he passed away in 2007, I decided to continue his exploration of the form.

This is a Williams poem I wrote in 2008 based on the word “spraypaint” — last year, Jürg Lehni’s spraypainting robot Hektor installed the poem at the Utrecht Manifest Biennal for Social Design.

My search for words in a Williams poem begins with a very different sort of auto-completion exercize — another hacked search bar of sorts. This is a terminal window that shows the output of a Perl script for a given word, in this case “spraypaint.” I put out a call for a Williams Word Generator in 2008, and within 24 hours we had this up and running. There’s actually a lot of work that’s being done on computational poetics right now, but much of it focuses on the mechanics of screen reading and machine learning — I’m most interested, at least right now, on the computer as a kind of composition tool, like a typewriter.

Two years ago, I installed a series of Williams poems at the W/— Gallery. the gallery usually shows pairs — one person with another person — I was paired with Dan Eatock, who installed a series of clipframes in various permutations.

The source words for my Williams poems were the words used to describe Daniel’s piece: “clipframes” and “permutations.” The installations are site-specific — in this case, the words were installed using press-on letters scavenged from a dozen or so LES hardware shops.

I like when these individual interests find opportunities to merge into client projects. This is an identity we made for a collaboration between Audi of America and Columbia GSAPP — it was called “Experiments in Motion.” The project asked students at the architecture school to explore how new technologies of mobility like driverless cars and programmable groundplanes will reshape the city, and how the city will reshape the car. Our identity explored a kind of “field theory” as the letters are allowed shift and reorganize themselves according to the bounaries of any space they inhabit, a meditation on nonlinear motion.

The website pushed this identity further, pairing the letters with animated GIFs by illustrator Santtu Mustonen and allowing each student to have their own customizable Tumblr theme, distributing student research onto a network that could be monitored in real time by the project’s two coordinators.

The opposite of this formless letter field is a letter space, a place of occupation — in this case, a square in the New York Times that was made available in support of Occupy Wall Street. The letters, drawn from a sign held by one of the protesters, read simply, “Occupy All.”

Letters in particular configurations have always been thought to have the power to transform our circumstances — here’s an ancient example, the “magic word” abracadabra written in the form of an equilateral triangle with A’s at each of its three points. This configuration could be worn as a slip of paper around the neck for protection. It summons powers that might not otherwise be there and reminds me a bit of that “hologrammer” poem we saw earlier.

The artist Paul Elliman writes in his essay “My Typographies” that writing can give the impression of things and things can give the impression of writing. The forms of clouds in the sky, the lexical structure of DNA — information often has a typographic flavor.

Elliman’s work is featured in the “Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language” show that’s on at MoMA now. In the show’s organization, it’s preceded by a hallway that includes Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Il pleut” (“It rains”), which is shown here.

Dating from 1930, these early types of concrete poems were known as caligrammes — poems that are in the shape of the thing they describe and made possible by what the wall text describes as “the kaleidoscopic environment of France in an age of technological and scientific innovation” — a new technological context.

New technologies change the shapes of buildings, too. How might we conceive of a caligramme to describe the work of a contemporary architectural practice?

This is the menu to our website for architects Weiss/Manfredi. It arrives onscreen at a scale equivalent to a building and structured with the asymmetry that’s characteristic in a lot of their work.

The site is organized to resolve the tension that’s often present in architectural websites, between large-scale visuals and large-scale graphics — the web allows for multi-state, modal experiences where both the visual and the graphic can collide and commingle.

As a result, my visual shorthand for the experience of the site is that the user is “on an elevator trying to read a poster”; that is, moving through a simulated architectural space, looking at a fixed graphic object.

This poster-like menu idea comes out of work we did for a much earlier website for a different context — the music writer and Brassland label impresario Alec Bemis.

Here the psychodelic split-fountain printing of a rock poster becomes a kind of palimpsest on which content-specific postings are placed, layered, and removed — it’s website as poster wall.

In feel and in structure, Bemis’s website evokes artist Alan Ruppersberg’s 2004 installation “The Singing Posters,” which are derived from Alan Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl” and were made by Ruppersberg when he discovered how many of his students at UCLA were unfamiliar with the poem.

The wall shown here comprises a kind of guided tour through the poem in the style of the psychodelic posters I described earlier, with precise phrasings written phonetically in the manner of a dictionary speech aid — thus, through their text, color, and total occupation of the viewer’s visual field, the posters “sing.”

“Howl” has been described as “a jumble of images and buzzwords that vividly describe the social, political and historic state of America in the 1950s.” It’s a poem assembled with parts from other places. Ruppersberg cycles through this process once more, breaking the poem itself down into posters and phonemes in order to re-present it.

Both projects are about a kind of ignorance — ignorance on the on the part of Ruppersberg’s students with “The Singing Posters,” and ignorance on the part of the culture-at-large with “Howl,” 520 copies of which were seized by the U.S. Customs office in 1956, leading to an obsecenity trial that vindicated the poem in the following year.

These images show an entirely different context — Belgium at the turn of the century — but an evocatively similar project. This is the Mundaneum, an institution started by the Belgian lawyer and librarian Paul Otlet. Otlet appears at the center of the photo on the left, and a later image of him is inset in the circle below. The card catalogues on the left held more than 12 million index cards at the Mundaneum’s peak, which disassembled bits of information from books and publications and filed it so that it could be retrieved electronically via telegraph by people at their homes.

The disassessembly I described was done in large part by the women surrounding Otlet on the left — just one case in which the integral role of women in early computer science has been under-historicized — the telegraph room is shown on the right. Like “Howl,” the Mundaneum was censored in its time, shut down by the Nazis when they invaded belgium in 1940. Google is now at work on preserving and reviving it along with the city of Mons and the University of Ghent.

Otlet’s Shelf is an homage to Otlet and his work — it was created by Andrew LeClair and I at Project Projects last summer.

Otlet’s Shelf facilitates the sharing of libraries in the way that Otlet facilitated the sharing of information. Using a simple Tumblr theme and the Amazon Product API, we created a bookmarklet that allows users to easily add a book onto an infinite shelf for display. We have plans to expand beyond Amazon to Worldcat and other library databases soon.

The growth of Otlet’s Shelf has been a nice surprise; there are thousands of Tumblr users and a growing range of applications — from normal book nerds like me…

…to voices in the interactive world like SVA IXD’s chair Liz Danzico…

…and Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova. We’ve been in touch with a number of librarians as well.

But one of the most graitfying uses has been by this book group, which catalogued its 15-year reading history for friends and family.

Tonight is about how our passions drive our work. Otlet’s shelf was born from our shared passion for reading and sharing books.

Here it is with my own library…

…and one of my own favorite books.

I am a handle

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 13:01:36 -0500

This text was commissioned by Dexter Sinister for The Serving Library. It was originally delivered as an iChat “lecture,” from a studio in Manhattan to a library in Banff, Alberta, on 11 August 2011 at 12:32 PM Mountain Time.

Good afternoon.

I am a handle, writing you with the same software that is writing me.

When I carry one idea over to meet another, it’s a metaphor I’m making.

(META means “over, across”; PHERIN means “to carry, bear”)

Most metaphors work like this — they’re comparisons plus distance, the result of preparing one idea alongside another.

(COM means “with”; PARARE means “to make, prepare”)

Usually a metaphor’s not a perfect or direct comparison but something more diffuse, a kind of rough EQUIVALENCE, parts instead of wholes.

William Shakespeare’s metaphors use this roughness to flatter, to heighten a sense of the singularly incomparable. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” asks the I in Shakespeare’s 18th sonnet, “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

In that sonnet, the I only further woos his you with his inability to simulate her beauty. Then the I concludes, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

This is the sonnet as software: run it (or read it) and the avatar of one lover appears to fumble and flourish his way into the affections of another. This virtual pair, this you and this I, these two need not have been real in life to live in our minds.

And though the I is trying to construct a sonnet lovely enough to get himself noticed by the you, the I that speaks is not Shakespeare himself — he is Shakespeare’s construction, his program.

Rimbaud, another poet from another time, famously wrote that in writing “I is another.” That’s a second type of metaphor, a SUBSTITUTION, where we swap wholes instead of parts.

Again, from Shakespeare: “Juliet is the sun.”

Here, Romeo exchanges a girl for a star in four simple words. Having replaced Juliet with the sun, we may reflect on how she guides Romeo, how (like the yous in the sonnets) her radiance is so singular and distinctive, and how she seems, at that moment in the play, so far out of Romeo’s reach.

Reach, of course, is something that, as a handle, I know a thing or two about. Pick me up, pull me over, place me where you wish. I hold the tools for you to use. Grab and release. drag and drop. Open and close. Repeat.

Even my own name comes with something attached: the “-le” suffix on the end denotes repeated actions (a brook babbles, a diamond sparkles) or things of diminutive scale (a thimble on a thumb, a shuttle on a loom).

Like a metaphor,

(metaphor)

we handles facilitate manipulation, asking the manipulator to operate at a distance.

A cook takes a pot off the stove by its handle. a trucker warns about police over his CB radio with a handle (“smokey”) in case the police are also tuned in. in both cases the handle acts as a separator: pot from hand, word from meaning.

Word handles have a long history going back to the epic of Gilgamesh. Some were meant to disguise or encode, while others were meant to differentiate and aid memory in an oral culture.

In The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick hears the recurrent epithets of homer in the rhythms of african drums:

The formulations of the African drummers sometimes preserve archaic words that have been forgotten in the everyday language. […] The resemblance to Homeric formulas — not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer; not just the sea, but the wine-dark sea — is no accident. In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first. The Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne.

Beyond these percussive and performative attributes, however, epithets represent a third kind of metaphorical situation, an INTERACTION.

Here, the modifier and modified mix to make something altogether new — not just a memorable sonic product, but also a twist of the natural and the supernatural, the actual and the imagined.

Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” personifies the dawn as a goddess and adds a narrative veil to the then-unexplained machinations of daybreak and nightfall.

Some experts in metaphor have theorized that the earliest metaphors stemmed from the ancients’ attempts to describe their dreams, which in Gilgamesh are as a soft mist or mystical vapor, a potent cocktail of earth and sky, easy to see as they block one’s vision, possible to sense but impossible to touch.

It’s a haze not unlike the virtual reality we’re now in, a dreamy mix of bits and atoms from which all-new metaphors have sprung, including that of our data’s presence in an unseen, ever-present cloud.

Did we distinguish between “real” and “virtual” things before the computer came along?

Much in the past was virtual (or at least metaphorical), even if it wasn’t exactly digital. Skies, clouds, dreams, spells — all involved some sort of virtualization, some form of conjuring, some method of making a world where one was not.

In describing these pre-digital worlds-within-worlds, I’m reminded of the ’pataphor, a literary technique that extends alfred Jarry’s philosophy of ’pataphysics.

Just as ’pataphysics extends metaphysics into the realm of the imaginary, ’pataphors extend metaphors into a virtual space entirely their own.

So if there is thunder,

(fact)

and that thunder is like a bolt thrown by an angry god,

(metaphor)

then that god’s whole world, his interactions with other gods, the power he draws from his celestial position, his bolt-throwing abilities — all of that persists on the level of the ’pataphysical

— a networked set of metaphors with minds of their own and implications for the world of the real.

And in this way, the gods in the sky are just like the ghosts in the machines we use everyday, machines whose function depends on an increasingly interconnected set of interoperable metaphors mapped onto the otherwise clinically persistent processing of zeros and ones.

Glancing down the list new features in apple’s recent OSX update —

whose power they liken, by way of its name, to a that of a Lion’s —

metaphors proliferate. You can easily call up Mission Control for a global view of your system or boot applications from a Launchpad; a robotic Automator helps with routine tasks while a Time Machine transports you to past versions of files.

These metaphors work together to give our systems a soul. Susan Kare, who designed handles like myself into the windows of the earliest version of MacPaint in 1984, has often referred to the creation of a new icon as a kind of “metaphor shopping.”

Searching for a metaphor to describe the new job of the icon designer, Kare, who also holds a doctorate in art history, reaches for something ancient once more:

The tile mosaics of the Romans can be thought of as an early form of bit-mapped graphics. […] Similar techniques appear in medieval weavings and tapestries.

Here’s a palette of infinite fills from Kare’s original MacPaint design.

As the virtual appears, it acts like the magic mirror of the real, reflecting physical things into digital form through metaphors of use.

A virtual pencil relies on the use metaphor of a real pencil, though the virtual pencil’s behaviors are quite different. For one thing, it can draw at a variety of widths with pixel-precision and make ruler-straight lines with a crosshair instead of a pencil lead. These abilities are beyond those of a real pencil in the physical world.

As graphical user interface (GUI) pioneer Alan Kay explains,

The screen as “paper to be marked on” is a metaphor that suggests pencils, brushes, typewriting. Fine, as far as it goes. But it is the magic — understandable magic — that really counts. Should we transfer the paper metaphor so perfectly that the screen is as hard as paper to erase and change? Clearly not. If it is to be like magical paper, then it is the magical part that is all-important and that must be most strongly attended to in the user interface design.

As magical new things arrive in a virtual space — the arrow pointer, the lasso, the type tool, crop tool, spinning pinwheel — others fall away, and still others persist even though we may no longer need them.

In Apple’s Lion, Address Book, a contact management application, has gone from a simple GUI window to a hovering date planner complete with a leather binding, bookmarks, and a gutter with visible sewing effects.

As archeologist and anthropologist Timothy Taylor explains in The Artificial Ape,

The existence of objects, such as saucepans, not just allows actions but suggests them. The ability of objects to suggest things this way has allowed the development of special features of objects and special types of objects, where the function is more to suggest than to deliver.

An example would be a fake-fur leopard-skin coat, lacking the original insulating qualities of the fur, but imbued with other qualities, such as a capacity for social signaling. Such an object, in archeological parlance, is a SKEUOMORPH, a classic manifestation of technology as it leaves the realm of natural things.

We find skeuomorphs everywhere, from the nonessential rivets on a pair of denim jeans to the paperlike pages of a digital book. I once saw a fellow handle on a bottle of maple syrup whose design mimicked a jug three times its size. You could barely thread a needle through it.

Suggestive objects often reify the past in the present. The automobile, originally known as a “horseless carriage,” retains many aspects of an antique carriage’s form, including the unnecessary spokes on its wheels.

The New York Times reported this February that “electric cars, which can operate with unsettling silence, are being designed to make more noise, largely for safety reasons.” But when trying to imagine the past from the present, we have the opposite problem.

In The Information, Gleick further recounts how English scholar Walter J. Ong plays the “horseless carriage” metaphor in reverse, in order to illuminate the fallacy of mapping the literate consciousness of the present onto the oral culture of the past. He writes,

Imagine writing a treatise on horses (for people who have never seen a horse) which starts with the concept not of “horse” but of “automobile,” built on the readers’ direct experience of automobiles. It proceeds to discourse on horses by always referring to them as “WHEELLESS AUTOMOBILES,” explaining to highly automobilized readers all the points of difference. Instead of wheels, the wheelless automobiles have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of headlights, eyes; instead of a coat of lacquer, something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on. In THe end, HORSES ARE ONLY WHAT THEY ARE NOT.

Metaphors of mobility pervade virtual space — from Homer’s well-known epithet of the “swift-footed achilles” to Steve Jobs’s well-known metaphor that a computer is “a bicycle for our minds.”

Jobs turned this phrase many times, but one of the most explicit comes as part of a video interview for the Library of Congress:

I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool-builders. now, I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer, and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list — not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So that didn’t look so good, but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle blew the condor away — completely off the top of the charts! […] What a computer is to me is … the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Jobs’s metaphor is a comparison that emphasizes the efficiency of the two technologies for human advancement —

recalling Taylor’s idea that objects don’t just allow actions but suggest them, the suggestive power of a bicycle is that of speed, progress, and the power of human beings to conquer boundaries.

And those actions are precisely what Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Bicycle Wheel from 1913 critiques.

Consisting of a single bicycle wheel turned upside-down and mounted to stationary stool, it seems to celebrate — at least to some degree — a pointless, going-round-in-circles kind of motion.

Duchamp himself frequently compared the wheel’s spinning to “flames dancing in a fireplace” or the back-and-forth of a game of chess.

Rather than efficiency and progress, Duchamp’s wheel is a man-made object that is somewhat accidental yet thoroughly intentional in its design and offers no efficiency or practical use whatsoever.

However, in this refusal of efficiency, and in its willingness to break from then-contemporary notions of art, it offers, in place of efficiency, something akin to Kay’s magic eraser: an object that touts its virtual delights over its real-world uses.

In this way, it is a different sort of bicycle for the mind —

one that it opens our collective imagination to new modes of aesthetic interpretation —

even as we’re sitting absolutely still.

Antithesis

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 18:02:00 -0500

This class took place in January 2012 during RISD’s Wintersession period. A website documenting the students’ coursework is available here. The results of the class are also described in my talk Unbuilding.

Dear Wintersessioneers,

To have big, we need small. To taste sweet, we need sour. To see a letter, we need the space around it. Identity is a study in contrasts; our character is made as much by the things we’ve chosen not to do as by the things we’ve done.

More than seven years ago, I taught the fall semester of senior thesis at Parsons School of Design in New York. It was the first of two thesis semesters for my students — I would help them to frame their ideas and initiate a few key projects in the fall, and they would complete their work and install their show in the spring.

I taught in the spring as well. Unlike thesis, my course that semester was an elective studio for seniors. Many of the students I had in the fall also signed up for my elective in the spring. Enrollment in the two classes was nearly identical.

But the class had changed. Fatigue and frustration had started to set in among the group. Students described feeling uninspired and unsure of what they were doing. As a gesture of understanding and solidarity, I retitled our studio “Antithesis,” which, if nothing else, might help to lighten the mood.

This is my third Wintersession course, and I’ve noticed that the dark days of January can produce a similar effect at RISD. Year after year, I join you at a piviotal point: not starting out anymore, but far from finished. In spite of its joking tone, Antithesis 1 was a great success; this year, I thought I’d give it another try.

Your thesis, to paraphrase composer Steve Reich, is a gradual process. Our class will take its inspiration from Wintersession’s speedier pace and interstitial context.

