Author Archives: zvezdana

James Victore

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“One would think that having no design education to speak of, having never learned the proper way to do, well, anything, would tend to be a major handicap. Instead, it allows me to forgo the formalities and head right to the good stuff.” (James Victore,  Victore, or, Who Died and Made You Boss, New York: Abrams, 2010. project 40, no page number)

He writes compassionately about teaching, how students come to him “standardized,” and he has to break their molds, as it were, to allow them to believe that they can really make a difference and that “love always wins.”

He got together with a bartender/actor friend to create a non-profit called the Shakespeare Project that staged plays for diverse audiences. (Example of interdisciplinary work!)

It’s important to be steeped in culture!

Introduction — notes

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By Zvez:

  • What is inerdisciplinarity? Various definitions, ending with our own.
  • Brief two-tracked history of academia: segmentation and merger
  • Why is this important for you? What will you gain with this book?
  • Chapter breakdown
  • A shot into the future of graphic design (how is interdisciplinarity changing/enriching the field)
  • Conclusion

Although our target reader is the designer —  student, recent grad, or seasoned practitioner — looking for a way into the interdisciplinary buzz, we hope the book appeals more broadly to any visionary thinker in search of new knowledge.

By Nancy:
In 2011 the boundaries that were once drawn between disciplines are dissolving and deteriorating. This past static perspective is getting turned on it’s head as we face new modes of communication, immigration, and environmental challenges… Within all this change new problems arise. Designers are well positioned as creative problem solvers to face these challenges but they cannot do it alone, collaborative teams of diverse thinkers are often brought together. The borders of the design field have become so far reaching, at what point do you call a project interdisciplinary? What is within and what is outside the borders of graphic design?

Flow charts

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We need to find an example of a flow chart used in an interdisciplinary graphic design process. Here are some random ones that don’t fit the bill, but it’s a start.


This medical flow chart shows tracheostomy decanulation in adults.
http://apps.einstein.br/revista/arquivos/PDF/365-Einstein%20v6n1p1-6.pdf 

This funny chart by julianhansen.com charts the process of picking a typeface. This is not a functional chart, it’s more of a statement on the barrage of typefaces out there.

What’s different about interdisciplinary design?

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Here’s the table of contents of Ellen’s new book, Graphic Design Thinking. In it, she explains the tools of the gd process. In working on the Method chapter, I’m wondering, what makes interdisciplinary design method different from the regular design method? Also, much of this comes from straight forward project management (working with others, making flow charts, accountability, etc); what’s different about interdisciplinary method? Feel free to respond to this post with an answer. Here are some of my thoughts:

IDGD is about breaking down boundaries, not setting them up. It’s about building a joint process where disciplines melt down into something surprisingly new, not done before.

IDGD is about hybrid ways of working and hybrid outcomes.

IDGD is about being visionary.

Sample Chapter: Method — 001

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Chapter Outline
Intro: Methods of interdisciplinarity
How to find interdisciplinary work? Being ready. Being willing to let go of control. Step into the unknown equipped with the right tools. Have respect and trust for the others in your group.

Inside your mind:
Venn Diagram
Mind Map
Flow Chart
Notes (how to look up other knowledge, take notes, make charts)

Working with others:
How to make a welcoming atmosphere for conversations (Ryan’s dinners)
Structured talks
Listening
Role play

Testing in stages
Staying neutral
Observing
Good failure
===========

Chapter 1

METHOD

“Design is now too important to be left to designers”
(Tim Brown, Change by Design, p. 37″

Interdisciplinary work starts from within. In order to include other knowledge or other people in your process, you have to be willing to try new ways of making design. Here we will discuss mind maps, flow charts and venn diagrams as helpful means of seeing how disciplines can come together. We will then look at larger efforts in interdisciplinary work, where experts from different fields come together to produce new knowledge. How do diverse groups work well together? We will look at how making a welcoming atmosphere, choosing the right structure, listening well and role playing can help.

Venn Diagram — finding overlaps
A Venn diagram is useful when you think about the spaces where two disciplines come together to form a singular problem, need, or outcome. For example, in a freshmen design elective, students at MICA were asked to rethink hospital walls and come up with graphic patterns that would cheer up a doctor’s visit. A Venn diagram illustrated how two opposing kinds of imagery could come together to create these patterns.

(Follow up with completed images from this assignment)

Mind Map
Mind maps are great for thinking through an idea and finding associations with it. They can show us how ideas or words connect. In an assignment at OSU, Students paired up and picked a profession out of a hat. They had to mind map the strengths they held in their profession separately then list the strengths they held together. From there they had to define a collaboration between the two professions, highlighting their combined strengths.

 

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Random notes:

Example: At Hartford Art School’s Design Global Change, Natacha Poggio partners up with engineers, educators and aid professionals to construct meaningful, service-oriented projects for her students. What are some of her strategies?

Example: In an intense study abroad program, Nancy Froehlich led six OSU students and as many Indian crafters to produce a line of scarves. Nurturing trust and sharing control of the process were essential to this project.

book structure #1

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STRUCTURE #1
Each chapter has brief essay followed by practical know-how

Possible title:
Connect: A Guide to Interdisciplinary Graphic design

_introduction: the new connector
(theory, context)
historical presedents; history of disciplines; why interdisciplinarity now? inter/cross/trans; design and philosophy

_chapter 1: method (mind games, including the end user, testing, learning to talk to each other)

_chapter 2: space (flexible spaces for doing interdisciplinary work; flexible classrooms, inspiring work areas at home and work; space to put your ideas in — process books, idea books, notepads; portable spaces; school as space)

_chapter 3: scale (S, M, L, XL projects)
subdivide these into culture, science and society
this would be longer and more heavily illustrated; snazzy captions will point to relevant points
Culture (the fashion company, India projects, etc)
Science (data visualization…)
Society (Center for Urban Pedagogy, Ideo…)

