Author Archives: zvezdana

Meredith Davis — Article

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Article Title: Design’s Inherent Interdisciplinarity

Link to pdf: Davis_interdisciplinary

  • Design can increase problem solving and cognitive ability
  • High-skill jobs require “knowing how to learn,” a skill that traverses boundaries
  • Students need to communicate in verbal, visual and computational languages (1)
  • Attempts toward integration in grade schools are usually shallow and do not take “visual thinking” as a tool, but rather as a “gift” that cannot be taught. Usually, artistic “process” is equated with technique, not thought.
  • In such cases, collaboration is limited to subject matter, skill or vehicle for presentation, and excludes utilizing “visual thinking”.
  • Students who are discipline-schooled usually need to be “retrained” by their employers to consider multiple angles of the professional problem and become resourceful in an interdisciplinary kind of way.
  • The goal is to focus on cognitive skill, and not on fact-learning.

Why is design (so well suited to) interdisciplinary (study)?

  • Design problems are “situated”; they have clear contexts that can be used as springboards for research.
  • Design problems relate to the “real-world”. They’re not totally artificial.
  • Design problems are not just about the problem at hand. They are also about “ways of knowing”.
  • Design mockups are very close to the real thing, and can be easily tested.
  • Design is analytical and synthetical
  • Architect Christopher Alexander says: Design is the goodness of fit between form and context.
  • Design is systems-based; It needs to exist in a relationship of users and stakeholders. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
  • Design often requires interdisciplinary teams, and as such teaches us  about planning and collaborating and building a common vision.
  • Gives example of elementary students (Hawthorne Elementary) improving a piece of land by engaging all kinds of disciplines in a multi-year process. Interdisciplinary approach allows students to model real-world problem solving in a respectful and productive way.
  • Design experiences as tools for integration
  • Art teachers need to be educated about design more, while still in school. That way they can use it as a cross-disciplinary tool.

Build: Lego and Google collaboration

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Infinite building possibilities from Lego and Google collaboration

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/build accessed 6/26/12 by Zvez
Posted by James Cartwright, 
Back in the good old days of yore children whiled away their afternoons in idol play, lost in their imaginations with nothing but bed sheets, twigs and a muddy pit at the back of the house as props for their elaborate role-playing. Kings waged wars, empires fell and everyone had to get cleaned up before tea. Then came Lego and the shape of play changed forever, so much so that those little coloured blocks and weekend afternoons will be linked in my mind forever.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and Lego’s gone digital, offering fans the opportunity to rebuild the world (well, Australia for the time being) in its own blocky image. Build, a collaborative project between Lego Australia and Google Chrome, fuses WebGL, the very latest in in-browser graphics, and Google Maps to allow users the chance to build, share and even renovate their very own digital Lego structures on a global platform. Complete structures can then be shown off to friends and family via email or Google+.

This may not be the tactile experience we’ve come to expect from Lego but their commitment to pursuing projects on digital platforms is impressive for a product so naturally grounded in the physical world. The online Build experience also encourages the more social aspects of Lego play that long-time fans hold dear. Best of all however is the staggeringly awesome possibility of INFINITE BLOCKS, a literal impossibility in the physical world.

Eat that bed sheets and sticks.

Sara De Bondt

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Sara De Bondt (Belgian designer based in London) designed the inside of Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes. She would be good to interview a.) for the sculptural work with Foer, and b.) for her high-theory publishing house, and c.) because she’s a woman.

Sara De Bondt is a London-based Belgian graphic designer who has been running her studio since 2003. Before that she worked for Foundation 33 and studied graphic design at Sint-Lukas, Brussels (BE), Universidad de Bellas Artes, Granada (ES) and Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht (NL). She has given workshops/talks at Beckmans college Stockholm, Ecole des Beaux Arts Lyon, Ecole de Recherche Graphique Brussels, deSingel Antwerp, Jan van Eyck Akademie Maastricht and Laus Symposium Barcelona.

She teaches at The Royal College of Art and co-curated the The Form of the Book conference at St Bride Library in January 2009. In 2008 she started Occasional Papers with Antony Hudek.

She also designed bookends out of recycled printed matter by screwing through blocks of paper:

Peter Bil’ak: Dance Writer

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The renowned typographer Peter Bil’ak (History, Greta) collaborates with Slovak dancer/choreographer Lukás Timulak. Together they created Dance Writer, an program where you can type in some letters and watch a dancer “perform” them by describing the letters with her body in space. This is a true merging of dance and typography into something new and unique.