You’ll choose one project per set from the three sets listed below. Each project will ask you engage your thesis investigation directly through a given form. The forms are somewhat generic; which ones you choose to engage and how you choose to engage them is up to you.

During our first class, we’ll spend some time researching and discussing these forms. Later, we’ll spend time in critique better understanding what we’ve made. All three projects will be critiqued first on 01/21 and then again on 02/04, which is my final visit. In addition, all projects should be posted to a classwide website for my review before your visit to New York on 03/10. We will discuss this classwide website in more depth during our first class.

SET 1: Communities

Tote bag: Design a tote bag related to your thesis research. Silkscreen and produce at least five bags to distribute and record any responses of note. Document the project.
Picket sign: Make a picket sign that helps to illustrate implicit political or power structures embedded in your thesis research. Silkscreen and produce at least five of the signs. Document the project.

SET 2: Compressions

Single serving site: Develop a single serving site related to your thesis research. Once the site is online, promote it through word-of-mouth and social media. Document the project.
Supercut / trailer: Produce a supercut or trailer related to your thesis research. Upload the video and promote it through word-of-mouth and social media. Document the project.

SET 3: Contexts

Tabletop: Stage a tabletop still life with objects related to your thesis research It should be equal in size to an ISO A1 sheet. Photograph the tabletop and output this photograph at 1:1 scale.
Treasure hunt: Conceive a treasure hunt whose clues and objectives relate to your thesis research. Ask a friend or a group of friends to go on the hunt. Document the project.

I mentioned that during our first class we’ll do some research and discussion, and I’ve assigned each of these forms to two of you. Please come Friday prepared to make an informal presenation on the form you’ve been assigned. This can be loose, but plan to show us a few useful examples, share a key reading or two, and help to lead a discussion on the possibilities of the form. We’ll spend about 20 minutes per group.

If there are any questions about the presentations, feel free to drop me a note. I look forward to our time together in the coming weeks!

Antithetically, RG

AY006

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 12:02:00 -0500

Above: Unbuilt Helsinki (via)

… it’s a funny thing to take a trip, you almost never come back the same. Have you ever been tempted to get on the wrong flight? When you arrive at the airport, you check in for your flight to Helsinki but consider going to Venice instead. There’s a strong wish to react to life’s present situation, to swap one circumstance for another.

Once aboard, you lose yourself to the hum of the plane’s engines and nod off for what seems like minutes but might be longer. You wake to find yourself in the middle of a film playing in the cabin on the projector upfront — is it “Inception”? Something vaguely futuristic, anyway. The flight attendant pushes a cart down the aisle and offers drinks. You order a glass of wine, and the attendant sets down a wide, low tumbler with a notched-out center. An odd choice of glassware, of course, but it reminds you of a time you went on a boat ride with some friends and toasted with whatever you found on board. There’s a kind of provisional improvisation you have to allow when you’re in transit.

You put off doing any work and decide to enjoy the wine while reading stories from the in-flight magazine — about politicians, architects, performers, and musicians. A mathematician has won a prize for a new discovery. A young chef’s dish has received three-and-a-half stars in a competition. A school is working on a new approach to architectural education. Toward the back, you find pages of advertisements for all kinds of deluxe indulgences. A portable hard drive that lets you take all of your files with you when you travel. An e-reader that slips comfortably in your briefcase and stays charged for days or more, perfect for commuters. There’s an advertisement for the airline you’re flying showing the plane you’re flying in. Bathed in golden light and hovering aloft perfectly puffy clouds, you suddenly feel a bit of turbulence as you look at the ad, a reminder that whatever control you may feel aboard this flight is illusory.

Back at home, you were fiddling with Google Maps to get oriented and hovered over Helsinki in plan as Google’s satellite imagery struggled to load on your slow connection. Zooming in quickly, for a moment a highway interchange seemed to interrupt a historical district. In Street View, you tried to rehearse a walk from the art museum to the university but found yourself lurching forward in virtual space, as if you were aboard the Millennium Falcon and someone had just thrown the switch. Eventually, you noted the directions on a scrap of paper from the wastebin, part of a recent purge from your attic. You’d last used the scrap years ago to sketch a building of your own design. Just think about all the things you sketched then that were never built. All your plans for counter-buildings that were until recently gathering dust in the attic. It was enough for an imaginary city.

You wipe your eyes, finding you’ve nodded off again. The sun pierces the fog and the city comes up faster, growing larger as you bring your seat upright and prepare to land. Soon enough, you’ll be in Helsinki, and you can scarcely wait to visit the churches, the museums, the universities, the department stores, to sit and have a coffee in the station as the trains arrive — and then to think in just a few days more it will all be shadows, memories cast in late afternoon, as you sit back on a plane like this one to fly home again, back to where you started and yet somehow transformed, as if landing in the city made it impossible to ever return to the same place exactly as you were before.

The flight attendant attempts to make an announcement, but the PA system picks up voices from another broadcast. Collecting your luggage at the airport, you set out in a taxi to find the hotel, and, on the way, spot a small announcement for a show at the Museum of Finnish Architecture curated and initiated by Åbäke and Nene Tusoboi and decide you’d like to attend.

UNBUILT HELSINKI, an exhibition about the Unbuilt City and its inhabitants, opens at the Museum of Finnish Architecture on Tuesday 4 December 2012. The exhibition was curated by Åbäke and Nene Tsuboi from the archives of the Museum of Finnish Architecture.

School Days

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:58:00 -0500

Above: “School Days,” from Graphic Design: Now In Production. (Larger)

“And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” — David Byrne

A few years ago, after being invited to serve as a critic for final reviews at an MFA graphic design program, I found myself riding home with two designers and an architecture critic. Each designer had an MFA from a different program, and the architecture critic was working on a PhD. I have a BA. All of us teach at the graduate level while working actively in the profession. After catching up a bit with one another, our discussion returned to the critique. “Why do the students talk about their personal lives so much in explaining their work?” the architecture critic asked. “What do their biographies have to do with it?” While it is certainly valid to question the place of personal histories in a professional context, to talk about ourselves and our stories, it nevertheless seems a persistent inclination among designers to so. We hardly know weʼre doing it — look, I’ve opened here with an anecdote drawn from my own life story.

Perhaps part of this is that there is no one else to write these stories for us. Whether overtly biographical or simply self-referential, design remains even today in the peculiar position of having its history and criticism written largely by and for its own practitioners. Since most of us are involved in making things, we write quite naturally of the hows and whys of making them in a collective effort to evaluate a design’s production. But what’s gone into our own production? How are designers produced?

There are, of course, many ways, many paths — possibly as many as there are designers. Designers can certainly produce themselves as self-taught designers, often through equal parts passion, necessity, and aesthetic brute force. Or designers can be produced by hands-on training through internships and on-the-job experiences. Or designers might arrive from other disciplines and professions. Here’s a cross-section drawn from Rob Roy Kelly’s account of the early days at Yale in the 1950s:

> Most faculty members were well-schooled in art and design history, although several were educated in fields other than art or design. [Alvin] Eisenman, a Dartmouth graduate, studied typography with Paul Nash and had a book design and publishing background. [Lester] Beall had been educated in art history. [Alvin] Lustig did not have a formal education in art or design. [Leo] Lionni was educated as an economist in Italy and was a self-taught graphic designer. [Herbert] Matter studied painting at the Ecole des Beauxarts in Geneva and the Academie Moderne in Paris under Leger and Ozenfant. [Bradbury] Thompson was a graduate of Washburn College, a small liberal arts school in Kansas. He had been a cartographer during World War II. Paul Rand, largely self-taught, was influenced by European painters and designers. He attended night classes at Pratt Institute, took some courses at Parsons School of Design and studied with George Grosz at the Art Students League.

While there may be many routes into a life in design, recent years have found one path in particular on a steady rise: the graduate program. And as more designers return to school for graduate degrees in graphic design than ever before, they fuel a growing list of graduate graphic design programs. Beginning with just a few of these in the 1940s and ʼ50s, including the founding of the first MFA program at Yale in 1951, the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD) now lists approximately 300 accredited institutions as its members, the great majority of which offer both graduate and undergraduate degrees in design, and, while the AIGA and other design organizations don’t have precise numbers on record, there are published estimates of up to 2,000 graduate and undergraduate graphic design programs in the US alone. By any measure, the design school business is booming.

Consider the example of the School of Visual Arts in New York, which opened its Designer as Author (now Designer as Entrepreneur) MFA program in 1998. Since then, SVA has entered a period of rapid expansion, opening one new graduate program every two years, including programs in Branding, Design Criticism, Design for Social Innovation, Interaction Design, and Products of Design. (I have been fortunate to teach, lecture, or visit in several of these programs.) During the same period of time, designers Karel Martens and Wigger Bierma founded the influential Werkplaats Typografie (1998), Bruce Mau worked with Toronto’s George Brown College to create the Institute without Boundaries (2003), and IDEO’s David Kelley founded Stanford’s d.school (2005).

This growth is hardly unique to design. Other creative disciplines have experienced a similarly steady increase in new programs, particularly in graduate programs, along a similar timeline. One of the most significant, both in terms of expansion and in terms of cultural impact, has been creative writing, which, starting with a handful of programs in the 1940s, had increased this number to over 350 accredited instutions offering both graduate and undergraduate programs by 2004.

The rise and impact of creative writing programs in the postwar period is studied by UCLA English Professor Mark McGurl in his thoroughly illuminating book The Program Era (2009). McGurl takes my architecture colleague’s earlier question about personal histories quite seriously:

> [The] category of “personal experience” has over the course of the twentieth century, and in the postwar period in particular, achieved a functional centrality in the postindustrial economies of the developed world. These economies in turn inhabit what Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and others have described as a “reflexive modernity.”

The reflexively modern society, unlike the conventionally modern society, looks forward to the new and backward to its modern past, a modernity whose impact has been total and whose influence reverberates in every sector of culture. Instead of the dismantling and overtly critical strategy employed by postmodernism, the reflexively modern society seeks to examine and correct itself in order to keep placing itself continually back on track. The result is a heightened sense of self-awareness and self-preservation leading all the way back to the individual. McGurl writes that the utility of reflexive modernity as a concept “leaps off the page, suggesting that literary practices might partake in a larger, multivalent social dynamic of self-observation,” which includes “the self-monitoring of individuals who understand themselves to be living, not lives simply, but life stories of which they are the protagonists.”

It is not simply the unexamined life here that is not worth living, but the unnarrated life — and far from a nostalgic examination, that narration is increasingly essential and increasingly likely to occur in real time. Far from narcissistic, McGurl writes, this instinct is decidedly self-preservational and potentially even an unwanted burden, like a kind of punishment:

> [As] Beck puts it, modern people “are condemned to individualization.” To be subject to reflexive modernity is to feel a “compulsion for the manufacture, self-design, and self-staging” of a biography, and, indeed, for the obsessive “reading” of that biography even as it is being written. And in this project there are a host of agencies, including schools, waiting to help.

It would be quite natural to stop here and ask if graduate programs in graphic design and creative writing can really be compared. While the writing program has remained relatively consistent in its structure and steady in its evolution since its earliest days in the ʼ20s and ʼ30s at Bread Loaf in Middlebury, Vermont, and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, graphic design programs have changed and adapted to new currents in the profession.

The first schools embraced the Bauhaus’s original workshop structure (Josef Albers founded the Yale University School of Art and Mies Van Der Rohe directed the architecture program and designed the campus at the Illinois Institute of Technology), but the model was soon restructured to include a more programmatic and analytical approach drawn from architectural training. Other schools throughout the ʼ60s and ʼ70s (like CalArts, founded by Walt Disney in 1961) popularized design through the lens of applied art training. When Katherine McCoy was appointed co-chair of the graduate design program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1971, she combined an interest in architectural theory with the more language-based techniques drawn from the writings about deconstruction and post-structuralism by Barthes, Derrida, and others. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s arrival at Yale in 1990 extended these ideas to include postmodern notions of identity and a public-minded social awareness, giving design the broadened sense of a humanistic discipline sited at a major research university. Jan Van Toorn’s arrival at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 1991 signaled a similar shift in Europe. The end of the ʼ90s found design education having come full-circle, from Dan Fern’s studio-practice–driven model at the Royal College of Art in London to the Werkplaats Typografie’s reintroduction of the workshop model in the Netherlands.

On this level, graphic design and creative writing programs might be considered distant cousins at best. Both are creative pursuits sharing certain structures, like critique and peer review, but many more of these structures remain distinct to each. What McGurl’s book offers to a designer reading it closely is not a set of examples to follow in explaining design education but rather a methodology to adapt for investigating it. What if we play the old “designer as author” metaphor in reverse, describing authorship not as an input or mode of creation, but as an output or model of practice: the designer as cultural influencer, identifiable persona, and creator of a distinctly voiced body of work. This, perhaps, is how an author’s training and a designer’s training are linked.

And this is how the “Program Era,” a term that McGurl adapts from literary critic Hugh Kenner’s earlier “Pound Era,” might resonate with designers today. “The rise and spread of the creative writing program over the course of the postwar period has transformed the conditions under which American literature is produced,” McGurl writes, adding:

> It has fashioned a world where artists are systematically installed in the university as teachers, and where, having conceived a desire to become that mythical thing, a writer, a young person proceeds as a matter of course to request application materials. It has in other words converted the Pound Era into the Program Era.

Once dedicated to mastering basic skills of the craft, the school has become, in design’s Program Era, tied instead to the production of a professional, the creation of a designer as a whole self, an individual with a self-actualized practice in which student work, not client work, often forms the basis for an introduction and ongoing access to the design sphere. Compare this to Lorraine Wild’s description of the graduate school environment at Yale in 1982 that, she writes, functioned like a kind of boot camp where “correct typography” consisted of “using only one font with one weight change.” In this context, Wild wonders,

> Could you be forgiven, perhaps, for beginning to suspect that what you were being taught was not actually modernism at all, but habit? Or bizarre fraternity rituals? The similarities to frat hazing were alarming; if you did what you were told you would be let “in.” […] If you asked questions, there were no sensible answers and you definitely risked rejection.

Today, students’ design work is less learning by rote than practice through self-examination. The resulting work, shared online and through institutions, events, talks, collaborations, extracurricular projects, and other generally pedagogical methods, becomes, in effect, an advertisement for its accompanying self, the designer whose interests and academic path of inquiry shaped it, framed it, and offered it into the context in which it now resides.

“For the modernist artist,” McGurl writes, “the reflexive production of the ‘modernist artist’ — i.e., the job description itself, is a large part of the job.” These reflexive professional efforts, he suggests, are not all that “radical” or even “deconstructive” but instead “perfectly routine,” part of a system of self-reference that extends past the making of literature and to the making and organizing of all things. McGurl describes this self-constitution of systems using a concept drawn from systems theory called “autopoesis.” Designers know these efforts, under slightly different circumstances, as so-called “self-initiated work,” which comprises a good portion of what’s done as an MFA student. And just as McGurl prepares a list of “signature genres of the Program Era” — which includes the campus novel, the portrait of the artist, the workshop story collection, the ethnic family saga, meta-genre fiction, and meta-slave narratives — we might attempt a designer’s list along the same lines, including the thesis book, the process poster, the experimental typeface, the urban map, the data visualization exercise, the group portrait photograph, the image archive, the slide talk, the meta-exhibition, and the project-as-class performance.

Above: “School Days,” from Graphic Design: Now In Production. (Larger)

Especially this last genre owes a debt to the recent “pedagogical turn” in art, which suggests that education is itself a form of art, a facilitator of artist development, and a method for activating art in the public sphere. Among the key projects in this movement is Manifesta 6, which announced the creation of an art school in Nicosia, Cypress in place of a typically temporary, “drop-on-a-city” exhibition. Artist Anton Vidokle notes in the catalogue Notes for an Art School,

> The Bauhaus, in its brief period of activity, arguably accomplished what any number of Venice Biennials have not (and at a fraction of the cost) — a wide range of artistic practitioners coming together to redefine art, what it can and should be, and most importantly, to produce tangible results. All this in the face of Walter Gropius’s famous assertion that “art cannot be taught.” An art school, it would appear, does not teach art, but sets up the conditions necessary for creative production, and by extension the conditions for collaboration and social engagement.

Vidokle’s essay concludes with an “Incomplete Chronology of Experimental Art Schools” beginning with the École national supérieure des beaux-arts (1671) and continuing through the Bauhaus (1919), Black Mountain College (1933), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (1946), Nova Scotia College of Arts & Design (1966), Whitney ISP Program (1968), Beuys’s Free International University (1974), General Idea (1977), the Vera List Center for Art & Politics (1992), Mountain School of Art (2005), and beyond.

While Manifesta 6 did not come to be, it did serve as a catalyst for organizing many groups including Dexter Sinister, who “proposed to establish a print workshop as part of the [Manifesta] school, which would explore existing modes of art publishing and possibly suggest new ones.” In addition to the Bauhaus, Dexter Sinister looked to Toyotaʼs “just-in-time” production process as a model for their workshop. The spirit of this pragmatic academic/commercial workshop fit well with Manifestaʼs hybridized exhibition/academy format. Dexter Sinister, who designed Notes, also contributed the school’s iconic blazon, a slashed shield that Steve Rushton likens to a typographic slash marking the tenuous boundary between terms like love/hate, speech/writing, and, perhaps, art/school.

As art’s “pedagogical turn” seeks to dissolve or at least refashion this last boundary, so too does McGurl undertake an effort to frame writing as a distributed, multifocal, and highly structured creative effort. With this, he completes the second of two substantive transformations of standard-issue Program Era criticisms. The first, as we have seen, is to dismiss the idea that program work is narcissistically self-involved and instead suggest that it is enlightenedly reflexive. McGurl’s second transformation is to dismiss the idea that program work is “generic,” “assembly-line” and basically unoriginal and instead suggest that it is deeply systematic.

