Last October I was invited to give a lecture at SVA’s D-Crit program about the distribution and circulation of design objects and the role of these processes—as opposed to aesthetics or production—in giving meaning to those objects. Here’s a little more from the talk description:

When design writing is practiced by design producers, often an emphasis is placed on the way things look and how they get made. This talk will begin after that. How do designed objects enter the world? How does the way something’s distributed effect our understanding of it? When these objects are circulated, who sees them, how do those audiences respond, and how are those responses accounted for?

The talk was structured by a list of questions that themselves arose from a question: “How does a design object enter the world?”:

1. Is its audience local or global?
2. Is its audience knowledgeable or uninformed about it?
3. Is it made quickly or slowly?
4. Is it made cheaply or expensively?
5. Is it produced as needed or in anticipation of need?
6. Is it wasteful or thrifty?
7. Is profit expected from it?
8. Is value received from it?
9. Is wealth created from it?
10. Is it given or paid for?
11. Is it original or repurposed?
12. Is it rare or common?

I described question 01 as a “Geographic Gap,” question 02 as a “Knowledge Gap,” questions 03–09 as a “Production Gap,” and questions 10-12 as a “Usage Gap.” After moving through examples that built on each of these questions, the Coda was going to take the initial question—”How does a design object enter the world?”—and frame in terms of distance, the distance from the maker to the user or consumer. The corollary to the distance question is a question about time or duration—”How long does a design object last?”—and, taken together, these questions give us a sense of distance over time, or the velocity at which design is moving. The questions from the Coda, which asked how long a design object lasts, were:

1. Is it stored in an archive or library?
2. Is it ever displayed once it’s been cataloged?
3. Is it written about or analyzed?
4. Is it used to make new work?

Update

Audio

Download MP3 / Time 1:12:06

Allan Chochinov kindly asked me to give this talk again to his grad students at Pratt on 05 November 2009. My slides were almost identical to the ones posted above, so it’s possible to follow along or use the slide references below if you get lost.

Below you’ll find references for all the visual slides above along with some helpful links for further reading. Enjoy.

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Above: 1970s TDK cassette tray packaging. Cited as influential by Graphic Thought Facility’s Andy Stevens in an interview with the Design Museum, London.

This Saturday I took part in a panel discussion at the New Museum along with Marco Roth, Astra Taylor, and the panel’s organizer, Brian Sholis. We were asked to give a short lecture at the start of the discussion to outline some of our views on “generational coherence, generational self-consciousness, peer networks,” and other themes related to the museum’s Generational show. While I don’t usually script my talks, preferring instead to discuss images casually as I display them, I decided that this panel was a good opportunity to set images aside for a moment and get my thoughts together on this subject. My remarks follow below, and I hope they’ll be of interest. —RG

Most graphic design is easy to make, quick to produce, and not expected to last that long. If it lasts awhile, great, but it makes no claim to permanence. About the most permanent thing a designer can make is a book, and those often get reeditioned or go out of print. So graphic design’s relationship to duration is different than that of a painting or a building. I’m working on several projects right now that involve redesigning things that were just designed or redesigned in the last five years. Magazines come out and are thrown away, posters are put up and torn down, websites are built to change everyday. A new CEO takes over and wants to put a new stamp on something, so the logo’s changed once again.

In fact, the duration of most graphic design is closer to that of a song. I’ve heard that for awhile Stevie Wonder wrote a song every day. He’s a lot like a designer in that regard. It’s practiced creativity. And, after a few months, he selected a dozen songs or so to release as an album. That’s his portfolio, an edit of songs for the world to share.

There has been a lot of thinking done about design and art. Today, I’d like to do a bit of thinking about contemporary graphic design and music. In terms of our conversation here, music is a useful tool for talking about generations because it’s so defining for generations. I think design is defining, too. We identify ourselves with the songs we listen to but also the brands we buy, the organizations we support, the websites we contribute to, and the media we collect.

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I was thrilled when Prof David Shields of University of Texas at Austin invited me to come down to the Lone Star State to give a lecture about my work as a design writer and critic. In addition to a great studio called Viewers Like You, Shields and his students preside over the Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection, and I was lucky enough to be given a grand tour shortly before this lecture was given.

All of the faculty at UT Austin were exceedingly generous and bright; I must thank them here for their hospitality. In addition to the lecture I was lucky enough to spend a day with the undergraduate seniors in the gallery where they were about to have their show, and they were curious and passionate about design in the most infectious of ways. (They were so passionate about design that one rejected theme for their show was “Designgasm,” which became a bit of a running joke throughout the weekend.)

For anyone visiting Austin, I’ve compiled a few great restaurants and shops on this Google Map. It’s a fantastic city.

The embedded slidecast above was created with Slideshare, which does not allow for absolute precision in terms of transitions but is excellent (and free) nonetheless. I showed two videos during the presentation: this one of Milton Glaser, and this one of Stewart Brand. Enjoy.

As soon as we’ve realized this, we turn around and see a trail of fish behind us. Fish in John Baldessari’s work,

fish in Mark Dion’s work,

piling up,

and, on page 101 of Supermarket, the name of a fish that’s the name of a town that I’d heard of before.

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Returning to the introduction of Joshua Tree—VanderLans writes, “It is an archetypically American experience to drive through the desert…. Like many artists who helped define and shape the cultural image of California, Gram Parsons was not originally from there.” The question that hovers above these statements, all the time, is deceptively simple: where was he from? The search for origins—a human drive as ancient as Altamira—informs not only VanderLans’s quest to know his rock heroes, but also, as all art does, the quest to know himself. Specifically, to know himself as a designer and photographer and as an émigré to California, and it is this quest, I think, that motivates his fourth and largest book, Supermarket.

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Artist Doug Aitken tips the swimming pool on its side, throwing our equilibrium off like we’ve got water in our ears. Seen this way, the pool evokes the form of the numeral zero. Across from it, in this book, are a grid of billboards, and all of these billboards are blank. Let’s use Aitken’s structure—signs on the left, pools on the right—as we continue.

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That moment is in the early spring of 1997, when Emigre magazine published its 42nd issue. Emigre was initially launched in Sacramento, CA, by Rudy VanderLans (who was born in Holland) as a magazine to showcase the cultural contributions of émigrés like himself. But by issue 3, in late 1985, VanderLans had begun to experiment with his wife Zuzana Licko’s coarse-resolution typefaces, like this one.

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This article was originally presented as a lecture at the Type Director’s Club, New York City, as part of the “Type Salon” program on 21 April 2005.

I want to begin, tonight, with where we are, a darkened room with a screen, and with the context of where we are, a slide lecture. This kind of gathering is not without a history, a set of expectations, and the first slide I’ve brought to share with you deals with that.

This is a photograph of the staging of a play called The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein. It depicts an actor playing the woman we know as Heidi Holland, who is employed by Columbia University as an art historian. The prologue of the play finds Heidi in the midst of one of her slide lectures concerning three women artists that, while well respected in their time and by their societies, are virtually unknown today.

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