Dance Writer 2, 2006
http://www.typotheque.com/dancewriter 

http://dancewriter-app.com/ 

Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes

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This book was a designer’s hit when it came out…2010? Because Foer made it into an art object by having words cut out of pages and the reader interacting with the sculptural build up of the holes as well as the actual content. Designers on the project are Sara De Bondt and Jonathan Gray. Foer, like Dave Eggers before him, is an example of a writer deeply concerned with typography and design. These guys are interdisciplinary

An article about the making of the book is here:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662680/inside-jonathan-safran-foers-unmakeable-interactive-book

 

“The book is actually a kind of interactive paper-sculpture: Foer and his collaborators at Die Keure in Belgium took the pages of another book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, and literally carved a brand new story out of them using a die-cut technique.”

 

Rob Giampietro

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Rob Giampietro, Tense Relations, Dot Dot Dot Issue 12, pp. 62–66.

Rob Giampietro, designer and writer, partner in Project Projects, writes in Dot Dot Dot magazine about what designers do. Here he’s commenting on a book called Dutch Resource: Collaborative Exercises in Graphic Design, and quotes the back cover copy from that book:

“Today’s graphic designer, a specialist and jack-of-all-trades in on”—a hybrid of hybrids!—”who is not only meant to be a good designer but often works as a writer, researcher, editor, curator, critic and photographer as well.” (66)

“The best collaborations assume a diversity of their participants’ gifts” (66)

d.school at Stanford

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Wall-E: Reconfigurable Walls at Stanford d.school Make Each Class the Perfect Size, by Linda Tischler, 4/28/2010, on the Fast Company website

http://www.fastcompany.com/1631889/wall-e-reconfigurable-walls-at-stanford-dschool-make-each-class-the-perfect-size

Fast Company article on the moveable walls of the new d.school building at Stanford. The innovative idea here is that the instructor can literally change the layout of the classroom making a “perfect fit” for each class.

“The school’s second floor is, essentially, one large room, framed by a truss system that lets planners design a series of sliders, attached with a gizmo they call a “taco” to a beam-mounted C-channel. That allows teams to create instant studios, of the exact dimensions appropriate to the day’s activities. Need a cozy nook? Done! A wide-open expanse of space? Not a problem.”

“The system allows a modal shift between intimate and open,” says Scott Witthoft, co-director with Scott Doorley of the school’s Environments Collaborative, which designed the arrangement along with Dave Shipmen of Steelcase.”

Department 21

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Department 21 was launched in 2009 by a group of students at the Royal College of Art in London, with the aim of artists, designers and architects coming together to do interdisciplinary projects. I think they’ve recently disbanded.

http://www.department21.net/?page_id=1919
“Emerging from an institutional context in which individual authorship and outcome-driven projects are the dominant frames for creative production, the project is the result of a need for new, collaborative forms of exchange between students from different disciplines: it is a means to get in touch with other peoples’ practices (and in this way question one’s own practice), as well as being a platform to support collaboration beyond specialties.”

“Particular to Department 21 is the emphasis on a physical space within which ideas can grow and serendipitous encounters occur. With a belief that the physical and social design of a learning space has an impact on the learning that happens within it, Department 21 has sought to work with a variety of spaces, both within and outside the Royal College of Art, to encourage different forms of social interaction and dialogue and participation. For each location the project inhabits (alternatively shared common space, occupancy of the college’s galleries during exhibitions, outdoor events etc.), the question of design comes first.

Recognising the impact that structures have on how we interact and learn, and using the inter-disciplinary knowledge of the group, Department 21 has created a purpose-built moveable working space, to enable the activities of learning, teaching and collaborating to flex to fit a wide variety of spatial environments.”

This is the moveable furniture they have created to facilitate their various events and meetings:

 

Arranging Your Desk

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On March 10, 2008, How Magazine ran a feature titled Make Your Creativity More Productive Around the Office. It focused on Behance, the online portfolio site and their approach to office space. I like the simple idea of keeping stuff up on the wall and keeping the desk clear. The notion of balancing order with chaos. And the simple idea of lining your wall with fiber board (homosote) to make a large pin up area.

Above: Chief of Design Matias Corea at work. He tends to keep his wall full and his desk clear, what he describes as a “proper balance of chaos and clarity.”

 

Chief of Design Matias Corea’s desk, with his “Action Pile” to the far left.

The famous “Done Wall” that is a testimony to ideas happening as a result of action steps being captured, processed, and completed.