But how can a creative discipline be systematically taught? The question is pervasive. Earlier, we saw Vidokle nod to Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius’s assertion that “art cannot be taught.” McGurl quotes the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s official history in the same vein: “Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught,” it states, “we continue to look for the most promising talent in the country, in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but talent can be developed.” It’s a careful balancing act of populism and elitism, allowing for the popular notion of individual genius on one hand while underscoring Iowa’s legacy and prestige on the other. Neither Gropius nor Iowa doubts the possibility of the creative individual, but both seem at best anxious and at worst dismissive of a creative system. Creativity, especially in the last century, has been characterized as something that breaks from the pack; how, then, can it be broken down, spread out, and passed on?

To the extent that there are systems in place to teach writing and other forms of creativity, they are not the same systems that are in place throughout the rest of the university. At Iowa, for example, one participant recalls that her teachers “commented on what they liked or didn’t like about a particular story, offered isolated bits of advice about technique, but most of us got through two years of instruction without any formal discussions of theory or craft.” The description might apply to many design classes as well. And while there was much debate, especially in the early 1990s among a new generation of design educators, of the potential for adapting theoretical systems in the teaching of design, “slowly,” notes Andrew Blauvelt in his essay “Towards a Critical Autonomy,” “the debates subsided.”

“Graduate schools,” Blauvelt continues, “whether celebrated or scorned, were once seen as the source of ‘the problem’” of design’s reduction “to its commodity form — simply a choice of vehicles for delivering a message: ad, billboard, book, brochure, typeface, website, and so on. Implicit in this reductive understanding is the denial of graphic design as a social practice and with it the possibility of disciplinary autonomy.” Here a new question has emerged: not “can it be taught” but “to what end”?

Lorraine Wild asks a similar question, writing in 2004 that “for a time, some of the design schools were more responsible for creating a space where a little more perspective and independence about the practice and the ‘profession’ could occur than anywhere else. The formal investigations produced by students and teachers were produced against this context, which utilized, and was enabled by, a reading of critical theory, and had large targets.” But soon, she writes, these forms “were so alluring (and so specific to a younger audience) that, like every other formal expression of a cultural idea in our consumer-based society, they entered the life cycle of visual style; that is, they were marketed.” In Blauvelt’s formulation, the project of teaching design is tied to the project of teasing design apart from other disciplines; in Wild’s formulation, the project of teaching design is tied to the potential of the school’s position as a space outside the commercial aims that design typically must serve.

But school was changing too. As McGurl notes, the increasing commodification of everyday goods (including those design objects that Blauvelt and Wild describe) required the marketing of “the experience of being marketed to” as a reflexive thing unto itself. After a brief nod to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s late ʼ90s business classic The Experience Economy, McGurl quotes landscape architecture scholar Dean MacCannell’s book The Tourist from a decade earlier to help illuminate this shift in our cultural understanding of school. MacCannell, he writes, surveyed this new landscape of experiences and compared it to a “generalized tourism” in which “the value of things such as programs, trips, courses, reports, articles, shows, conferences, parades, opinions, events, sights, spectacles, scenes, and situations of modernity is not determined by the amount of labor required for their production. Their value is tied to the quality and quantity of the experience they promise.”

What may have first looked like a shift away from the idea of including theory in the classroom was instead a shift toward the classroom as a lived experience in which people, places, and real-world projects come together in a pragmatic whole — an idea that was advanced by Werkplaats Typografie with its arrival in the late ’90s. In its prospectus founders Karel Martens and Wigger Bierma describe the idea of “Workshop as Meeting Place”:

For typographic designers who are just starting to practice — in this case, the participants of the Typography Workshop — it is vitally important that they become familiar with the standpoints and considerations of other typographic designers. The best way to do this is literally to enter into a conversation with them. Moreover, it is important that participants are offered the opportunity to present themselves to future colleagues.

The prospectus goes on to describe the idea of carrying out real-world assignments alongside individual research as participants inhabit a fully-equipped studio where other participants, advisers, and outside experts are all available to discuss and develop creative work.

And though its prospectus doesn’t exactly describe a classic master/apprentice system, the Werkplaats’s outside experts do seem to function in a similar way. McGurl notes a similar dynamic in the creative writing classroom, where the relationship between student and teacher is more of a creative “apprenticeship” and knowledge is delivered informally via practice rather than systematically via syllabus. Perhaps, like the teaching of writing the teaching, the teaching of design at the graduate level has this kind of informal system at its root.

McGurl extends this idea further still, past the classroom and into the writing itself:

> Creative writing issues an invitation to student-consumers to develop an intensely personal relation to literary value, one that for the most part bypasses the accumulation of traditional cultural capital (that is, a relatively rarefied knowledge of great authors and their works) in favor of a more immediate identification with the charisma of authorship. […] Part of the value of of the modern literary text, quite apart from the “relatability” of its characters, is the act of authorship that it records, offering readers a mediated experience of expressive selfhood as such.

Rather than separate the teaching of writing from the autopoetic act, the experience economy bundles them together. “Is such a thing [as systematic creativity] possible?” McGurl finally asks. “Or is it, rather, perfectly normal?” Isnʼt declaring a passion for a creative persuit and making time for it in our busy lives, selecting to be in a group of similarly passionate people led by a mentor who has been successful at that effort, improving our work through discussion and debate, and developing a sense of ourselves and our role in the wider field of cultural production — isnʼt that a system? Isnʼt it one that allows us to grow and be more creative? Isnʼt it one that asks us to teach and learn, lead and follow, remain who we are and be changed by our surroundings? Donʼt our deepest lived experiences change us? And isnʼt school one of them?

Setting aside the anxieties that naturally surround discussions of systematic creativity in this way is just one of McGurl’s many useful insights into the world of creative training and how we might reflect differently about it — to reevaluate (and here I’ll crib a favorite author) What We Talk about When We Talk about Education. The key question is not, as McGurl so lucidly observes, “Programs: pro or con?” Instead, he suggests, we need studies that seriously examine the influence of these programs on literary production and interpretation in the postwar period. What, he asks, are the social factors that gave rise to these programs? How, in their sheer magnitude, have these programs reorganized creative production in our time? And how might we seek a new and more nuanced awareness of the creative products they produce?

Above: “School Days,” from Graphic Design: Now In Production. (Larger)

Perhaps around the bright sun of design we have, during the last few years of our own Program Era, added more planets, more moons and comets, more elliptical orbits, more complexity, and more interconnectedness to our disciplinary universe as it expands ever-outward. This idea ran through part of a RISD MFA syllabus that I wrote several years ago called “Graphic Design & Critical Thinking,” which, if I can indulge in a second autobiographical moment, I will quote here:

> Designers are asked to have a tremendous number of technical and analytical skills at our disposal to communicate information that is unfamiliar to us. Borrowing from Alice Twemlowʼs book What Is Graphic Design For?, a few of the forms that designers regularly use include: typefaces, motion graphics, music and sounds, games, signage and wayfinding systems, posters, magazines and periodicals, books, information graphics, interactive systems, identity systems, advertising, writing, software programs, and more. All of these forms require very different skills, different critical tools for understanding them, and different expectations from audiences in terms of which forms suit certain kinds of content best.

Rather than seeing design as a single paradigm practiced in a uniform way by canonical figures, this “universal” model of design — McGurl would note the similarity to “university” — sees a multiple, shifting set of polarities with highly influential individuals and institutions acting as centers of gravity. The task for emerging designers is to first enter an orbit and then, if they wish, increase their gravitational pull over time. A wider variety of schools and programs naturally help to foster this exercise in self-definition. As more types of people described as “designers” arrive, however, skillsets can grow more distinct and distant from one another.

One of the effects of this broadening has been that design has, in recent years, become noticeably less like a trade and more like a humanistic discipline than ever before. As part of this shift, designer and professor Gunnar Swanson authored a call in 1994 to reconsider “Graphic Design as a Liberal Art.” He writes,

> We must begin to believe our own rhetoric and see design as an integrative field that bridges many subjects that deal with communication, expression, interaction, and cognition. Design should be about meaning and how meaning can be created. Design should be about the relationship of form and communication. It is one of the fields where science and literature meet. It can shine a light on hidden corners of sociology and history. Designʼs position as conduit for and shaper of popular values can be a path between anthropology and political science. Art and education can both benefit through the perspective of a field that is about expression and the mass dissemination of information. Designers, design educators, and design students are in a more important and interesting field than we seem to recognize.

In Swanson’s formulation, design as a discipline acts as a kind of guide between disciplines, adopting and adapting specific theoretical concerns of each and passing them through the lenses of form, communication, and distribution. To this process Blauvelt adds the important quality of reflexivity:

> Graphic design must be seen as a discipline capable of generating meaning out of its own intrinsic resources without reliance on commissions, functions, or specific materials or means. Such actions should demonstrate self-awareness and reflexivity; a capacity to manipulate the system of graphic design.

If humanistic disciplines bridge the analytic, critical, and speculative impulses in understanding ourselves and our world, then design is increasingly engaged in all three of these impulses. It always has been analytic, attempting to understand and solve problems in both the commercial and cultural spheres. But, with the support of academic institutions like schools and museums, design has explored a critical role as well. “Critical design” is a term associated with a growing set of designers, including the RCA’s Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. (Dunne is the head of the Design Interactions department; Raby is on the faculty as well.) “Speculative design,” another alternative practice model and cousin to critical design, has sprung up with methods allowing designers to unpack new scenarios of technology, citizenship, communication, and power. Metahaven, who teach, lecture, and publish widely, are frequently cited as touchstones for speculative design and practice.

The subdiscipline of “design research” has been launched as well. In his preface to one of the first collections on the topic, UCLA’s Peter Lunenfeld begins by stipulating that “the territory is vast” but cites Rem Koolhaas as one possible model for design practice in three ways: “first, to understand the context of any building project he might wish to undertake; second, to develop the building’s program itself; and third, in a reflexive way, as a selling tool for the research and the building themselves.” Research, in this model, is not only an analytic method but also a cultural product unto itself.

And there’s “design thinking,” a kind of re-envisioning of problem-solving itself, less didactic and more open-ended, less specifically about problems and solutions and more of a method for observation and analysis, particularly within larger corporations and institutions. Its name is a curious mash-up of forming things and formulating ideas, which are both separated (”designing” and “thinking”) and intertwined (”design thinking”). It may, in the minds of many, be more easily associated with a set of advocates than a set of concepts, as Helen Walters wrote in early 2011 for Fast Company:

> I joined [BusinessWeek] back in 2006, which was a time when design thinking was really beginning to take hold as a concept. My old boss, Bruce Nussbaum, emerged as its eloquent champion while the likes of Roger Martin from Rotman, IDEOʼs Tim Brown, my new boss Larry Keeley and even the odd executive (A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble comes to mind) were widely quoted espousing its virtues.

Other than Walters and Nussbaum, who are journalists, each of these figures is associated with a postgraduate educational institution: Martin became Dean at Rotman School of Business in 1998 (before that Lafley was his client at Monitor, a consulting group), Brown at Stanford’s d.school, and Keeley at Chicago’s IIT. Walters’s article continues:

> Still, in the years that have followed, something of a problem emerged. […] When we stopped and looked, it seemed like executives had issues rolling out design thinking more widely throughout the firm. And much of this stemmed from the fact that there was no consensus on a definition of design thinking, let alone agreement as to whoʼs responsible for it, who actually executes it, or how it might be implemented at scale.

With its collection of faculty-advocates, its self-evolving set of methods, its position as a primarily theoretical rather than practical structure, and, above all, its assertion that — unlike the more action-oriented, collective “doers” of business cultures past — this process defined by a more contemplative, individual “thinker,” “design thinking” is in every way more the kind of movement that emerges from a school than the kind that emerges from a typical boardroom.

And it is the kind of movement that’s funded like a school as well, complete with the grants, fellowships, prizes, and an expanding base of institutional support. As programs grow, many designers may also rely on teaching to support their practices, and many grad students may look to teaching as a way to remain engaged in the more reflexive practice of design that they currently study. “Like most writers these days, I support myself by preaching what I practice,” jokes John Barth in his 1966 novel Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus (which appears nearby Chip Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters from 2001 on Wikipedia’s illuminating list of “the school and university in literature”).

But before we settle too comfortably into this system of increased support, there are those who take a more cautionary tone. As historian an theorist Thierry de Duve notes Art Schools,

> Art schools have not always existed, and nothing says that they must always exist. Their proliferation is perhaps a trompe l’oeil, masking the fact that the transmission of art today from artist to artist is very far from occurring directly in schools.

In de Duve’s version of events, the growth of art schools is not a steady trend but an illusory and temporary event. This is the “school experience” as goldrush, like a kind of speculative bubble about to burst — with dozens of ad-hoc schools, for-profit trade academies, and educational ventures jockeying for a piece of the student loan industry pie. There is now more education-related debt than credit card debt in the U.S.

And there may be overeducation, too. While there has never been a more important goal than universal access to a college education, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics nonetheless reports that 17 million Americans with college degrees do jobs that do not require them. In the sciences, the number of PhDs given has grown by nearly 40% during every year since 1998, reaching 34,000 doctorates in 2008. In her essay “The PhD problem” science writer Kate Shaw cautions that “the workforce cannot absorb all these highly trained graduates,” most of whom “are fully funded through research assistantships, teaching opportunities, and fellowships. With so many graduates these days taking jobs they are overqualified for, some educators and economists believe this money is simply being wasted.” These developments suggest that education may need to adopt a more streamlined attitude in the years to come.

During an interview in Eye magazine from 1997, Paul Elliman noted that

> It almost doesnʼt matter that itʼs graphic design Iʼm teaching. There must be equivalents in all academic areas of people who teach through a sense of passion. […] The World Wide Web — an environment where, for better or worse, connection is everything — suggests, among other things, new possibilities for design and its education.

Elliman continues,

> This space allows both practice and reflexivity. For the “school,” both as extension to the old model and in the transition to a new one, the Internet will offer a more continuous dialogue with practicing designers, and with other specialized areas, in ways that could counter some of the problems and complexities found in the institutional teaching of design.

To tweak Gropius’s assertion once more, the question here is not “can it be taught” but rather “can it be taught in school”? Because just as art is a frame for a certain kind of aesthetic practice, school is a frame for a certain kind of pedagogical practice. And just as there are types of aesthetics that are not called art or are coming to be known as art, so too are there types of pedagogy that are not called school or are coming to be known as school.

Anton Vidokle notes in his essay that his research into the Manifesta 6 school project unearthed “an amazing range of schools in the past 100 years” that suggest an ever-changing field. “Art education is not in stasis,” he writes. “It is being constantly rethought, restructured, and reinvented.” De Duve calls the extracurricular teaching and learning of artistic practice “transmission” and suggests, along with its deprofessionalization, that it be made available to everyone, not just art students. As Raymond Williams’s Keywords project teaches us time and again, what we call things now may be different than what we call them in the future.

But whatever we call design school next, our design schools now have undoubtedly produced the design culture we share today, and perhaps this is exactly the point. As more designers go to school, go back to school, and return again to teach in school; as there are more postgrad “lifelong learning” environments like conferences and meetups; as there is more discussion and debate online, in after-work lectures and weekend book fairs and degree shows; as designers seek to make themselves better, learn more, and define a life in design as an unfolding lived experience — as all this happens, then the culture of design becomes increasingly more like the culture of school. As we look back on this period in the years to come, these may be design’s school days indeed.

This piece was commissioned by Andrew Blauvelt and Ellen Lupton for the catalogue of Graphic Design: Now In Production in 2011.

Unbuilding

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:37:00 -0500

This talk was given on 15 November 2012 at the Build Conference in Belfast.

Thanks to Andy McMillan and to everyone Build for having me here. I also want to start my talk today by saying thank you to Ethan Marcotte, who’s speaking today, for leading the charge on Responsive Web Design. There aren’t a lot of things that come along that really change the game for how you think about what you do, but, for me, Responsive Web Design was one of those things.

Before I started working on the web, I worked as a print designer. If you’re designing a book, there’s only one page size and everything comes from that. You spec the type, define the baseline grid, and shape the page. The format, in many ways, forms the design.

A responsive design for the web, however, is shaped by its context. It adapts to how you’re viewing it. Rather than assuming a fixed form, it embraces fluidity. It uses one code base to serve many different situations. It does this elegantly, even beautifully.

The practice of Responsive Web Design is shaped by its context as well. While it exists as an invention, it also exists as a critique. It critiques fixed-grid layouts, for example, since they cannot scale responsively — in fact, it critiques fixed presentation methods of all sorts.

Instead of seeking a lowest common denominator for a site’s presentation, or fragmenting it across several subdomains, Responsive Web Design says you can have it all: presentation needn’t be singular, and fragmentation needn’t be necessary. A site’s design can be both variable and total.

This is a really big deal. It seems simple when Ethan describes it, but it’s a fundamental shift in thinking about how things for the web are made.

Ethan’s piece on A List Apart started with a quote from John Allsopp’s “A Dao of Web Design” about ebb and flow. In that article, Allsopp adapts a number of Taoist teachings into guiding principles for the web. Emptiness is not on Allsopp’s list, but he might have included it. Here’s what the Dao teaches about emptiness:

> We pierce doors and windows to make a house; and it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11)

A house is the space it contains and the space it releases. Its windows frame space through absence. A house interacts with its environment through the portions that are either removed or never built. As much as a house is defined by its building, the Dao says, it is also defined by its unbuilding.

This is a talk about unbuilding.

When we think about building, we think about a lot of things. For example, we think about what we can build, and that takes knowledge. So building is about learning, building skills, building with those skills. But in order to learn, we must also take the world apart a bit, unravel it, examine it up close. In other words, we have to unbuild it.

To build anything revolutionary, we’ve got to be innovative. We’ve got to invent new strategies, new approaches, new tools. So building is about inventing, making new, even surprising our competition. But in order to invent, we must also shake things up, disrupt our normal process, reorganize. Again: unbuilding.

And building is undoubtedly about growth — making something bigger. Maybe scaling by a little or a lot, but bringing things to the next level. And doing that involves — you guessed it — unbuilding: disseminating your point of view, dispensing your product, diversifying your capital, all that.

Learning and unraveling, inventing and disrupting, scaling and disseminating — you can’t have one without the other. If building is the call, unbuilding is the response. They are two sides of the same coin, each constituting the other. Far from opposite of building, unbuilding offers an opportunity to see what it means to build from a fresh perspective.

Let’s start by giving a little more depth to these concepts — here’s building on the left and unbuilding on the right.