Add: Interviews and assignments for educators; these can be peppered throughout on special, color coded pages.

stephen farrell — design meets fiction

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Designer, educator, works closely with fiction writers on hybrid image/text novels. (this has precedence in Dada, McCluhan, etc)

From Farrell’s page at SAIC
http://www.saic.edu/gallery/saic_profile_faculty.php?type=Faculty&album=467
Simply put, I write stories and explore critical ideas with design. I’m interested in taking traditional literary forms, the short story, the novel, the critical essay, and remaking these forms to include the methodologies, the vocabularies—the possibilities—of design. In the literary realm, writing and design are usually two distinct, non-overlapping activities. Most of the book pages designers labor over could be characterized as non-places. These book pages, although skillfully crafted, work tremendously hard to transport the reader to a transparent realm of language, dissolving the spatial and material aspects of the page. A lot of the work that I do pushes against this transparency and manages the flow of reading in different ways. My work still acknowledges that reading is about flow, and that one of design’s chief objectives is to manage and facilitate this flow. However, the strategies I use—the way I manipulate flow, arrange and organize texts, and employ a spatial approach to the page not unlike staging in theater —often encourage both linear and non-linear movement. Simultaneous stories may interweave, images and information graphics may interject. How this spatial, imagetext experience collides or coincides with the linearity of reading is of prime interest to me.

VAS: An Opera in Flatland, A Novel

Steve Tomasula, Stephen Farrell

University of Chicago Press, Dec 15, 2004

Printed in the colors of flesh and blood, VAS: An Opera in Flatlanda hybrid image-text noveldemonstrates how differing ways of imagining the body generate diverse stories of history, gender, politics, and, ultimately, the literature of who we are. A constantly surprising, VAScombines a variety of voices, from journalism and libretto to poem and comic book. Often these voices meet in counterpoint, and the meaning of the narrative emerges from their juxtapositions, harmonies, or discords. Utilizing a wide and historical sweep of representations of the bodyfrom pedigree charts to genetic sequences VASis, finally, the story of finding one’s identity within the double helix of language and lineage.

 

 

m/m paris — design meets photography

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Of course, design and photography are closely related disciplines. But MM Paris worked with photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin to mesh the two disciplines in a fresh new way, in designing “Alphabet” (2001) and “Alphamen” (2003). This seems novel because the letterform and the photo-fill are so closely intertwined, giving a result that is greater than the sum of its parts. By contrast, in a traditional sense, a photograph is still a photograph without being included in a layout, and conversely, a layout maintains its identity even if the photos on it change. With these MM projects, the photos and the graphic shapes transform so radically into the letterforms, that they would not have the same “identity” as separate images.

Key questions

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Key questions:

How do I do interdisciplinary work?
What do I get from it? What’s really hard about it? What are the down sides?
How do I think like an iterdisciplinarian?
How do I use this in my own graphic design practice?
How do I think about creating new knowledge at the intersection of disciplines?
How do I combine two of my totally unrelated passions into something great?
How do I share my stuff with the world?

How do I approach other specialists about working together?

 

Joe Moran: Excerpt from “Interdisciplinarity”

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This book is about interdisciplinary research on a broader scale. The introduction traces a history of disciplines and follows up by a “defence of interdisciplinarity.” It’s a great read at about 18 pages.
Here’s the pdf of the introduction: joe_moran

Here are my notes in reading this introduction:

11/17/11
Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity, Routlege….

  • Two meanings of discipline: body of knowledge, and obedience/order (2)
  • hierarchical in nature, from latin disciplina,  meaning taking orders from an elder
  • the term “discipline” is “caught up in questions about the relationship between knowledge and power.” (2)
  • funny Roberta Frank on “fields” as cows and mud, versus “discipline” as enshrined, clean… (3)
  • Classical division —Aristotle’s order: theology/mathematics/physics, then ethics/politics, and finally the arts/engineering/poetics (4); assigning of value — more and less esteemed disciplines
  • Modern era: universities and states
  • Late Middle Age — universities of Salerno, Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge replace medieval schools; discipline starts to mean profession, such as medicine, law and theology (5)
  • However until 18 C. there was a core curriculum of liberal arts
  • trivium (logic, grammar, rhetoric)
  • quadrivium  (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music)
  • University from latin universitias, meaning “universal” or “whole”
  • The Enlightenment (17, 18 c) pushed disciplines — reason-driven, all about instituting methodologies; this agreed with the overlapping scientific revolution (16, 17c) Copernicus, Newton, Gallileo, etc
  • Parallel tendencies to be holistic and  yet subdivide into disciplines — through encyclopedias (7)
  • Giambattista VIco (18 c) early promoter of interdisciplinary (7)
  • Kant (18 c) privileges reason through philosphy
  • Early duality between specialized and liberal arts education (10)
  • Comte argues for applying scientific method to other areas of knowledge (11)
  • Neitzsche critical (and lamenting) of the scientific man as superior to the philosopher (19 c) (12)
  • Industrialized and technologized society demanded specializations (13)
  • Our question: Where and since when do Ph. D. programs in design exist?
  • Clark argues disciplines are discursive in that they promote certain languages and modes of thought, and exclude others (14)
  • Epistemology — the study of knowledge
  • Interdisciplinarity is about addressing problems that cannot be answered within existing disciplines (15)
  • Interdisciplinarity is ” any form of dialogue or interaction between two or more disciplines;  the level, type, purpose and effect of this interaction remain to be examined” (16)
  • Roland Barthes (1977: 155) “it begins effectively when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down…in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has  a place in the field of sciences that were to be brought peacefully together”….mutation
  • politics of teaching (17)
  • intellectually promiscuous (17)