Among its many radical ideas, Ivan Illich’s 1971 treatise Deschooling Society called for the disestablishment of educational institutions in favor of the development of ad-hoc peer-to-peer learning networks. Illich writes, “The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.” Full text here. More on Wikipedia.

Susan Yelavich’s Global Issues in Design & Visuality in the 21st Century: Culture class is free and open to the public and started two weeks ago on 27 January. Browse the great schedule of speakers (and the poster that caught my eye) here. If you are in NYC, the class meets Tuesday nights at 6.00pm in the New School’s Tishman Auditorium on 66 W 12th Street. The next lecture is by my colleague Lucille Tenazas about “The Designer as Cultural Nomad.” Would love to see you there.

Above: y=mx+b magazine project. Custom tote bag designed and screenprinted by Yelena Avanesova.

Above: A spread of Ryan Quigley’s well story, “The Future of Fashion,” from y=mx+b. Page through the whole magazine from Issuu below, or visit the website to order or download your own copy.

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Above: Christopher Miller created “A Gentleman’s Guide to the 21st Century,” a buying guide divided into three booklets: work, play, and love. Inside, the guides mixed a kind of email informality with a nostalgia for the classicism of centuries past.

Create a product catalog for an object from the future. This should be an object that you will desire, but it may be anything from an overpriced luxury item to an essential tool for surviving 10 to 20 years from now. Use your imagination. The market for this product will be an important consideration. Your catalog should be largely image-driven and should use minimal text. It should pursuade, convince, and seduce us.

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Above: Yelena Avanesova’s project focused on a book she decided to read for the class, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which imagines our planet after the last human has died off. Yelena’s underlined passages combined with imagery from vintage National Geographic magazines in this unique presentation of a world and text remembered. More + 10 to 20 projects below.

Above: Isaac Weeber’s book centered around sorting predictions about the future into three categories: plausible, possible, and impossible. These were color-coded and these colors showed up on the outer margins of all the content he chose to reproduce depending on his personal opinion.

Above: Yu Chung Lim’s book was a catalog of existing experimental architecture projects that she felt pointed a way toward the future of building and urbanization.

Generate a book about the future. This future should not be hundreds of years away, however: I’m interested in what you think about the immediate future, within your own lifetime, no more than 10 to 20 years from now.

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Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

These are slides from the lecture I gave to my publication design students on the first day of class. The first half of the lecture was focused on craft. I basically looked at Case da Abitare, a beautifully redesigned Italian home magazine, and then showed my students how to take it apart. (There is a great interview with the magazine’s creative director Tyler Brûlé, art director Kuchar Swara, and photo director Stephen Ledger-Lomas logged here on our class blog.) I started with a heavily-gridded page, the Index, and reveal the magazine’s basic 12-column structure. I went on to show how lines and rules are applied to the gutters and outer margins of that 12-column grid. Then I showed how the type is sitting on a p3.5 baseline grid which governs the placement of all horizontal elements on the page. Basically, the height of any element on Case da Abitare’s pages is a multiple of p3.5. Then I showed students how to guess at type sizes based on baseline reoccurrance, and finally I showed how all of these templated elements play out across a variety of grid schemes.

The second part of the presentation is a set of “Notes on Magazines.” First, I asked students to consider magazines as a publication form by contrasting them to other types of publications. (For the sake of simplicity, I definited a “publication” as any object with multiple pages made available to the public.) This included newspapers, journals, brochures, books, and blogs. Then we looked at various “toggles” within the magazine form itself. These included timing (or frequency), scope, length, number of authors, quantity of advertising, makeup of audience, and different strategies for distribution. Finally, I sketched a “garden variety” three-act magazine. This is what most lay readers learn as the magazine form proper: front of book, feature well, and back of book, with all the content-driven and stylistic assumptions that come with those sections. —RG

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The last two pages of the 1979 book Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century describe what will happen on earth over the next 120 years. Reproduced below are the authors’ predictions for the first ten of those 120 years, from 1980–1990. Source: Paleo-Future.com