While building is planned, following a step-by-step path, unbuilding is reflexive. At last year’s Build, Wilson Miner reminded us of the Marshall McLuhan quote “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” — that’s a reflexive thought, it works in a circular way. Building looks forward toward progress while unbuilding evaluates and learns by looking back. Building involves skills and know-how; unbuilding requires inquiry and investigation. When we build we follow patterns; when we unbuild, we often find them. Building involves setting expectations, while the objective of unbuilding is often discovery. In building we place things where they’re supposed to go; in unbuilding we often try to misplace or creatively recombine them. When we build we build with intention; when we unbuild, we embrace chance. Building is a logical process; because of the element of surprise and wonder, unbuilding can often be an emotional process.

Earlier I said that while Responsive Web Design functioned as a practice, it also functioned as a critique of the practices that came before it and the culture that surrounded it. Art often functions this way too, and I want to take a look at some artworks today and see how we might learn from how they work.

This is Marcel Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel” from 1913. Like Ethan’s idea of Responsive Web Design, Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel” hugely influenced the art that came after it — it is widely regarded as Duchamp’s first readymade, kicking off almost a century of appropriation in the art world. But, like Responsive Web Design, the Bicycle Wheel is also a critique of the culture that surrounded it — specifically the culture of cycling and mass production, which by 1913 was about a century old.

So it’s reasonable to stop and ask at this point: How did Duchamp create this totally new approach to art? What strategies is he using here? If we were seeking this kind of insightfulness in our work, how might we systematically approach it?

We’ve already talked about appropriation — he’s clearly doing that — unbuilding our concept of what is original. Duchamp also said reflexively that “instead of choosing his objects, his objects chose him” and this injects a bit of chance into the imperative of artistic choice. I’ve talked a bit about how “Bicycle Wheel” negates the conditions that surround it — about bicycles and about art-making — and it does so through a kind of removal of the artist himself. We have an expectation about the role of the artist, so the work seems incomplete — even its author can’t explain what it means. This failure — to be meaningful in a comfortable way, to even to qualify as something we understand as art — this is built in to the Bicycle Wheel’s efforts at unbuilding its context.

So, I’ve named a few strategies:

Appropriation
Chance
Negation
Removal
Reversal
Incompleteness
Failure

and to these we could add even more:

Speculation
Repetition
Comedy

Strategies like speculation: What will things look like in the future? Repetition: What do 100 of them mean? What about 1 million? Comedy: What does it mean if I laugh at this?

As we look at all these strategies that come out of unbuilding, I want to zoom in on four of them today — negation, removal, reversal, and incompleteness — and see how they function with examples in art, on the web, and elsewhere. A disclaimer: some of these strategies are complementary — a particular reversal might also be a negation of some kind, for example. My goal here isn’t to create rigid categories; I want to spark new ideas about how we work.

Negation as strategy

Let’s start with negation, and with the Canadian artist Jeff Wall.

This is an incredible image by Jeff Wall, stunning and complex. It’s called, simply enough, “Tattoos & Shadows.” In an interview with SFMoMA, Wall describes his process using this image as an example. He says, “I begin by not photographing.” So, if he’s out on the street and he sees something that strikes him, he simply doesn’t photograph it — instead, he memorizes that scene.

This image was made a year after Wall first saw it. There’s a different tree, fewer people, different people. But in his re-creation, Wall enhanced what’s powerful about this image — the temporary pattern of the light laid atop the permanent, inked patterns on his subjects’ skin.

Here it is in installation.

Let’s look again at how this image exists as a critique, how it unmakes the world of photographs, particularly everyday snapshots. Here’s two lists that work like readings on a set of dials.

I’ve already described how this work is re-created, remembered, and translated from life with Wall’s enhancements. As an art object, it’s also a lightbox, not a print, so it’s literally made of light. It’s large-scale and Wall does not edition them, so each lightbox is individual and original. And there is something controlled and knowing about the image that comes from Wall’s subjectivity and the year he spent thinking about it. It is self-aware and self-conscious, even though its source material comes from real life.

Negation works well on the web — you may be thinking of many ways already. There was an interesting project done last year by the artists Jonas Lund & Anika Schwarzlose called “This Too Shall Pass.”

This work was included in a group exhibition about photography and performance called The Second Act. A photographic print has been placed on a shelf attached to a shredder. When someone visits the website for the project, the shredder is activated for a third of a second. After enough visits, the entire edition is destroyed.

Wall’s type of negation is non-action; Lund and Schwartzlose’s type of negation is non-preservation. Unlike Wall, they present their work as an edition, but they also display that edition in a way that destroys it. And, importantly, they make a normally passive audience consider the meaning of looking at something.

The internet places us in an economy of attention. Here, that attention is heightened, even quantified, until the edition is gone. “This Too Shall Pass” unbuilds our feelings about experiencing art in a mediated way.

Negation can also function in interactive and participatory situations beyond the web. Let’s look at unbuilding a working process.

I am a thesis advisor in the grad program for graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Last year, I led a three-week workshop called “Antithesis” — so negation was clearly on my mind.

The class came at a critical point in the year — in January between semesters. Thesis topics were not exactly new anymore, and yet there was a long slog ahead in the spring. Fatigue, anxiety, maybe even a bit of discouragement were all setting in. Clearly, it was time to twist some dials.

Unlike the thesis, Antithesis was an optional class. Instead of a constant, year-long process, it was interstitial, happening during a “down time” in the year. We didn’t really have class meetings — instead, I spent my time hanging out in the studio. Everyone loosened up. After thinking intensively about the thesis for 12 weeks, it was time to stop thinking about it — at least, consciously. The goal was not to keep pushing forward on the thesis but to get new projects started in parallel.

Part of shaking things up was offering new prompts. Instead of honing research essays, we made tote bags.

Tote bags been everywhere recently, gaining significance as a social signaling device, particularly Anya Hindmarch’s “I’m not a plastic bag” — negation again.

We also looked at ways of mixing scholarly research in time and space. We looked at the supercut as a new way of mixing found video.

We looked at tabletops and “things arranged neatly” as ways of spatially organizing source materials and objects of design.

We finished our time together by making a website of our work.

It was only online a few weeks when one project, a tabletop exploration that came out of thesis research on the aesthetics of the novel, showed up on the Huffington Post and ping-ponged around the web from there. Soon after that, a supercut called “Cage does Cage” showing 4:33 of silent looks from various Nicholas Cage films showed up on BuzzFeed. My students were never expecting this kind of response to their thesis work.

When you’re in the middle of something complex and lengthy like a thesis project, you often know a lot more than you think. My students thought they were struggling; yet their ideas proved tremendously resonant —not just to the design community, but to the culture at large. They were doing a lot better than they thought, they just needed to change their process — to get out of a standard educational process that puts one thing after another and get into a looser, more associative process that let them to use what they already knew in order to ask new questions.

There’s a very smart curator named Charles Esche who’s the director of the Van Abbemuseum in Holland, and he wrote an article that went back and looked at the history of avant-garde art programs along with documents about how artists should be educated. There were a lot of disagreements in those documents, but he found three common threads.

“Anti-specialization” basically says that sculptors can do things other than sculpt and painters can do things other than paint. ” Anti-isolation” or “anti-autonomy” basically says that art should matter, it should get out of the museum and touch the world in specific ways. And “Anti-hierarchy” basically says that making art should be available to everyone, not just to a certain class of people

Negation is in all of these — that’s where these disparate approaches to art education find common ground decade after decade. And every one of these ideas has already been applied to the web. When you think about anti-specialization, think about hackers and painters. When you think about anti-autonomy, think about doing things that matter. When you think about anti-hierarchy, think about the value of passion projects, startups, and all the amazingly talented amateurs online.

Removal as strategy

The next strategy — the strategy of removal — also connects to Esche’s threads. These threads don’t just negate certain conditions of art education, they also seek to remove the structures underlying those conditions. In order for anti-hierarchy to be a rallying cry, the hierarchies must first exist, and then they must be removed. So negation and removal are related.

And I was thinking about this as I went into a workshop in Italy this September at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. The workshop was part of a symposium on design education. Like Antithesis, the idea for this workshop was really simple. Instead of supplying a syllabus, I removed it. And instead of hiding that fact, I drew my students’ attention to it, asking them to write one of their own.

My model in this was Maria Montessori, who described herself as an anti-teacher — more a careful observer or a guide than a professor or instructor. What resulted over the next two days was a wide-ranging discussion about methods and models of education, educational debt, administrative hurdles to interdisciplinarity, and realizing the utopian dream of the open school.

Within hours, one group had posted a syllabus for open-source learning on GitHub and started to discuss it via Git commits.

Another group went out to film international students who discussed of impact the Bologna Declaration, which calls for educational compatibility in Europe, on their everyday lives.

Online, removal as a strategy translates just as well. This gallery of internet sprites by the artist and OKFocus cofounder Ryder Ripps takes the sheets of tiny image sprites used by services like Twitter and GMail and archives them. The sprite sheets were created to speed up the sites by reducing calls to the server for small images. But in removing them from their original context, Ripps presents the sprites in another way. These tiny images organize and spatialize the way we interact with these powerful platforms. What’s allowed, what’s encouraged, the color and shape of selection and refusal — they are all contained here. Ripps’s work has found a huge audience online, and it’s this unbuilding process that gives it much of its force.

Here’s an Irish example — Dan Walsh, an IT manager from Dublin, started the popular site “Garfield minus Garfield” in 2008 after being captivated by discussions of how the strip might be different if its title character was removed. It quickly became a phenomenon — 4 months after it launched, Walsh was getting 300,000 hits a day. Without Garfield’s witty thought balloons, his owner Jon Arbuckle’s deep pathos is revealed. Questions that Garfield’s creator Jim Davis intended as setups for the cat’s punchlines instead serve to express the deep disaffection and existential uncertainty of everyday life. This is a different kind of humor for a different kind of time.

And this generational tension exists in the art world too, for example in the now-famous erased Willem de Kooning drawing by Robert Rauschenberg. After visiting de Kooning in his studio to introduce himself, Rauschenberg asked the elder Abstract Expressionist for a drawing to erase. De Kooning, unsure at first, eventually agreed — but only after selecting a drawing that he would truly miss, and one that would be very difficult for Rauschenberg to erase. The process took Rauschenberg two months and raises all sorts of questions. Who is the author of the piece? Is this a creative act or a destructive one? Has a work of art been lost or gained? These questions, of course, are impossible to resolve — such is the beauty of the piece. Rauschenberg’s act makes meaning by turning loss into a material. The drawing was once about what had been created — Rauschenberg has converted it into something that’s about what has been removed.

Earlier this year, Wikipedia performed an act of self-removal in the face of concerns that the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act would do serious harm to free speech and free knowledge exchange online. For 24 hours from January 18-19, the site went dark and invited everyone to consider a world without Wikipedia.

It’s hard to imagine a more powerful gesture — by January 24, Senator Harry Reid and Representative Lamar Smith announced the test vote on their bills would be postponed due to lack of support.

Reversal as strategy

With that legislative about-face in mind I want to look at a third strategy, which is, of course, reversal.

Wikipedia doesn’t work without the technology of writing and a literate public. Yet there was a long time in human history when literacy was the exception, not the rule. Culture spread through speaking and remembering, not writing and reading. Even though we may already know these facts, often we still think about Homer’s Odyssey as a written text that we read silently to ourselves, not something that was designed to be easily memorized, spoken, and listened to.

In his book Orality & Literacy, professor Walter Ong analyzes this transition and theorizes about the impact of literacy on human consciousness. In describing the impossibility of understanding a culture that is primarily oral from the point-of-view of one that is primarily literate, he draws a comparison to the automobile:

> Imagine writing a treatise on horses (for people who have never seen a horse) which starts with the concept not of “horse” but of “automobile,” built on the readers’ direct experience of automobiles. […] Instead of wheels, the wheelless automobiles have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of headlights, eyes; instead of a coat of lacquer, something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on. In the end, horses are only what they are not.

In a sense, Ong unbuilds the car to build a horse.

He ends with a negation: to unbuild the car to build a horse is not to build a horse at all.

Metaphors about technological progress often reference transportation like this — think about Steve Jobs’s “bicycle for your mind.” Or Ted Nelson’s recent suggestion at Brooklyn Beta that “Computers that simulate paper are like ripping the wings off a 747 and driving it down the highway like a bus,” which is an image that, once described, is difficult to erase from your mind.

These metaphors are so memorable because they place progress in reverse, and the illustrator David Macaulay has done something similar in his book Unbuilding, whose title might be a namesake for this talk. For many years, Macaulay has drawn an incredible series of books that illustrate how everything from pyramids to castles to subway systems are built. But in Unbuilding, he describes a future in which the Empire State Building is disassembled brick by brick in order to be shipped across the ocean to a foreign buyer. Tragically, in the story, the ship is lost at sea.

Why tell the story this way? A clue might be in Macaulay’s dedication for the book, “To those of us who don’t always appreciate things until they are gone.”

What does a building mean to a city?
What does a website mean to a society?
What does a drawing mean to an artist?
What does a character mean to a story?
What does a photograph mean to a viewer?

These questions are difficult to answer, and more often we don’t even consider them. But again and again, unbuilding is a process that asks us to confront these questions about the hidden forces that shape our interactions with world.

Pointer Pointer does this too. Using a large database of candid snapshots of people pointing in different directions, it tracks the movements of your mouse so that when you point, people point back at you. This simple reversal makes you eerily aware of the movements of your own mouse, while you’re confronted with goofy photos of strangers you never asked to see. Pointer Pointer raises questions about all sorts of things — big data, click tracking, and online surveillance, to name a few.

The personal website of the web designer Jake Dow-Smith asks a similar set of questions. What does a personal website really seek to represent? Is it a place to post ideas? Share photos? Link to external projects? Should it give a sense of who someone really is? These days, we do so much of our living through email, but how much of that process of living are we really allowed to see? When we log on to this site, we seem to be looking at Dow-Smith’s desktop, complete with incoming mail. Is this real? Are we supposed to be seeing this? Dow-Smith reverses what’s closed and what’s open on his site. Instead of portfolio materials, we get personal emails, grocery lists, even deleted spam. We’re left asking what we’d hoped to find, and what a personal website is really capable of sharing.

Reversal can be immensely appealing, too. When I originally dreamed up this talk, the first image of unbuilding that came to mind was this routine by Penn and Teller, which dazzled me on TV when I was younger. In this amazing sequence, they start with a pretty silly trick — Teller enters a rocketship and parts of him “blast off” all over the stage, until he is eventually recombined. It’s a pretty literal image of unbuilding in that sense, but what’s incredible is the reversal. Once they’ve shown the trick, Penn and Teller set about unbuilding it, brandishing a set of clear boxes to do the trick a second time, this time showing the secrets behind it.

The audience clearly likes the first version, but they love the second version. What’s so thrilling the second time around is not the trick itself — you already know what’s happening — but the process, the artistry, the craft of it. It’s like David Ogilvy telling you how to write an ad — it makes you want to hire him to write one for you.

Something in seeing this trick after all these years made me think of something I’d seen earlier this year, this incredible demonstration of the Kiva robot, which was shown by Kiva CEO Mick Mountz at TEDxBoston in June 2011. As you can see, the system literally unbuilds the warehouse, so instead of a worker going to the shelving, the shelving goes to the worker. At the core of this reversal is a human benefit — not only is the old method “an inefficient way to fill orders, it’s an unfulfilling way to fill orders.” In a single stroke, Kiva changes the warehouse’s architecture from fixed to emergent and the methods that it uses to choreograph shelves on the floor are now parallel, not serial. Kiva was acquired by Amazon in March this year.

Here’s another reversal I saw last year, this time by the architectural firm Interboro Partners. Every summer, MoMA’s PS1 invites a new young architecture firm to install a project in its courtyard. The installation offers shade, seating, and shelter during outdoor concerts that take place there throughout the summer. But while these concerts are well-attended by New York’s art and music scene, Interboro learned that many local residents of Long Island City had never visited PS1. A high wall around the courtyard only added more distance.

During the months leading up to the project, which Interboro called “Holding Pattern,” the architects surveyed the neighborhood, asking institutions what they needed.

The taxi drivers wanted a ping-pong table. The ballet school wanted new mirrors. The senior center wanted benches.

Interboro purchased or designed these items using the installation budget and held them in PS1’s courtyard for the summer.

Their eventual recipients were invited in to use them, give performances, host readings, and take part in the cultural life of the museum.

Interboro writes, “When Holding Pattern was deinstalled this past fall, we delivered 79 objects and 84 trees to more than 50 organizations in Long Island City.”

This is the best kind of reversal, of recycling, a social design process that works from the inside out.

Incompleteness as strategy

The last strategy I want to discuss, a bit more loosely, is incompleteness. We might call something unbuilt if it’s taken apart, but we might also consider something unbuilt if it’s never finished. And so to embed incompleteness into a thing is to leave it unbuilt — yet this is such a pervasive part of the web that it’s hard to even single out one example. What website isn’t being tinkered with all the time, changed, added to, improved? Isn’t incompleteness what makes websites dynamic, responsive, fluid, timely, adaptive, and all the rest? Of course it is.

One of the best places to see incompleteness in action is GitHub. This July, developer John G. Norman wrote a great post on his blog that described GitHub as “The Most Important Social Network,” and I’m inclined to agree with him. Norman explains how GitHub doesn’t just provide a decentralized method for collaborating on computer code, it also makes available and analyzable the very nature of human-to-human collaboration. GitHub unbuilds the way things get done. It assumes code is by its very nature incomplete, and in the process it gives us unbelievable access to the nature of work. Norman writes,

> Yes, I know that conversations on Facebook and Twitter have their purposes, but at GitHub, there is real pressure to move a project along and keep it alive. If you’re a scholar interested in computer-mediated communication, you ignore GitHub at your peril.

In February, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum took the very exciting step of releasing its collections metadata on GitHub using Creative Commons Zero, the most permissive license available. In doing so, the museum’s Digital & Emerging Media Director Seb Chan hoped that offering this information would make it more discoverable, allowing it to be searched from outside the museum’s own website.

Even more, he hoped releasing the metadata would inspire to new forms of interpretation around the collection. The collections metadata is incomplete in two ways — for one thing, as Chan notes, it isn’t the objects themselves, only information describing them; for another thing, it is only as good as what you can do with it.

Incomplete metadata is made more useful only when it enables an item from the collection to appear in exhibitions, catalogues, or other experiences. Chan asks, “Could GitHub become not just a source code repository but a repository for ‘cultural source code?’”

Langauge is a more direct expression of a cultural source code, and it’s being edited, tweaked, and extended all the time. Designer and illustrator Joe Davis’s website Telescopic Text takes a simple sentence, “I made tea,” and unfolds these three words, clause by clause, into a total of almost 200. In so doing, a simple documentary fact becomes an experiential, associative tone poem that’s as pleasant to play with as it is to read, as the words swirl around each other like milk in Davis’s teacup.

But much earlier, writer Jorge Luis Borges described this same kind of incompleteness in a lecture at Harvard titled simply, “The Metaphor.” In it, Borges shows how metaphors arise before language, before we find words to describe something. Then, as we share these concepts with one another, metaphors evolve into words. Borges jokes that “a word is a dead metaphor, which is a metaphor,” but then he returns to what metaphors can do and introduces the concept of openness, which is related to incompleteness — metaphors are open because they are incomplete. They make a suggestion we must complete in our own minds. Here’s Borges:

> Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody. They convince nobody because they are presented as arguments. Then we look at them, we weigh them, we turn them over, and we decide against them. But when something is merely said — or, better still, hinted at — there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it.

And this idea of incompleteness is embedded in our legal system too — laws have amendments, precedents, arguments are overruled — the law is constantly unbuilding and rebuilding itself.

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his iconic speech on race centered on a single phrase in the U.S. Constitution — the idea of “a more perfect union.” With this idea of progressing toward perfectability, the Constitution ensured its status as a living document, something that was simply a first draft, born incomplete, made more perfect with each generation, but never, truly, perfectable.

OK — I’ve covered a lot today. I’ve described a way that making things can critique the world around us, by unbuilding systems. I’ve described this kind of process as something that’s not opposed to building but instead catalyzes all knowledge, invention, and growth. And I’ve pointed to a few examples we can use in our own individual work.

But how about our collective work? I’ve described how you can’t build a house without unbuilding — but how about a community? Of course, unbuilding figures into that too. And in our creative community on the web, I believe unbuilding — how we look back on what we’ve done, reflect on it, find patterns, make discoveries, embrace chance and emotion as pathways to meaning — unbuilding is a tremendously important part of making our community stronger, pushing us further, and, most importantly, linking us to cultural conversations that are happening across disciplines.

A few months ago at our studio we met with a museum curator who was interested in bringing some of our work into her collection. And she looked at books, posters, identity manuals, exhibition diagrams, all these physical things, and that all seemed pretty easy to acquire, but when we talked about websites, she grew quiet. As we talked, I discovered that it wasn’t just the technology that made matters difficult for her, but the lack of a canon. “What websites have other museums acquired?” she asked. “It’s hard to start from zero.”

At that moment, I realized that we need to start building not just in a practical sense but in a critical sense. Together, we need to build a canon for the web.

This is a very hard thing to do. Our discipline is relatively new, it encompasses a wide range of skills and talents, its techniques are always changing — but with the publication of the late Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions in 2007, the discussion really seemed to get started. Soon after that Armin Vit wrote an essay asking “Landmark Web Sites, Where Art Thou?” and Khoi Vinh and many others promptly responded.

It’s tempting to say we don’t need a canon, but the curator who visited me, along with Bill and Armin and Khoi and all the others all have a point: canons are the sign of a maturing discipline. They build consensus, spark debates, establish throughlines and themes, and set the parameters for future critiques to undo. Web design may be a participatory practice, a political practice, and a commercial practice, but I also believe web design must consider itself an aesthetic practice — this is, after all, why many of us are here. And canons, problematic though they may be, have been the operating systems for aesthetic practices for a long time.

Andrew Blauvelt, one of our foremost critics of design and a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, published an essay in 2003 called “Towards a Critical Autonomy” in which he wrote,

So my question to you, today, is: Can the same be true for web design? Is web design a system capable unbuilding itself? I believe, and people like Ethan have shown us, that this is possible. What else is possible? When we think about what we’d like to build, let’s think about building a canon, even if it’s never complete.

The critic Susan Sontag wrote that “A complete set of something is not the completeness the collector craves.” She’s saying that the collector really wants is to chase after completeness — not actually to get there. Seen this way, the ever-evolving nature of our work is actually a thrilling aspect of canon creation, not an impediment to it.

Critique is a complex instrument. It dissassembles the very things it wishes to knit together. If you’ve ever “viewed source” to see how a web page was built, you know exactly what I mean. If we “viewed source” on our collective efforts at making meaning in our work, how would this work be built?

That’s exactly what we should try to answer next.

Teacher's College

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:31:00 -0400

Along with Daniel Eatock, Metahaven, Formafantasma, and others, I’ll be conducting a workshop and giving a lecture at the 2012 Unibz Design Festival in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy this September. This year, the festival’s topic is “learning.” My workshop abstract and suggested reading list follow below.

A syllabus is a document. Photocopied, staple-bound, and generally up to a dozen pages, it is often produced by an instructor and includes a course’s most basic information: time and location, schedule, learning objectives, grading, rules for conduct in class, introductory text, reference figures and imagery, and an overview of the course’s readings and assignments.

The goal of this workshop is to produce its own syllabus. Over two days, we will collaborate to assemble a document that outlines a future course about design education, drawing from examples both within design and beyond. On day one, each designer will arrive ready to present for 5-10 minutes on a topic of their choice. Of particular interest are educators like Socrates, Ivan Illich, Maria Montessori, and Norman Potter, educational institutions from the Bauhaus to TED, and prior syllabi like those from David Foster Wallace, Milton Glaser, and others. Following these presentations, designers will be put in teams of two, with each team contributing a single page to the course syllabus — from timelines, annotated reading lists, taxonomies, learning tools, reference aids, and more.

Following a favorite teacher of mine, the syllabus will begin with an image and end with a list, forming points A and B of the document. How these points connect, and how future designers might make use of them, will be our collective concern and ultimate project.

The spectral mimicry of things said to the mind

Fri, 04 May 2012 16:11:00 -0400

A stunning bit of writing from William Gass, by way of his essay “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence” from his collection Life Sentences:

“The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” The rhythm of the sentence not only propels the sentence forward, it helps to organize its significant units — its phrases and clauses. The reader is made, not merely to see the sentence, but to sound it, because it is now a small mouthful. These sounds are not those of ordinary speech, but the spectral mimicry of things said to the mind, heard only by the mind, in the arena of the mind — in the subvocal consciousness that exists during reading.

The saleman’s sentence seems quite sure of itself. It is direct; it is definite; it has no room for reservations. Yet without altering a word, its epistemological and ontological status can be radically altered. That is why I called these verbal instruments, transformative operators. For instances, we could lower the sentence’s degree of assurance. “[I thought that] the fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” “[I guessed that] the fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [but Gertrude was of quite a different opinion].” Amphibolously: “[Harold said that if] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [he was a monkey’s uncle].” Or change tone and attitude: “[I certainly hoped] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [otherwise I’ve just now bought a cat’s brush to comb my beard].” “The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [but what if he were also the exhibitionist who has been frightening the neighborhood?]” More radically, we can put it in another realm of Being. “[While seated before the fire in my dressing gown reading Descartes’s Meditations, I dreamed I heard a knocking. Then a cuckoo popped out of its clockhouse to announce that] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman. [I realized, when I was awakened by my desire to answer his knocking, that I had been dreaming inside a dream not altogether mine.]”

Layers of reality, degrees of uncertainty, ranges of attitude, levels of society, depth of contextual connection, modulations of tone, the ramifications and complexities of concept, and, above all, the vocabulary of the denoted world, must be taken into account, managed, and made the best of.

Time Warp

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:04:42 -0500

Above: Time Warp as published in Mousse #30.

Each issue, the editors at Mousse invite a contributor to select a text or a group of texts to be reprinted in the magazine as part of their section “Reprint.” The reprinted work may be an article, a short essay, a piece of narrative, or something else, but the original layout is always kept. The scans are accompanied by a text/introduction by the contributor. I was delighted when they asked me to contribute and enjoyed the selection process enormously. The simple act of choosing a set of things and then writing something that helps to connect them was a productive one for me. My thanks to them for the opportunity, and for making it look great. — RG

Lydia Davis’s compact story “20 Sculptures in One Hour” begins like a word problem from a long-lost math class: “The problem is to see 20 sculptures in one hour.” We wait for more, but that is the entirety of the problem, which is a classic half-empty or half-full scenario — though this one comes with a twist, as it must account not only for perception but for the passage of time. Once the problem is stated, Davis’s prose quickly double-backs on itself, repeating the worry that although “An hour seems like a long time” it also seems like “20 sculptures are a lot of sculptures.” If anxiety can be described as the reflexive condition of worrying about worrying, then you might know where the first part of Davis’s story is heading.

I love Davis’s story all on its own, but I had the desire to stretch it out, to make it last longer, to parse it more closely, to somehow freeze-frame each sentence in motion, like Muybridge’s famous photographic study of a galloping horse. Muybridge’s images were made at the behest of university founder Leland Stanford in order to prove a supposition by French naturalist and early photographer Étienne-Jules Marey that all four of a horse’s hooves left the ground while galloping. With the help of twelve special cameras, Muybridge captured “movements whose speed exceeded the perception of any painter’s eye,” writes Prof. Friedrich Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, and proved Marey correct.

By 1882 Marey had developed something better than Muybridge’s cameras for recording bodies in motion. Combining Gatling’s mechanized machine gun with a multi-chambered camera developed for capturing the night sky through a telescope, Marey introduced a “chronophotographic gun” that could fire twelve frames per second. “Shooting” film was born.

The chronophotographic gun was soon aimed at one of Marey’s assistants, Georges Demeny, who produced images of himself speaking common phrases in an attempt to understand the motor functions of the face and mouth in producing speech. He used his simulations to teach deaf and mute patients at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. The 20 millisecond-long exposures shown here animate Demeny as he speaks a declaration of love, “Je vous aime.”

“Such is the solidarity of film and typewriter,” Kittler notes, as every word heard, read, spoken or typed by Demeny and others “breaks down (as the stenotypist puts it) into its constituent letters.” Almost 100 years after Remington launched its first commercial typewriter in 1873, the typewriter’s filmic potential had throughly infused the writing of poetry. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Peter Finch’s slim collection of Typewriter Poems (1972), edited by Finch and published by Something Else Press, whose leadership by then included not only founder Dick Higgins but also editor Emmett Williams, whose epic concrete poem sweethearts had been published several years earlier with a note instructing readers to both read the poems’s pages and try flipping them “fast enough to achieve a primitive cinematic effect.”

Every one of Finch’s selections stretches, bends, shapes and sculpts words with the help of the typewriter’s clacking keys of uniform width, but Alan Riddell’s “hologrammer” is perhaps my favorite. By 1972 holography (which means “whole writing”) was spreading — found everywhere from a gallery show by Salvador Dalí to a window at Cartier’s 5th Avenue shop — and its inventor, the Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor, had just received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his creation. Riddell’s poem neatly diagrams the process, which involves “the exposure and reconstitution of an image,” with the typewriter’s keystokes substituting for particles of light.

The holographic process is likened to musical recording on Wikipedia, “whereby a sound field created by vibrating matter, like musical instruments or vocal chords, is encoded in such a way that it can be reproduced later without the presence of the original vibrating matter.” This notion of a musical experience that can remain direct even if mediated synchs up well with some of composer Steve Reich’s early tape loop pieces from a decade earlier. In his Writings on Music, Reich explains that “it seemed disappointing that tape music, or musique concrète as it was called, usually presented sounds that could not be recognized, when what seemed interesting to me was that a tape recorder recorded real sounds like speech, as a motion picture camera records real images.” Reich, a trained percussionist, is well known for working with tapes to adjust, repeat, or overlay found sound, allowing musical patterns to emerge.

These tape loop pieces, which functioned similarly to musical canons, stretched language and allowed the passing of time to be heard in new and different ways. Reich explains in Writings that “canons are produced by gradually changing musical distances” and his work went on to explore canons and their relationship to language in many ways. Early unison canons had both live or prerecorded voices sounding together, while substitution canons began to extend phrases by substituting notes for rests. “Proverb” is an augmentation canon, taking a single phrase found in Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value — “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” — and elongating it through augmentation to over 14 minutes.

The last part of Davis’s story opens not with the problem but with a suggested answer, and it charts a different course from part one. Here time is not fleeting but slow, and in a single sentence we are astonished by how an hour, which now seems a little short, can be stretched to include so many three-minute periods “lasting so long.” As you finish reading the story, maybe three minutes or so after you started, you might be left wondering if it’s really a story at all, or if a sculpture wouldn’t be a better word for it, and, turning this over in your mind, you might feel tempted, as I have, to circle back and scrutinize it a second time.

Above: Part one of “20 Sculptures in One Hour” from Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, 2007.

Above: Georges Demeny speaks the phrase “Je vous aime” from Photography of Speech, 1891. Reproduced in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich A. Kittler, 1986 (German edition).

Above: “hologrammer” by Alan Riddell from Typewriter Poems, edited by Peter Finch and published by Something Else Press, 1972.

Above: Measures 495-501 of “Proverb” by Steve Reich, 1987. Reproduced in Reich’s Writings on Music, 2002.

Above: Part two of “20 Sculptures in One Hour” from Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, 2007.

SPRAYPAINT, painted

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:08:00 -0500

Above: SPRAYPAINT as painted by Hektor installed at the Utrecht Manifest Biennal for Social Design, 2011.

It’s so fun when wishes come true. Thanks to Jürg Lehni and Hektor for making this one happen.

New essay for Graphic Design: Now in Production

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:31:00 -0500

Above: Cover of Graphic Design: Now in Production

Project Projects was in attendance a few weekends ago at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for the opening of Graphic Design: Now in Production, Andrew Blauvelt and Ellen Lupton’s rich and engaging survey of graphic design since 2000. But the show is much more than just a survey, as they write in the catalog description:

Graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed skill. The rise of user-generated content, new methods of publishing and systems of distribution, and the wide dissemination of creative software have opened up new opportunities for design. More designers are becoming producers—authors, publishers, instigators and entrepreneurs—actively employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences.

Project Projects has several pieces in the show, including our identity for SALT Istanbul, our book series for Art in General’s New Commissions Program, our imprint and book series Inventory Books (edited by Adam Michaels), and more.

Above: Project Projects’ identity for SALT Istanbul installed at the Walker Art Center’s Graphic Design: Now in Production show.

In addition, Project Projects will be designing the exhibition when it arrives in New York next summer at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Since the Cooper-Hewitt will be closed for renovations at that time, the show will be presented on Governor’s Island at Building 110, formerly a historic Army warehouse on the island’s northern shore.

Finally, I was pleased to contribute an original essay to the show’s catalog, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I’ll archive my full essay here sometime later next year, but if you’re keen to read it before then I hope you’ll go out and grab a copy of the book. Quoting again from Andrew and Ellen’s catalog description:

[The book was] conceived as a visual compendium in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalogue. It features posters, info graphics, fonts, books, magazines, film titles, logos and more, interspersed with a variety of small texts delving into specific project details, excerpted artists’ statements, interviews and published manifestos, technical details, and new and old technologies and tools.

For the curious, my essay is called “School Days” and is a close reading of The Program Era, UCLA English Professor Mark McGurl’s Capote Award-winning study of the rise of MFA Creative Writing programs in the postwar period. What’s so useful about McGurl’s study is that he sets aside the typical value judgments that accompany the discussion of these programs and instead examines how, as more writers go to school, the culture, setting, and experience of the classroom increasingly finds its way into the creative work of the period. He also looks at the social and cultural conditions that fueled the growth of the MFA Creative Writing degree and the reflexivity it fosters in the life of a writer. I was interested in adapting McGurl’s ideas to look at the last 15 years of MFA Graphic Design programs to understand their impact, along with offering some general context around their history and founding.

Above, top: Writer Paul Engle teaching a class at the Iowa Writers Workshop, ca. 1950s. Above, bottom: Albers assesses work from his Preliminary Course at the Bauhaus, 1928-1929.

Here’s a bit more on my approach from the essay itself:

What McGurl’s book offers to a designer reading it closely is not a set of examples to follow in explaining design education but rather a methodology to adapt for investigating it. What if we play the old “designer as author” metaphor in reverse, describing authorship not as an input or mode of creation, but as an output or model of practice: the designer as cultural influencer, identifiable persona, and creator of a distinctly voiced body of work. This, perhaps, is how an author’s training and a designer’s training are linked. […] Once dedicated to mastering basic skills of the craft, the school has become, in design’s Program Era, tied instead to the production of a professional, the creation of a designer as a whole self, an individual with a self-actualized practice in which student work, not client work, often forms the basis for an introduction and ongoing access to the design sphere.

And here’s a bit of the parallelism I’m describing in application:

“For the modernist artist,” McGurl writes, “the reflexive production of the ‘modernist artist’—i.e., the job description itself, is a large part of the job.” These reflexive professional efforts, he suggests, are not all that “radical” or even “deconstructive” but instead “perfectly routine,” part of a system of self-reference that extends past the making of literature and to the making and organizing of all things. McGurl describes this self-constitution of systems using a concept drawn from systems theory called “autopoesis.” Designers know these efforts, under slightly different circumstances, as so-called “self-initiated work,” which comprises a good portion of what’s done as an MFA student. And just as McGurl prepares a list of “signature genres of the Program Era”—which includes the campus novel, the portrait of the artist, the workshop story collection, the ethnic family saga, meta-genre fiction, and meta-slave narratives—we might attempt a designer’s list along the same lines, including the thesis book, the process poster, the experimental typeface, the urban map, the data visualization exercise, the group portrait photograph, the image archive, the slide talk, the meta-exhibition, and the project-as-class performance.