1980–1990

• Satellites in Earth orbit beam educational programmes to many countries in the underdeveloped Third World.
• Wind turbines—modern windmill designs—are developed which can supply electricity economically.
• Domestic computers run household equipment. Electronic chores include keeping accounts, ordering supplies, suggesting menus, cooking meals and keeping a diary for the people living in the house.
• Newspapers supplied to homes either via a computer print-out or in electronic form over the TV screen.
• First domestic robots used as household “slaves” to do simple tasks.
• Terrorists steal nuclear warhead from military base. Threaten to blow up a city unless their demands are met. General realization of the appalling risks of poor security promote measures to keep atomic weapons under proper “lock and key.”
• Nuclear fuel detector-satellite placed in orbit to maintain a watchful electronic eye on the world’s supplies of atomic material.
• Good insulation and other energy-saving features built into all new houses.
• Solar panels in general use to heat water in homes. Solar-electric cells used to generate electricity for some uses, such as recharging batteries.
• World tree planting programme begun. Aim is to restore the oxygen-producing capacity of the world’s plant life. Centuries of being chopped down have reduced the world’s forest areas to a fraction of their former size. Other benefits include the production of wood-alcohol to use as a substitute for petrol in cars.

I hope I’m remembering this right, but I think it was one of my favorite teachers, Paul Elliman, who once remarked that some classes start with a program and others start with a provocation. He was often fond of the latter approach, and in the case of teaching this class, so was I. The goal of the class was to introduce students to different kinds of publications, but I chose to focus on artists’ books, catalogs, and magazines. Simply designing these forms in a vacuum, however, wouldn’t do: what makes any publication great is its context and, more importantly, its content.

The future seemed like an ideal subject. First, everyone has an opinion about it. Second, it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s impossible to be wrong. Third, especially for a group of Juniors and Seniors about to begin their professional lives, it seems like something worth stopping at least for a little while to think about.

Students began the class by researching and then trying to convey some aspect of the next 10 to 20 years in the form of a loose artists’ book or zine. Parsons students have a rich background and interest in fashion and upcoming trends, so the subject of the future fit naturally into that way of looking at the world. Some students’ visions were aesthetic, some were practical, some philosophical, some even spiritual. All were lively and resulted in illuminating and spirted conversation.

This conversation continued as we passed content around and began reforming it into other publication types, first as a sales brochure and then as a full-length magazine. Throughout, we had discussions about not only the future, but about the nature of collaboration and about the many publications and periodicals that inspired us to think about what’s coming next. —RG

PROJECTS

• Language of Forms
• + 10 to 20
• Object of Desire catalog
• Tomorrow Today

CLASS BLOG

http://4030class.wordpress.com/

Above: As one of his magazine posts, Scott Kellum shared the Andrew Heiskell newsletter. Scott writes, “I receive this newsletter about four times a year. Unlike what you might expect, the content of this newsletter doesn’t come on paper but comes on a cassette for blind people. Accessibility is always something that interests me. […] When inserted into my government issue 4-track tape player a brief introduction about the library is red aloud. Later books and other recordings are listed around a specific topic. The beginning of this tape is focused on topics of personal finance. Then a overview of library events, and other events in the area is given. Then new and popular books are listed.”

Once a week, share a publication you like with the class. It could be something you see in a bookstore, something from your bookshelves at home, or something you’ve read about. Write a paragraph describing why you like this publication and post at least three images of it for the class to see. Remember, a publication is anything with multiple pages (books, catalogs, brochures, reports, magazines, etc.) These posts will count toward your final class grade. You will need 12 posts in all for full credit. When you send me your preferred email address, I will send you a login for the blog to use throughout the semester. I will also use the blog to post images related to our class critiques and brainstorming for our in-class projects. You should feel free to do the same.

Note on posting images: The storage on our free class blog is quite limited. If possible, please post all images from your own Flickr account (or something similar) using Flickr’s embed codes (instructions).

A note on CLASS FORMATS

A “class crit,” where the whole class is involved in the critique, is useful because the critique not only refines the work being discussed but also becomes a teaching tool for the students listening in. As a result, everyone benefits from the ideas being shared. But repeating this format each week can also grow tiresome and counterproductive.

Whenever possible, I have tried to use a variety of class formats to keep us all engaged and learning in the right ways at the right times. “Desk crits” are adapted from architecture classes: the instructor wanders from desk to desk and students share what they’ve been working on. on these days, please use your time wisely and bring things to work on during class. “Small group crits” are better for critiquing projects in the “first draft” stage and for students who find the full-class critique format overwhelming and are more comfortable with speaking in smaller groups. “Presentations” as students to prepare short slide talks on a given subject to share with their fellow students. Students are expected to be timely and prepared. Finally, “guest crits” will introduce some valuable new perspectives into our full class critiques. When guests visit class, your attendance and attention is essential and expected.