I’ll have to leave it there for now, but there’s much more great writing in the catalog from Åbäke, Peter Bil’ak, James Goggin, Peter Hall, Steven Heller, Jeremy Leslie, Michael Rock, Dmitri Siegel, Daniel van der Velden, and Lorraine Wild, just to name a few. To say that it would be a welcome addition to any designer’s bookshelf would be an understatement. Go out and get it.

Identity and the arts: A talk at Artists Space

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:06:00 -0400

Later this month, Dexter Sinister will present “Identity,” an exhibition that, in the words of its description, “charts the emergence and proliferation of graphic identity since the turn of the twentieth century, with particular reference to contemporary art institutions — museums, galleries, and so called alternative spaces.”

Initiated by Artists Space, the project has been run by Dexter Sinister in cooperation with a variety of colleagues for over two years. In the fall of 2009, I was asked by Dexter Sinister and Stefan Kalmár of Artists Space to give a talk to an invited group of 20 or so guests. Part of a series of informally titled “How do we look?”, this initial lecture carried an aim that was deeply reflexive, examining the history of the organization’s own visual identity in the context of both arts-related identities and the somewhat woolier world of branding and visual culture. To facilitate the talk, I was given special access to Artists Space’s archive of printed ephemera — my thanks to Amy Owen and Jessica Wilcox at Artists Space for their help and guidance.

The tone was informal, with people asking me to expand upon one point or another, as we sipped some whiskey with conversation. Rather than adhere to a strict chronology of Artists Space’s identity development, I chose to group its marks around a loose taxonomy that included IMPRINTS, SYMBOLS, MONOGRAMS, LANDMARKS, and LOCKUPS so that perhaps a new story could emerge.

The talk was, for me, foundational to many projects and assignments that followed and informed both the structure of my SVA course and our recent identity work for SALT Istanbul at Project Projects.

The writing below is loose and rough, assembled from my notes and fuzzy memory of the evening — but, truth be told, it’s a story better told through visuals, anyway. Even if the below serves as nothing more than a prompt to visit David and Stuart’s smart and inventive show, then I’m glad to have shared it here. — RG

I thought I’d start out tonight with one of Artists Space’s most important early shows, the Pictures exhibition from 1977. And if you look at the booklet of the show here, you’ll see that at the bottom the name Artists Space has been typeset to match the look of the overall booklet. No standalone mark, nothing too systematic — in the early days things changed a lot from one exhibition to another. Reading this, the analogy seems to be that the gallery thought of itself as a kind of publisher. It’s presenting these things, but it’s not imposing its own external identity on anything. It’s initiating creative projects and then allowing its own identity to be mutable, to change with those projects.

And so with that idea in mind the first group of marks I’d like to look at is IMPRINTS. Imprimatur means “to sanction” or “to give formal and explicit approval,” and this is what I was describing before. Rather than a visual identity the emphasis is on the provenance: on where an exhibition came from and who initiated it.

Publishers have long relied on this mutability. Most famously and illustratively, Knopf has a whole broad set of Borzoi dogs that change to compliment a book’s cover design, tone, and setting. There is no single Borzoi. Instead, there are many simultaneous possibilities. It’s almost Platonic: it’s not a specific book with a specific dog but the idea of a book with a dog on it that assigns the book as a Knopf book. It’s more descriptive, really, than symbolic.

This website for White Columns, designed by Project Projects, works in much the same way. When you reload a page the style sheets refresh, and the site goes from serif to sans and back again. So it’s like the Borzoi dog, in that it opens up the possibility that White Columns can take on a variety of formal details but still remain, essentially, itself. The formal “idea” of the site doesn’t change, just its visual expression.

The more you rummage around the archives, the more you see a range of materials in which the Artists Space identity acts in this way. Here is a a flyer for some film programming from the mid-’80s, looking very theatrical indeed. And this strategy wasn’t continuous, either — between the Pictures show and the design of this flyer different, more formalized marks emerged and were then discarded.

Sometimes there was even variance within a given piece. Here’s a great example from 1988 for a show called Telling Tales. There’s literally one “super” logo, which is set in one typeface, and then there’s a smaller “logo-sized” logo in another typeface.

By the late ’80s the impact of design’s postmodern tastes were readily apparent, and the hybridity of a given graphic system set to the max. Even within the artists’ own first and last names there is variance and expressivity. This piece is from 1989.

At other points around this time, zine culture and DIY publishing became more apparent, as in the booklet design for this Robert Gero show from 1990. Here Artists Space acts as the publisher once again, with the form of its name subordinate to the larger aesthetic system of the booklet.

Here, too, in this small photocopied pamphlet from the ’90s, this vibe is apparent. What’s important to understand here is that imprints don’t need to be large or institutional in tone — they can be homemade, grassroots, inventive, and unmonolithic. Quite casual, really.

And in this casualness I’m reminded of Ed Fella’s wonderful posters for the Detroit Focus Gallery, made over a number of years with great inventiveness. Each poster treats the logo differently, and yet the set is coherent and identifiable, offering a kind of aesthetic consistency that supports the range of activities housed at the gallery. Willi Kunz’s ongoing posters for Columbia’s GSAPP program are another example of this kind of identification strategy. Rather than impose a system that can be executed by anyone, they create a highly particular set of responses that can be recognized without being formulaic.

Imprints can be achieved through the use of an institutional typeface. One of my favorite examples is Walker, designed by Matthew Carter for the Walker Art Center in 1995. By allowing serifs to be “snapped on” in a variety of positions and styles, Carter created a single typeface with a variable identity. He presented the initial idea to the Walker through a series of faxes, shown here.

In the hands of P. Scott Makela and Laurie Haycock Makela, the typeface soon became expressive, yielding promotional materials like this one. Much like Fella’s work for the Detroit Focus Gallery, this distinctive touch defined the Walker’s print materials for several years.

A few years later, the Walker introduced a new identity with a similar spirit. Once again the solution was a typeface with variable formats, only this time instead of letters it includes words and patterns that can be assembled on a tape-like strip. It is the work of Eric Olson’s Process Type Foundry.

This new identity reminds me of OMA’s work for the Seattle Public Library, which takes its form from the building’s program and allocation of space. I’ve heard the gesture of the glass skin referred to as “throwing a net over the brief,” which is a metaphor I quite like in this context. The Walker’s ever-present ticker-tape keywords play out in much the same way.

In its simplest sense, a SYMBOL is something that stands for or alludes to something else. It is “this” but also “that.” It’s a doubling device and a shortcut in one.

One of the most iconic symbols for Artists Space was this one from 1983–4. It appeared on the cover of a booklet and soon became adapted to a variety of uses. It works in a symbolic way…

…doubling the anarchist symbol, the circled A, meaning “Anarchy is order,” a double letter. This symbol dates back to 1868 when it was used by the Federal Council of Spain of the International Workers Association, an organization set up by Italian anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli in 1868.

The emphatic triangularity of the A also reminds me of the triangulation involved in perspective and sight…

…which is perhaps why the all-seeing eye, the Eye of Providence, is also inscribed in a triangle. The symbol has been in continuous use since antiquity and has been used by Egyptians and Masons alike. Perhaps because of the Masonic connection, it has also come to be known as the Great Seal of the United States and makes a well-known appearance on the back of the $1 bill.

The circling of the A also reminds me, in some ways, of the circled C in the copyright mark. The circle here forms a kind of barrier, a protection.

The circle alone makes an appearance in Josef Albers’ identity for a private club in New Haven from 1959–60, shown here in an elevation subtly inscribed in the masonry of the building itself, designed by architect King-lui Wu. Albers also notably used a black circle in his seal for Black Mountain College several years earlier.

The A can also double itself, serving as both logo and headline copy, as in this flyer from the early ’80s.

The A is also reminiscent of an engineering form — triangles are known to be the strongest shapes, used in bridges and buildings. In this way it is reminiscent of an easel or prop.

Experimental Jetset used the A this way (though in an isosceles rather than equilateral configuration) in their engaging identity for 104 (La Cent Quatre), a French cultural institute.

Similar to the flyer we saw earlier, the A here can serve as both logo and headline. It is a letter, a symbol, and a prop for 104’s cultural platform.

It’s also well-known that the certain aspects of the triangle’s history as a symbol are more difficult. In the Nazi concentration camps of WWII, people were marked with color-coded badges like the pink triangle, which represented homosexuals. The group ACT UP later appropriated the symbol, transforming it from a emblem of hate to an icon of protest. Turned right-side up, it sits on a more stable base and points more optimistically skyward.

By 1984-86, the A had morphed into the mark seen above…

…a kind of squaring of the circle, and, in the way that it breaks out of its geometric frame, a bit reminiscent of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

In this card produced around the same time, the A has moved to the center, a focal point or hub around which the other elements circulate. The name of each artist in this show is set in a different typeface, mixing individuality with system.

In a later card, the A moves from the center but becomes even larger and more systematized.

Artists Space’s new identity, designed by Manuel Raeder, collapses many of these themes into a single open mark that is a triangle, a protest mark, a support structure, and a monogram all at once

Speaking of MONOGRAMS — monograms are when one letter stands for the whole.

Obviously, as we’ve seen, it’s here…

…but it’s also here in this earlier monogram from late ’70s.

These days we see monograms too. Here is one for the newly-opened X Initiative project.

And a few years ago Spin in London made one for Haunch of Venison gallery.

Here as before, this monogram gets inserted into words as a letter itself. It’s on the verge of being a custom typeface, which underscores how blurry the boundaries are between all these approaches. Art institutions mix and match these approaches all the time.

The monogram and typeface for the Museum Boijmans von Beuningen, designed by Mevis and Van Deursen, is a good example of this. Carrying inline and outline styles, the two letters come together to form a double monogram, a B within a B. Formally, it gives the B’s a sense of energy, they seem to radiate.

It’s a similar feeling, though in a different cultural context, to Lance Wyman’s work for the Mexico ’68 Olympics. Wyman’s identity was derived from a mix of the Olympic rings, Op Art, and Huichol patterns. By recycling or reinserting these forms back into culture, Mevis and Van Deursen’s double-B becomes symbolic and suggestive in other ways, too.

Inside the museum itself, the prop returns, here shown leaning against walls within the gallery space to form a loose set of triangles. In this identity, museum and signage don’t so much cohere as collide or collapse into a kind of mutual coexistence. Rather than using fonts on brochures in a hybrid way, here the museum transforms itself into a heterotopia, a forest of signs, a system that tends toward individualization.

Mass customization surrounds the monogram form in 2x4’s identity system for the Brooklyn Museum. Here, the museum can generate a wide array of logos using a highly structured kit of parts. As diverse as these forms are, however, the result feels very systematic — from any given input comes a nearly identical output.

In this way, it reminds me a bit of NikeID, Nike’s recent foray into the world of custom footwear. It too, is a mass customization project, allowing the buyer to change colors at nearly every level but retaining its “Nikeness” nonetheless. It’s impossible to break the system, to inject something into it that feels out of place. This is what makes it a durable consumer process, but it is also what makes it feel like the product of an assembly line, something that is mass produced despite its claims of individualization.

In my research of mass customization processes, I dug up this chart detailing the various modes of mass customization, and I have found myself referring to it many times since. It’s interesting how much shape and contour can define a sense of change or transformation — it almost harkens back to our earlier discussion of Platonic forms earlier. You can’t, after all, call a square a triangle, or a circle a square. Looking at the chart, cut-to-fit and sectional modularities feel differentiated while mix and bus modularities feel unified.

At least four of these modes are in play with Mevis and Van Deursen’s 2001 design for Rotterdam’s turn as the European Capital of Culture. Here component-sharing, mix, bus, and sectional modularities come together in a single system.

The Yale University School of Art website, designed by Linked by Air, is also modular, but in allowing users to become involved in constructing their own pages and insert their own content it becomes both customizable and participatory. Its many pages feel truly hybrid, active, and individual despite the overarching system.

LANDMARKS are building — they are marks on geographic space.

Here’s a photo, used as the cover of a 1985 catalogue, which shows the now-familiar Artists Space squared A as a sign hanging in front of the gallery.

This image reminds me of the Ferus Gallery’s sign, shown in this photo from 1958, which is as much the “logo” of that institution as anything I can think of.

Logos that suggest buildings emphasize the gallery as a kind of shop or site. Here’s one from the late ’70s where the typical “white cube” has become a “black house” instead. Simplified, almost childlike, it’s hard to tell how to read it. Is it a plan or an elevation? Does it depict an artists’ space from above or from the side?

Weirdly, it reminds me of the Pizza Hut logo, which may have appeared around the same time. Pizza Hut is also a decorated shed, a branded building, and the logo takes its form from their iconic red roof, visible from a distance, while driving down roads and highways. Architecture and identity are one.

“Chains” like Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and others create an unusual set of landmarks in the landscape. While our experience of a city may differ widely from one to the next, every fast food restaurant is identical and consistent. They almost form a kind of networked place within another place, like a set of corporate embassies whose interior space is unaffiliated with the context surrounding them. They are mass customization writ on a much larger scale, component-swapping atop the simplest possible type of building.

Here’s an early flyer from Artists Space that uses the floorplan directly, initiating an invitation or offering. Artists were invited to make projects in this space and the invitation to this program provided the specifications for these proposals to be made, open-sourcing the project.

The building as diagram is a well-known form — a discussion of it will recall our discussion of OMA’s Seattle Public Library from before. Here’s an earlier example, the Centre Georges Pompidou, designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. The design evokes many things, but among them it specifies the museum as a kind of organ within the body of the city.

And while the Pompidou has a logo, really the logo for the Pompidou is the building itself. A proper logo is almost unnecessary because the building is so iconic, every photograph that includes it is, in a sense, branded. The Eiffel Tower plays a similar role, as Roland Barthes writes in his famous essay, “Wherever you are, whatever the landscape of roofs, domes, or branches separating you from it, the tower is there; incorporated into daily life until you can no longer grant it any specific attribute, determined merely to persist, like a rock or the river […] the moment I begin writing these lines about it, the Tower is there, in front of me, framed by my window.”

Here’s an equally iconic building, photograph here to show the type that’s been applied to it and derived from it.

Employing the institutional typeface in yet another away, Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s Verlag for the Guggenheim both revives the building’s Deco-era face and extrapolates it into the present day. It is an act of “historic preservation”, but with an intent to modernize. It’s not a break from the past but an extension to it, a bridge.

Here is another Guggenheim, Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim Bilbao. Its form is contextual — Gehry has likened it to a boat on the water — but also iconic, like the Pompidiou from before. It exists within the same institution as Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, but type is applied to it in a very different way…

…and somewhat awkwardly. Instead of Verlag, it uses Futura Bold; instead of a surface application, it uses a scaffold. The type here, unlike the New York building, feels more applied than rooted in the building itself.

In a more recent example, the right angles of Breuer’s Whitney Building…

…became the right angles of the institution’s new typeface and logo by Pentagram’s Abbott Miller.

Stefan Sagmeister’s identity for Portugal’s Casa de Musica identity represents the building, designed by OMA, directly — but it adds a bit of mass customization in the form of mix modularity as colors from various images can be applied to the building’s gemlike surfaces, which appear quite different depending on position and perspective.

The role of architecture in defining the identities of arts institutions is seemingly continuing to expand. Another recent example is Wolff Olins’s “stack” system for the New Museum, which uses the museum’s base and roof as a set of brackets into which varied activities and phrases, set in Fred Lambert’s bold Compacta, can be swapped and exchanged. Part of its effect comes from the stack’s similarity to the shape of SANAA’s building, but part of its effect also comes from the font’s ability to imbue an art institution with a more casual, even industrial flair befitting its location among the restaurant supply shops on New York’s lower Bowery.

Art Basel doesn’t depict a building in its identity, designed by Müller+Hess, but its typeface — Heinz Hoffman’s Block Berthold Condensed — has a similar effect.

For a period of time, Artists Space drew inspiration from within its walls rather than directly from them. The gallery has a huge archive of artists’ slides and for a time made regular catalogs with selections from this archive. To represent this program, the slide was used. The booklet on the left is from ’82, and on the right, ’83.

Playfully, the slide is used as both an emblem and an object. Its properties of compression are retained in its graphic expression, as seen on this catalogue from 1984, where it’s used in conjunction with the squared A that represented the broader institution.

The more I saw these slides in Artists Space’s archive, the more I was reminded of Art + Project Bulletin’s attempt to extend the gallery to the mailbox. In many ways these mailers were a kind of distributed gallery space rather than a representation of its built form. Here, the White Cube is transformed into a Tabloid Sheet, a portable art space. This Bulletin from 1975 is by Bas Jan Ader.

The final system I want to look at is the LOCKUP. “Lockup” is a term designers use to describe how information is laid out or arranged on a 2D surface. It’s often consistent — “locked up” — but it doesn’t have to be, and many identity systems accommodate varied lockups for more horizontal or vertical scenarios.

Beginning in the 1970s, Artists Space’s print materials had very expressive lockups, often pushing the gallery information to the absolute edges of the paper, and leaving as much “space” — the “artists space,” presumably — as possible. Here are a few other examples. In one, the type playfully engages a rather heavy grid; in the other, basic info is pushed more typically to the corner and the center of the card is cleared for the exhibition information. More examples from the mid-’70s follow.

GTF’s identity for the Max Wigram Gallery is a kind of lockup as well. Centered with a custom color and typeface, it “expands” with the gallery’s programming and “contracts” when it needs to represent the gallery alone.

Müller+Hess have used the lockup as a kind of palimpsest in their printed matter for the Kaskadenkondensator Art Space, from 1996–1998. The entire yearlong roster is printed in advance, and then overprinted as events are completed. When the sheet is full, the season is over, but the residue of past projects is left behind.

This Artists Space catalog cover from 1987 creates a lockup system as well, as everything, even the gallery name, is systematically slotted into the grid and made equivalent.

Instead of 3D becoming 2D in the case of the landmark examples I showed earlier, Bruce Mau’s 1993 identity for the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) projects 2D type into 3D spaces to suggest architectural surfaces and built forms. Like a flash of light, its forms are fleeting and ever-changing, varied from one printed piece to the next as they are taken from 2D to 3D and back again.

In the context of narrative space, lockups take on yet another meaning. In Maureen Mooren & Daniel van der Velden’s work for ROOM gallery from 1999–2003, press releases were used to “lock up” information systematically into various narrative genres. Here the press release is a kind of visual/verbal readymade, available for reuse and reappropriation by each artist using it. Here form is given not through typography but through language itself, shaping our ideas about art objects via the stories we tell and are told about them. In the second image, there is a more lyrical system of marks, dots, doodles, and squiggles applied on top of the press release, and these marks, at least to me…

…represent both the press release’s mundane office-bound origins and the artists’ touch or signature. The final identity for Artists Space I’ll show tonight is this lockup, lettered by John Baldessari and used from 1994–2001. With echoes of the artist’s signature, perhaps the original artistic mark of identity, I guess I’ll sign off there. Thanks.

Discussing entrepreneurship

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:36:00 -0400

Justin Kropp — who writes a blog called One Skinnyj — recently got in touch to ask if I’d be game for an interview and I was happy to oblige. His questions were thoughtful and wide-ranging, but one topic I enjoyed discussing in particular was entrepreneurship, so I thought I’d pull out two pieces of our conversation to share in that vein.

First, Justin asked me to weigh in on the “end of client services” conversation — described thoughtfully here, here, and here — and I tried to add a slightly more historical take on the increasing popularity of this mode of practice:

We’ve always seen designers seek opportunities and models for practice outside of commissioned work — whether it was setting up publishing programs, advocating for cultural resistance, building institutions that centralize and reinforce design’s cultural capital, or finding solace in a world of “self-initiated” projects. In many ways, each of these alternative practice models is a product of their times, and the shift to entrepreneurial endeavors you mention is no different. I think we should, as designers, keep inventing more of these as time goes on. But I think as long as design’s central narrative is one of a problem-solving, analytical discipline, then the need and opportunity for service-driven practice will persist and endure. What’s notable, if anything, is the degree to which a ’90s-era world of self-initiated work has broadened, in the ’00s, and with the help of the internet, to a world far beyond the self — it’s now a whole design culture, large enough to support the careers of certain designers without the need for them to frame their practices through service. But I’ll sound a cautionary note here: while I think it’s good to launch projects that other designers think are great, I think it’s much more essential that designers look beyond the design sphere in framing new opportunities for themselves. These are the projects — self-initiated, entrepreneurial, commissioned, bartered, speculative, or otherwise — that I look forward to most.

Second, Justin asked me to offer some advice to designers getting ready to start their own studio. Since I’ve not yet had a chance to write a “top ten” list, I tried my hand at one here:

An untended garden quickly becomes a field: plant what you want to grow.
Have partners, but don’t do the same things: make sure you both do something you enjoy.
Hire people for what they can teach you, not for what you can teach them.
Everyone should be able to take criticism: creative trust is built on critical honesty.
Design is only one part of the puzzle: savor the discussion, development, debate, and dissemination of your work just as much as the making of it.
Goals may be arbitrary, but not having them will be maddening when there’s no one else to tell you if you’re doing a good job: set 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year goals at the outset.
When you take your favorite clients out to lunch, it’s a good time to propose what you’d like to do together next.
Knowing more designers doesn’t necessarily translate into having good clients: spend your development time wisely.
Be known for something: it helps.
You will never work harder than when you’re building something: find balance. Sometimes the best way to solve a creative problem is to take a vacation or read a book.

Read the whole interview here.

Introducing Otlet's Shelf

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:01:00 -0400

Above: Lined & Unlined’s Library (top) returns, powered by a free Tumblr theme and bookmarklet called Otlet’s Shelf created by Andrew LeClair and I (bottom).

I’ve been meaning to write this housekeeping post on changes, upgrades, and new sections of the site for awhile, but I’m very excited that it’s also the announcement of a new tool called Otlet’s Shelf, a bookmarklet and Tumblr theme for Amazon.com created by Andrew LeClair and I.

Transition to Tumblr

When Lined & Unlined launched (five years ago this November), it had a section called the Library with a selection of favorite books from my bookshelves. It was immediately the most popular area of the site, prompting nice notes from friends and readers saying they also loved this book, or thanks for pointing out that book, and for this reason it was my favorite area of the site as well. It was easy to browse, easy to update, and, because of Amazon’s Affiliate program, helped to passively support my activities writing and editing the site.

Originally both L&UL and the Library ran on Wordpress, and the Library was dependent on an outdated WP plugin that made the entire WP install difficult to upgrade and inflexible in general. Eventually in 2009 the site was hacked because of this inflexibility, and it had to go offline for several weeks. Every time the intrepid Randy Hunt and I tried to remove the malicious code from the site, it would be hacked again in a few hours and we’d take it offline so that cleanup start afresh.

In the meantime, I started to re-evaluate my decision to use Wordpress. It had never been a tool I liked writing in for one thing, and it seemed way too overloaded with features for the relatively simple writing I was doing. Meanwhile, my friends Liz Danzico and Frank Chimero had both been managing their blogs using Tumblr, and not only did a I like the look of their efforts, but I also liked their focus on writing and the elegance of their understated, language-driven designs. I suggested to Randy that we try moving the site to Tumblr and he was immediately enthusiastic, installing a WP plugin called Tumblrize that allowed me to quickly move all 800 or so posts over to Tumblr in an afternoon and leave the malicious code, buggy plugins, and Wordpress software behind.

Unfortunately, it meant leaving the Library behind too, at least in the short term. For one thing, the database inside Wordpress where the Library’s books were stored was corrupted and unusable. For another, while Tumblr made it simple to post almost anything from the internet to my blog using its bookmarklet, that simplicity didn’t extend to adding books from Amazon.com. What I wanted to was a something as simple as Tumblr’s bookmarklet that would work similarly to the earlier WP plugin, grabbing the title, author, description, and cover image from a book using Amazon’s Product Advertising API and adding with my Affiliate code in a single click.

I set the project aside and worked with Chris McCaddon, a designer at Project Projects, to gently redesign the site to work even better on Tumblr, simplifying the look of posts, adding some of Tumblr’s notes and feedback (which work far better than the comments I had always avoided adding to L&UL on Wordpress), and making the tags a more prominent design element as the site focused increasingly on a number of specific topics and disciplines.

Enter Otlet’s Shelf

Still, I missed the Library. And this summer, when Andrew LeClair joined us at Project Projects from RISD’s Graduate Program, I was eager to see if we couldn’t get it back up and running. We discussed many ways to structure the project and looked at a few sites that do a great job of handling book-related content, including A Working Library and Thinking for a Living. In the end, we opted for a solution that mirrored Tumblr’s own: a bookmarklet.

Once we got the bookmarklet working we quickly adapted the look of L&UL to begin receiving books on its “infinite shelf”, but we were also eager to make the tool we’d built available to other Tumblr users out there. Since I’d relied so much on other people sharing their tools in building and maintaining the site, it seemed only right to share one of my own.

Sharing it was pretty simple. We designed a Tumblr theme pre-built to handle the incoming content from Amazon.com. The theme has a number of different configurations — users can have shelves flow in an “infinite scroll” and can make book covers link directly to Amazon.com if they wish, along with having control of styling, layout, header, etc. Then we set up a website where users can enter basic info and get the bookmarklet. The only question was what to call it.

We looked at many, many names, but, in the end, it seemed fitting to name it after a librarian, and there was one that stood out as an early favorite. A few years ago I’d linked to a talk by Alex Wright, which was part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars on Long Term Thinking. In it Wright described a Belgian librarian named Paul Otlet whose visionary work in the early 1900s anticipated the networked knowledge and hypertext.

According to Wright, Otlet felt that librarians were too fixated on the book as an object. He felt what was important was the information inside books and the connections between them. He also felt that the efforts people spent interacting and annotating their books were as important and legitimate as the energies spent writing them, and that these energies of interaction and annotation could also be used for classification and exchange. Wright suggests that Otlet believed that people’s “trails through a document would become a new kind of document.”

To manage this, he conceived of a unique “electric telescope” that would allow people to view answers to questions by telephone on 3x5 cards housed in distant buildings called “radiated libraries”. He even built one: The Mundaneaum, which thrived for a short time before being closed in 1934. Tragically, it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940, an early precursor to the internet.

Like Otlet, I think the way people use their libraries is often as meaningful and interesting as the information inside the books themselves. I hope the creation of Otlet’s Shelf makes more libraries, reading lists, and collections available for use. As another librarian, S.R. Ranganathan, writes in the Five Laws of Library Science,

Books are for use.
Every reader his or her book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
The library is a growing organism.

I’m delighted to have L&UL’s library back. Have a look, and, when you’re through, feel free to use Otlet’s Shelf to make one of your own.

Trading fours

Mon, 16 May 2011 11:58:00 -0400

My friend Frank Chimero has started a new “occasional back-and-forth blog” called The Mavenist, and I am so pleased to be part of the first post, “Permutations & Loops.” The format of The Mavenist is simple, but also a welcome departure from the standard blog format. Rather than regular posts, The Mavenist will post occasionally. (This blog was founded with a similar attitude.) And rather than a single editor’s point of view, or even an interviewer/interviewee dynamic, The Mavenist will allow two people to take part in an equal exchange—or, rather, five equal exchanges, for a total of 10 parts.

Frank has done a lovely job introducing the project on his blog through the lens of gift exchange, which readers of this blog will know is a favorite topic of mine as well. There were so many parts of his introductory post that I liked that it was hard to choose just one, but I’m a sucker for a good West Wing reference:

There’s a scene in an episode of The West Wing where President Bartlet has his personal aide Charlie go on the hunt to purchase a new carving knife for the holidays. With each knife Charlie brings to the Oval Office, Bartlet shoots down his selection, citing the details he finds important. This happens several times, and finally Charlie brings the best possible knife he can find in Washington. President Bartlet inspects the knife closely while Charlie describes the finer details of what makes this knife the finest knife available. And with that, President Bartlet refuses the knife, much to Charlie’s exasperation. But then, Bartlet produces an heirloom knife of his own, apparently made by Paul Revere and in his family for generations, and gives it to Charlie as his Christmas gift.

This is what good gifts feel like.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Michael Bierut’s reaction to Tibor Kalman’s incredible $26 book project, one of M&Co’s annual holiday gifts. Bierut writes of receiving the book,

It was transcendent: not just a gift but an experience, combining surprise, humor, pathos, and guilt in an astonishingly controlled sequence. Everyone who received it was invited to feel not just the joy of getting but the joy of giving.

What Bierut’s observation suggests is that it is not just the exchange that makes the gift meaningful—it is also the structure surrounding and framing the exchange, as well as the careful control and use of time to allow emtions to unfold. This is why we wrap gifts, and why we unwrap them. It’s why we offer them on special occasions, and hide them at the end of treasure hunts. In shaping time with tradition in this way, the process is reminiscent of a poetic form, which both structures the verse and frees the poet to improvise within it. In this way, a poet’s creativity plays both with and against the constraints of the formal tradition. When composing a poem, the poet is in dialogue with the form itself—and the process of exchanging posts with Frank for The Mavenist didn’t feel all that different from the process of composing a poem in that sense.

Or, better still, it was a bit like the old jazz technique of “trading fours,” in which two musicians build on a melody with short four-bar improvised passages, listening and responding to one another instead of taking their solos individually. You can see Dr. Charles Limb discuss the process from a medical perspective on this TED Talk, or you can see Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette go at it at around the 8:00 minute mark on this version of Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo.”

However I try to explain it, it sure was fun, and quite a gift to boot. Here’s hoping the occasion arises again soon.

A message from the Open Reading Group

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:44:00 -0500

Yesterday, I received this message from the Open Reading Group:

Fellow readers,

This spring, Dexter Sinister is busy morphing from a “just-in-time workshop and occasional bookstore” into an non-profit institution-of-sorts called The Serving Library. This involves incorporating (The Serving Library Company, Inc.), describing (A Statement of Intent) and fundraising (here):

http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/the_serving_library

The idea is to build on the haphazard, contingent clutter of activities assembled during the five-year lease of our basement space on Ludlow Street in New York (which expires just before the summer) towards a more explicit, coherent set of intentions that can be condensed into the following equation:

“The Serving Library is a cooperatively-built archive that assembles itself by publishing. It will consist of 1. an ambitious public website; 2. a small physical library space; 3. a publishing program which runs through #1 and #2.”

The longer story involves two collections of books and artifacts, an online and printed successor to Dot Dot Dot called Bulletins of The Serving Library, a speculative Foundation Course modeled on the Photoshop Toolbox, a rotating Guest Librarianship, and a 12-year Black Whisky. Further elaboration is offered in A Statement of Intent, available from our existing library:

http://www.dextersinister.org/library.html?id=262

“I don’t complain about institutions! I complain about institutions that I don’t like.” (Michelangelo Pistoletto)

Please circulate this announcement freely.

Regards, David Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer

Please give what you can — one Ben Franklin will go a long way toward supporting The Serving Library and will ensure your copy of the first issue of the library Bulletin.

Update: Funded!

A fragile glass couldn’t help but break

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:01:42 -0500

Philosophy Bites interviews philosopher Helen Beebee on The Laws of Nature and Beebee continually revisits the metaphor of a fragile glass throughout the interview as she builds this poetic line of thought:

When you say a glass is fragile, you’re saying something about how it’s going to behave in certain kinds of situations. If I say, “Oh be careful that glass is fragile,” you know that I’m telling you not to drop it on the floor, or to dry it very carefully, or whatever it is, because to be fragile is to be disposed to break in certain kinds of situations.

[…What] the defender of the Armstrongian, Necessitarian view is going to say is: look, fragility isn’t really a fundamental property. What underlies the fragility of the glass is the fact that the glass has a certain kind of microstructure. And it’s a law of nature that things that have that kind of microstructure shatter when they come into contact with hard surfaces.

But just the fact that that glass has that microstructure and the floor is hard just by itself, that doesn’t guarantee anything about how the glass is going to behave. You could imagine a world where glass with the same kind of microstructure got dropped on hard floors and nothing bad happened, the glass just kind of bounced up. The laws of nature would have to be different, but that’s perfectly conceivable.

So in the Armstrongian view, we have to now think there’s a necessary connection between what’s happening with the microstructure of the glass when it comes into contact with a very hard surface. That’s an extra fact, as it were, about the relationship between those two things.

Now, the Dispositionist Essentialist view agrees on the case of fragility because they don’t think that fragility is a fundamental property, but let’s imagine that fragility is a fundamental property. The thought is that the very fact that the glass is fragile, the fact that that’s a disposition to break in certain kinds of circumstances, once you know that the glass has that disposition, you know that the glass is going to break. A fragile glass couldn’t help but break. Try to imagine an impossible world now where you have a fragile glass that doesn’t break when you drop it on a hard surface. You can’t do it, unless you imagine it being encased in bubble wrap or something. In exactly the same circumstances, if the glass is fragile, it’s guaranteed to break so you don’t need that extra, as it were, necessary connection to tie those two things together. It’s just given by the fact that the glass has that property, that it must break.

A ton in ash

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:06:46 -0500

“A ton in ash” is a new Williams poem published by The Holster as part of the 5th installment of their “Demand & Supply” series at the 2010 NY Art Book Fair at PS1. It was funded in part by one of ASDF’s “One Hundred $1 Grants.” Get a copy for just $3.00 or grab a PDF here.

Branding & Visual Studies: Foundations and Research

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:51:00 -0500

Above, top to bottom: Quaker Oats mascot; Sealand identity proposal by Metahaven.

Almost two years ago, I was asked by SVA MPS Branding Chair Debbie Millman and Co-Founder Steven Heller to teach a course for the new program, which kicked off its inaugural year this September. Over the months leading up to the program’s launch, I had the opportunity to immerse myself in research and to seek out the opinions of fellow faculty as I prepared this class. I am grateful for their contributions, and for the smart and hardworking students that enrolled in the course. I couldn’t have asked for a better group, and their contributions deepened and amplified the themes I’ve laid out here at every turn. I found few resources online for assembling a class of this kind, yet its topics seem to infuse our contemporary discussions of design and identity. I offer the syllabus here as an evolving document and will be adding to it myself over time. I welcome suggestions for additions as well. —RG

Course description: Beginning with the history and underlying ideas of branding and identity design, this course will examine the development of classic identities as well as seminal identity designers and design studios. We will also review contemporary cases that highlight the challenges of brand and identity creation in specific sectors including fast-moving consumer goods, durable goods, services, organizations, places, and ideas. At the same time, we will examine both critical viewpoints around the practice of identity design and speculate on the future of brands and branded environments.

Above all, this course will:

Educate and train your eyes
Ask you to observe, evaluate, and critique basic claims and assumptions
Provide you with a platform for research

Guest lecturers: Guest lectures by contemporary practitioners will complement our coursework. This semester, we will welcome:

Dmitri Siegel, Executive Director of Marketing, Urban Outfitters
Matt Wishnow, SVP D2C, Warner Music Group; Founder, Insound
Randy J. Hunt, Design Director, Etsy
Albert Lee, Portfolio Lead, IDEO New York

Class blog: Our class blog is a place to continue discussion, debate, and sharing outside of our weekly class meeting. You will be required to submit three kinds of short posts to the blog:

Image posts: Select an image drawn either from our current coursework or from your own ongoing research. Write a short description about this image, what it is, how you see it, why you find it interesting, etc.
Material posts: Select a reading, link, or video related to our focus in class that week along and write a short note about its connection with our coursework.
Discussion posts: Generate five questions or comments for discussion in next week’s class related to that week’s reading material.

Please tag your posts with your name to get credit and plan to monitor the blog closely to keep current with your classmates’ posts.

Instructional format: This course will employ a variety of formats including group presentations, individual presentations, discussions, lectures, and working sessions. When appropriate, video or other supplemental materials will be used. Students are strongly encouraged to take part in class discussions and in their own working groups. Working groups will be assigned early in the semester and will remain together for all group projects.

Projects and evaluation: Students are required to attend every scheduled class meeting, complete all required readings, participate actively in class discussions, and collaborate effectively in an assigned working group. Individual work, group work, and in-class participation will be evaluated using a four-point rubric (Beginning = 1, Developing = 2, Accomplished = 3, Exemplary = 4). Course grades are pass/fail but rubric evaluations will be available upon student request at the midterm and final class. At the end of the semester, group project slides and notes should be collected as a set of PDFs and handed in. Individual projects should be emailed as PDFs as well. All tagged blog posts will also be considered in the final evaluation.