SCHEDULE

• Class 1. Introduction to the class; grids (Casa Da Abitare); parts of a publication (NYT Magazine); intro “Language of forms”; intro “+ 10 to 20 p1”
• Class 2. Language of forms p1 (desk crits)
• Class 3. Language of forms p2 (presentations); intro “+ 10 to 20”
• Class 4. + 10 to 20 p1 (desk crits)
• Class 5. + 10 to 20 p2 (class crit)
• Class 6. + 10 to 20 p3 (guest/class crit); intro “Object of desire catalog”
• Class 7. Object of desire catalog p1 (small group crits)
• Class 8. Object of desire catalog p2 (class crit); intro “Tomorrow today”
• Class 9. Tomorrow today p1 (desk crits, presentations)
• Class 10. Tomorrow today p2 (small group crits)
• Class 11. Tomorrow today p3 (guest/class crit)
• Class 12. Tomorrow today p4 (class crit)
• Class 13. BREAK
• Class 14. Tomorrow today p5 (guest/class crit)
• Class 15. Tomorrow today p6 (working class)
• Class 16. LAUNCH PARTY

FINAL CLASS DELIVERABLES and GRADING

Please put all assignments in an envelope with your name on it for grading. This envelope should be well-organized and should include everything below (unless delivery by email is specified):

• Grid assignment
• List of blog permalinks (12 writeups and week 2 assignment
by email)
• + 10 to 20 book (comp to be returned and PDF by email)
• Object of desire catalog (comp to be returned and PDF by email)
• Object of desire ad (PDF by email)
• Everything you did for Tomorrow today (initial pages, 
round 1 and 2 revisions, covers, etc.)
• Classwide final magazine project (PDF and print version)

Each of the three major projects (+ 10 to 20 book, Object of desire catalog, Tomorrow today) will count for 30% of your final grade.

The grid assignment, blog posts, and class participation will count for 20%.

This adds up to a total of 110%. That’s what you should always plan to devote to your work, especially during the time you’re in school. But it also creates a cushion: if one of your projects falls a little bit short in terms of its design, you can always make up for it by being an active contributor to class on the blog and during critiques. 
Think of it as built-in extra credit.

This class was first given in fall 2008 at Parsons School of Design in New York, NY.

After I finished the first verison of Graphic Design & Critical Thinking up in December 2006, I remember thinking: “That was so intense, so fun, and I learned so much: but how am I ever going find the energy to do it again?”

Fortunately the answer came by way of my fabulous co-teacher Luke Bulman, principal of Thumb Projects in Brooklyn, NY. Luke took all the great things about the first class and not only kept them but made them better. Rather than sticking to a format where we were leading discussions during every class, Luke suggested that we let students conduct their own discussions in the form of interviews, or Q & As. These interviews would be recorded and form the basis of the journal project, a centerpiece of the class.

What’s so important about the class journal is that in most other forms of graduate education one of the imperatives is to publish, yet very often MFA Graphic Designers, who are perhaps the closest of anyone to the tools of publishing, do not take full advantage of their abilities. At RISD, we’re hoping to build up the tradition of a class journal during the first year, a classwide discussion that forms the basis for students’ thesis work in the second year. Luke’s training as an architect brought essential depth to the students from that area of theory, with which he is much more familiar than myself having trained at Rice as an architect. The result is was a richer journal in every way, and by building the more visual “Projects” into the syllabus as a compliment to the readings, we were able to spend as much of our classtime showing as telling.

Finally, as I was wrapping up the 2006 class and getting feedback from students, I asked them to pardon a particularly inelegant piece of writing because it was simply the best articulation of that idea by a graphic designer. “Why does it have to be by a graphic designer?” one student rightly asked. “This class should be about reading the most useful ideas by the best writers, whoever they are.” I couldn’t have agreed more. In the second time around, with Luke’s invaluable help, I think we finally got it right.

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In case you missed it the first time around, Typographic Research, the class blog for my Parsons course of the same name, has now been added to the library under “links.” For a crash course on a range of typographic ideas, start here.

Brian pointed me to a great project in LA called The Public School. The website is kind of a mix between a wiki, a blog, and a registrar’s office. Anyone can propose a class, people sign up for it, and if there’s enough interest, the class is offered. I loved their formula for assessing the cost of each class: “(Hourly Teachers Fee x (Classroom Hours + Preparation Hours)) + Materials + (Administration + Overhead).” If you’re living nearby, it might not be too late to sign up for Luck, taught by Xárene Eskandar, which starts on 13 August at 7pm. The course description reads as follows: “The true nature of luck and how to make your own. A self-help course for artists and others. Jean Cocteau: ‘Of course I believe in luck. How otherwise to explain the success of some people you detest?’”