Classes

Class 1: Myths and meanings
Class 2: Taxonomies
Class 3: Clarity and confusion
Classes 4 & 5: Practitioner groups
Classes 6 & 7: Market sectors
Class 8: Futures

Class 1: Myths and meanings

Summary: I started the class by looking at a wide spectrum of definitions of branding, and sorted them into four categories. Simple definitions took the form of “Branding is [blank],” reflective definitions suggested the brand was a kind of mirror for the internal dynamics of either a company or its consumer base, metaphorical definitions took this took this idea of the “brand as [blank]” and pushed them even further, and, finally, there are negative definitions, which often suggest that banding is not what you think it is. Like all definitions, each claim says as much about the claimant’s position as it does about the practice of branding itself.

We then looked at branding through more historical lens, suggesting that what has come to be known as branding can also be seen as the merging and mixing of four earlier professions: marketing, advertising, public relations, and graphic design. What triggered these disciplines to start to merge? One answer might come from looking at a shift in business itself: businesses, particularly fast-moving consumer goods like packaged food, realized it was ultimately more valuable to own the means of representing a product than it was to own the means of producing a product. Thus a company’s assets moved from tangible assets, or physical capital, to intangible assets, or intellectual captial.

Throughout the semester, we returned to this remark by John Stuart, Chairman of Quaker Oats (1900), which I introduced in this first class:

If this company were to split up, I would give you the property, plant and equipment, and I would take the brands and the trademarks — and I would fare better than you.

Stuart realized as early as the turn of the 20th century that the image of his smiling Quaker was worth more than any of his mills.

We went on to view branding not just through the merging of various professions but also through the lens of various academic disciplines like semiotics, economics, psychology, and anthropology. And finally, we saw the products of branding and identity design — symbols, logos, colors, etc. — as not a single but a varied set of signs, including marks of ownership (cattle brands), marks of affiliation (club insignias), marks of nationality (flags), marks of autheticity or maker’s marks (ceramic stamps), marks of reputation or rank (four-star general), and marks of aspiration (luxury brands), which typically have evolved out of one of the preceding mark categories.

I then posed several questions about the future of identity design:

How can an identity function not as a solution but as a framework? How can it function less like a building and more like a masterplan?
How can an identity remain simple and flexible enough to generate new implementations?
How do time and collaboration yield successive variations? How can these differences be productive?

The first question prompted a connection to Stuart Brand’s famous concept of a building’s “shearing layers” that suggest a single building is changing at various speeds all at once.

Above, top to bottom: Graphic from How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand. The sixth installment of Brand’s BBC series of the same name.

The second question prompted a look back to an earlier talk I’d given at Artists Space on the evolution of its A monogram from the institution’s founding in ’70s to its current iteration today by designer Manuel Raeder.

Above, from top: An early Artists Space monogram; marks from the early- to mid-’80s; a mailer from 1984; the Artists Space website in 2010.

The third question prompted a reference to art historian George Kubler, who, rather than looking at art objects on an individual basis, tried to position each object within a lineage of objects that are formally related to it, influenced by it, and influences on it. Kubler’s method blurs the boundaries between objects and treats them more like ideas captured at a certain moment, the way a page on Wikipedia is both static and evolving at the same time. This all-at-once-ness is present in the wonderful example of Knopf’s Borzoi dog, who takes many forms, each of which was made at a certain point for a certain reason by a variety of designers, all of which signal that the book is a Knopf book, and whose selection is somewhat conditional on the type of book Knopf is publishing in that case. Thus a Knopf book may be described as “a book with a dog on it,” and this description alone, though loose, is sufficient to mark it as a Knopf book.

Above, from top: The cover of Kubler’s The Shape of Time; the Wikipedia page for “Collaboration” and the history of its modification; a selection of Knopf Borzoi marks.

In-class project: Pick five brands that you identify with; discuss your thinking with the class. (30 mins)

Individual project: Using one of the five brands you identified in class, write a letter to Roland Barthes; come to class next week prepared to read and discuss your letter. (5-10 mins)

Rubric: Understanding of Barthes, engagement with chosen brand, quality of writing

Reading

Roland Barthes: “The Eiffel Tower” from The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
Roland Barthes: “Toys,” “Plastic,” “Soap-powders and detergents” from Mythologies
Douglas B. Holt: Chapters 3 & 8 from How Brands Become Icons

Class 2: Taxonomies

Summary: In this session I introduced the idea of taxonomies as a tool for visually organizing many of the marks we see. Taxonomies involve two simple activities that come naturally to designers: classing and ordering. Heterogeneous things are classed into common sets and those common sets are ordered into a hierarchical scheme. The Animal Kingdom, which moves from kingdom to species, is a good example. As you move up the chain, you get increasingly specific.

Above: Taxonometric classes (top) ordered into a hierarchical table (bottom) from Per Mollerup’s book Marks of Excellence.

We looked at a few different ways of creating taxonomies within identity design, from playful (Tibor Kalman’s “A New Identity” for Print Magazine), to basic (Elinor Selame’s 1975 chart of symbol types) to complex (Per Mollerup’s classification system). As we did, we discussed some of the assumptions these charts made, and what kinds of other systems might be open to exploration.

Above, from top to bottom: Tibor Kalman’s “A New Identity” flowchart taxonomy for Print Magazine, reproduced in Perverse Optimist. Elinor Selame’s chart of symbol types from her book Developing a Corporate Identity

Finally, we discussed some different ways companies organize their own brands. With the help of some taxonomies prepared by Australia’s Blueprint Advisory, we organized these strategies into “uniform” brand strategies (like BMW’s), “endorsed” brand strategies (like Apple’s iPod), “variable” brand strategies (like P&G’s Gilette, Clarol, Cascade, and more), and “hybrid” stratgies that combine elements of each. While uniform strategies work well for durable goods like cars and services like air travel, “variable” strategies work well for fast-moving consumer goods to aid in consumer recall and differentiation.

Above, from top to bottom: “Uniform,” “Endorsed,” and “Variable” brand strategy charts by Blueprint Advisory.

Individual project: A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification scheme useful in simplifying or abstracting a large set of varied data. For next week, your task is to collect 50+ varied logos and propose a taxonomy to organize them. While the logos in your collection will necessarily inform the taxonomy you construct, do not be overly literal in your conclusions. Logos that are all one form, logos from a single industry, etc are simply catagorical; they are not taxonometric. Also, while ambitious or even fantastical taxonomies are welcome, be sure to come to class ready to support your claims with solid arguments. (10 mins)

Rubric: Good collection, well-organized taxonomy, assertions supported with well-crafted arguments

Reading

Per Mollerup: Chapter 1 from Marks of Excellence
Karl Gerstner: “Logos and labels” from Visual Language
Paul Rand: “Logos, flags, and escutcheons” from Design, Form, and Chaos
Bruce Mau: “Audition” from Life Style
Hans Weckerle: “Typographer as analyst” from Design

Class 3: Clarity and confusion

Group project: Using brands from Kevin Clancy and Jack Trout’s Harvard Business Review article on “Brand Confusion” as a starting-point, select a pair of brands often confused for one another and research their histories, their present-day visual identities, and their market positioning. From this research, propose at least five actionable steps one or both brands could take to help mitigate consumer confusion and, potentially, increase market overall share. (20 mins)

Rubric: Quality of research into brand histories, strength of arguments, overall presentation and group effort

Reading

Barry Schwartz: TED Talk [Video]
Malcolm Gladwell: “The Ketchup Conundrum” from The New Yorker
Nicholas Lemann: “The Word Lab” from The New Yorker

Classes 4 & 5: Practitioner groups

Group project: Prepare a profile and portfolio selection for a significant practitioner of visual branding and identity design. This could be anyone: individuals (Paul Rand, Saul Bass), design firms (Pentagram, IDEO, Chermayeff & Geissmar, M&Co), industry giants (Landor, Wolff Olins, Siegel & Gale, Interbrand, Futurebrand, Lippencott), boutiques (Lloyd, Baron & Baron, A+R, Saffron), advertising agencies (Wieden+Kennedy, Saatchi & Saatchi), even in-house departments (Target, CBS). Along with preparing a representative selection of these firms’ work, you should be ready to offer your analysis each group’s impact and overall philosophy. (20 mins)

Rubric: Breadth of survey, quality of visual and factual research, depth of insight, conclusions, and take-aways, overall presentation and group effort

Reading

Wally Olins: Chapters 1–4 from The Corporate Personality
Phillip Meggs: Chapter 22 from Meggs’s History of Graphic Design
Thomas Frank: Chapter 1 from The Conquest of Cool
Metahaven: Intro Riff & Chapter 1 from Uncorporate Identity

Classes 6 & 7: Market sectors

Group project: Fast-moving consumer goods, durable goods, services, organizations, places, and ideas together comprise the six broad sectors of branding. Within each of these sectors there are several subsectors as well; organizations, for example, include not just corporations but also governments, NGOs, universities, churches, and museums to name a few. Consider each of these subsectors in your analysis, survey representative brands in each subsector, and then gather and analyze these brands’ visual assets and communication strategies in order to draw conclusions about the particular challenges faced by both the subsector, and, more broadly, the sector as a whole. (20 mins)

Rubric: Breadth of survey, quality of visual and factual research, depth of insight, conclusions, and take-aways, overall presentation and group effort

Reading

Judith Williamson: “Magic” from Decoding Advertisements
Raymond Williams: “Advertising: The Magic System” from Culture and Materialism
John Berger: Chapter 7 from Ways of Seeing
Daniel Boorstin: Introduction & Chapter 5 from The Image
Rotterdam 2001: Introduction and presentation by Mevis & Van Deursen from Identities
Dexter Sinister: “We would like to share”

Class 8: Futures

Individual project: As thoughtfully as you can, tell us what’s next, what’s coming, what’s on the horizon. What areas of opportunity do you see opening up? How will branding change in the next five years? How about the next ten? How can brands take advantage of this? How can customers? What sort of visual forms, systems, and strategies could be around the corner? What are pitfalls, dangers, and how can we plan for them? What are some risks worth taking? Where are there new opportunities? Take care to be persuasive and support your claims with facts, statistics, supporting visuals, and memorable take-aways. Consider this a pitch. (5 mins)

Rubric: Use of course materials in preparing presentation, big ideas presented in an accessible way, focus and polish in presentation, conclusions and thoughts future action or study

Fair Trade

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:24:00 -0500

Above: A spread from The Book Trust Prospectus by IFS, Ltd.

This year, much of the talk about the New York Art Book Fair seems to be centered on the Fair itself. Fueling some of this talk, whether expressly stated or not, is a simple question: how, in the midst of one of the most historic economic recessions on record, as the media outlets decry the final hour of the book, was last year’s Fair the biggest yet? And why does it seem that this year’s Fair may be even bigger still?

Against the backdrop of the recession and the destabilization of the book there are three additional factors that have a bearing on the Fair’s ever-increasing reach: the graphic design postgraduate program that defines a thesis book as its culminating project; the design social scene that functions a bit more like a rock scene, celebrating the making and distribution of new work over the more professionalized goals of acquiring and servicing clients; and the temporary or “pop-up” store that transforms the sometimes solitary act of buying into a networked, participatory, and collective event.

At the start of The Program Era, his study of the influence of postgraduate creative writing programs on postwar American fiction, Prof. Mark McGurl asserts that “the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history.” The same may be true our postgraduate design programs today. During the recession, designers have enrolled in these programs in record numbers, turning to the academy as fewer jobs and clients are to be found. If we look to McGurl as an example, the creative results of this widespread enrollment may soon, to use his phrase, be “everywhere visible in the texts as a kind of watermark.” For graduates of these programs, early notice often takes the form of design blogs, which monitor degree shows and are read largely by other students, designers, and design enthusiasts. Returning to the rock analogy, publishing work on one of these blogs might be equated with the release of a new single by an emerging band; in fact newness is the mode, and a meaningful contribution (along with perhaps a modicum of notoriety) the ostensible objective. Names get known, the best work gets celebrated, spurs new work, and the cycle of influence turns once again.

These design networks make it possible to “know” or even “follow” the work of more designers than ever before. And once you feel you know someone, it’s natural to want to reach through the Internet to shake hands and trade goods. The Fair enables this impulse, encouraging the exchange of books, in order to frame, or even ritualize, this movement from the virtual to the real. While these transactions are often microcapitalist and cash-based — at times, the classic lemonade stand image comes to mind — this year’s Fair features two projects that are not. The Werkplaats Typografie’s project is based on bartering and invokes the circulating metaphor of a library. And IFS Ltd.’s project is based on speculation, asking friends and followers to financially support a book that is, in one sense, the story of its own fund-raising or publishing while containing the potentially new tale of where it will move and how far it will go. Both projects tweak the economic concept of “stock and flow” to creatively productive ends, taking a common inventory (books produced by either group) and diversifying it to accrue new value as the common stock changes hands and flows outward into the marketplace. In in both projects, the system of exchanges will leave participants feeling more “invested” in the books they’ve acquired and in the people from whom they’ve acquired them.

For bookstores, the Long Tail of infinite shelf space and the elimination of middlemen in the supply chain along with increased transparency in pricing has either forced book prices down (as it has at big box retailers like Target and Walmart) or evened them out (as it has at internet retailers like Amazon or specialist sites like AbeBooks or BookFinder). New modes of distributing the “book” itself, either electronically or with on-demand printing, further challenge not only booksellers but book manufacturers, wholesalers, and publishers right up the chain. For books where content is separable from physical form — the book-as-markup — one of these two methods of distribution will likely become the rule, leaving booksellers to reckon with the results.

But while there may be other ways of getting books if not from bookshops, there’s a distinct loss at a local level without them there. “The local bookstore creates all kinds of value for its community, whether it’s providing community bulletin boards, putting rocking chairs in the kids section, hosting book readings, or putting benches out in front of the store. Local writers, harried parents, couples on dates, all get value from a store’s existence as a inviting physical location, value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books,” wrote Clay Shirky last year in a post titled “Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization.” At the conclusion of the piece, he proposes “trying to save local bookstores from otherwise predictably fatal competition by turning some customers into members, patrons, or donors” — though it’s not exactly what he had in mind, for three days the visitors, booksellers, participants, and networkers at the Fair are precisely that.

So what, then, of books and their makers? In the case of the book-as-markup mentioned earlier, its fabrication was once the purview of jobbing typesetters and fine printers. Now this kind of book is available for output across a wide range of devices, formats, and screens. And while e-readers like the Kindle seek to acclimate the readers of actual books to a new reality by retaining the booklike trappings of pages, bookmarks, and serif printing types, there’s nothing keeping the same device from outputting the same text as an unending tagged scroll in sans-serif backlit type for reading in bed, or as a scatterplot of most-cited quotations by readers on a particular continent for scholarly analysis. In this iteration of the book, the only labor required to produce it is the labor required to write it and distribute it. The labor of giving it one of its many potential forms is either frontloaded to the device manufacturer or offloaded to the readers themselves as a set of user preferences or stylesheets.

In the case of another sort of book, the book-as-artifact, its creation has long been the purview of artists, professional graphic designers, and art book publishers. While they may not always be wedded to the book form in the sense of a codex — many artists’ books and multiples actually do away with this most “booklike” of book qualities — books-as-artifacts are always wedded to objecthood itself and are lushly aware of their materiality, coming slipcased or bellybanded or oversized or hand-stamped or somehow otherwise ceremonial and laudatory. The reproductions certainly far surpass anything on a screen. The whole production is handsome and tasteful, something that’s likely displayed on a coffee table or carefully catalogued by a dealer.

There are many of these sorts of books, and many of them are wonderful too, and some of them can be found and browsed at the Fair, but not many of them will be bought there: they feel a bit remote from its aims. They are a bit expensive for one thing; books at the Fair are, for the most part, affordable. For another thing, these books-as-artifacts reiterate an existing power structure, particularly when it comes to the relationship of the art and design world; the Fair, though, seeks a different kind of order. Instead of relying on books to bolster established careers, books at the Fair more often showcase new talent, particularly when it comes to the making of the book itself. And it is not enough, in the eyes of many, to simply generate the files for output; now the book must be “made” through and through, editioned in a small number, output using inexpensive or cast-off printing technology and distributed one-by-one by the makers themselves, all of whom come together in one place for one weekend in a kind of superstore of mass localization. These are books that are meant to travel and be traded, to circulate and be charted, to grace the shelves of colleagues and to define another class of book that is just the kind of book that’s found at the Fair. The book produced by IFS, Ltd. is fueled in part by the speculative efforts of a community within a marketplace that mirrors this action. It is vanity publishing born out of communal necessity, and it is, every year, my favorite time, my favorite place to see friends, to swap copies, to drop cash, to grab coffees, and to take part in that common and much-loved thing I hope will always remain as vital as it feels now, in spite of all the gloom and doom. That is, the making and sharing of books.

This piece was comissioned by IFS, Ltd. for their project The Book Trust Prospectus at the 2010 New York Art Book Fair.

Lined & Unlined

Remarks from The New School, 28 June 2012

I am a handle

Antithesis

SET 1: Communities

SET 2: Compressions

SET 3: Contexts

AY006

School Days

Unbuilding

Negation as strategy

Removal as strategy

Reversal as strategy

Incompleteness as strategy

Teacher's College

Suggested reading

The spectral mimicry of things said to the mind

Time Warp

SPRAYPAINT, painted

New essay for Graphic Design: Now in Production

Identity and the arts: A talk at Artists Space

Discussing entrepreneurship

Introducing Otlet's Shelf

Transition to Tumblr

Enter Otlet’s Shelf

Trading fours

A message from the Open Reading Group

A fragile glass couldn’t help but break

A ton in ash

Branding & Visual Studies: Foundations and Research

Class 1: Myths and meanings

Class 2: Taxonomies

Class 3: Clarity and confusion

Classes 4 & 5: Practitioner groups

Classes 6 & 7: Market sectors

Class 8: Futures

Further readings and resources

Fair Trade