Susan Cain
Very interesting Ted Talk (I also ordered her book “Quiet”) that makes a case for not just having open work spaces- that sometimes great ideas come to you when you are isolated and in a quiet space such as an office, then you can take those new ideas back to the group.
http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/about-the-book/
Make Space hits the jackpot for our Space chapter. I just got my copy. It’s by the guys responsible for learning environments at the d.school at Stanford.
Make Space : How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration by Scott Doorley & Scott Witthoft is out! Based on the work at the Stanford University d.school and its Environments Collaborative Initiative, it is a tool that for helping people intentionally manipulate space to ignite creativity.
Zvez’s notes while reading this book:
http://startupsthisishowdesignworks.com//
Website devoted to the idea that graphic design plays a big role in startups.
Includes Dieter Rams’s “Good Design Is…” list.
Includes list of designers who are also startup owners:
__AirBnB, the rent-out-your-room startup that’s sweeping the nation, whose founder, Joe Gebbia, is a graphic designer.
RISD alum, double major in graphic and ID design. Airbnb is “the ebay of space”.
__Dave Morin, Path, a “smart journal that helps you share your life with the ones you love”
__Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square, an app that turns your iPad or mobile device into a cash register that accepts credit card payments
__Mike Matas, Push Pop Press, a digital publisher that produced Our Choice, the first full length interactive book, w/Al Gore, and now has been bought out by Facebook.
__Jeffrey Veen, Typekit, a subscription font service for the web
“Good artists copy, great artists steal” We should “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Typekit was acquired by Adobe in 2011.
Article Title: Design’s Inherent Interdisciplinarity
Link to pdf: Davis_interdisciplinary
Why is design (so well suited to) interdisciplinary (study)?
This chapter from the book Design Studies is called In Between: Challenging the Role of Graphic Design by Situating It in a Collaborative, Interdisciplinary Class. It talks about an interdisciplinary class at Northeastern in Illinois, and how GD figured in the mix. Students worked together to make Trace, an interactive piece to educate people about the Patriot Act. Chapter Author: Ann McDonald
Here’s the pdf: ann_mcdonald
One of the strengths of the class is that it taught students the importance of balancing the time spent planning and conceptualizing versus executing and realizing the collaborative work. This was possible because the class stretched over two semesters. (359)
“…collaborative authorship and group decision-making necessitated that design become a social practice.” (360)
“The instructors must act as facilitators of an undefined collective vision—they must steer, rather than lead.” (361)
“Individuals who were not performing could not be fired and had to be brought back into the fold with a renewed sense of ownership, involvement, or a revised area of contribution. There was a constant need to bring issues to the surface so they could be articulated, visualized and acted upon or resolved.” (361)
“Students learned the resilience needed to stay involved, so that even when their individual ideas were discarded by the group, they were able to remain invested in the collective goal.” (365)
“The students and the Trace project would have benefited from increased use of formal design skills as a method of questioning.” (367)
The piece goes on to honestly evaluate the strengths and challenges of tackling an interdisciplinary class.
THE CONVERGENCE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING AND GRAPHIC DESIGN
A paper by two professors from Creighton University:
David Reed, Chair, Department of Computer Science Creighton University davereed@creighton.edu, and
Joel Davies Director, Graphic Design Program Creighton University joel@creighton.edu
Published in the Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Volume 21 Issue 3, February 2006
The conclusion of the paper states:
As the computer science and graphic design disciplines converge, it is inevitable that cross-pollination between the two result in a blurring of the lines of professional practices. Computer scientists increasingly need exposure to design trends and principles, so that they might take advantage of lessons learned by graphic designers. Likewise, designers will require the computer science experience to accurately and efficiently code projects, in addition to the ability to comprehend new technologies as they emerge. Collaboration between computer science and graphic design educators is imperative to ensure that each discipline learns from the other and is prepared for future developments.
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This is an interesting scientific paper that argues for skilling the programmer with design basics.
DESIGN CULTURE NOW, national design triennial
accelerated change
A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.” R. Buckminster Fuller
“The US, like other nations of the world, faces many social, economic, and environmental problems. As people trained to bridge the gam between technology, science, art , and the humanities, designers are in a unique poison to be a powerful force for positive change.” Diane Pilgrim
“In collage, discrete elements remain visually distinct. The juxtaposition and overlap of individual parts spur fresh insight. Mutations fuse discrete elements into new entities. In the process of becoming something else forms meld to assume identities that bear few traces of their constituent parts. Mutations are a gens of change; their transformations suggest latent possibilities.” Donald Albrecht
“Enormous opportunities for the design profession are being driven by the possibility to meaningfully combine features, objects, materials, technologies, and ideas previously considered to be separate. THere are more unions of content and commerce than at any other point in history…As combinatory thing becomes the new norm, design –an intrinsically hybrid practice merging the conflicting needs of art, business, and engineering–will be on tis way toward total infiltration of human environments.” Steven Skov Holt
“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.” R. Buckminster Fuller
“Biomimicry, a term often used in conjunction with design, represents a form of reverse engineering, with designers studying and copying the appearance and forms of natural organisms in offer to reproduce various processes and functions. The Nike Free Shoe, for example resulted when a group o Nike designers spent time exploring the physiognomy of the human food and sketching and studying the natural movements of animals.” Barbara J. Bloemink
DESIGN LIFE NOW, national design triennial
Pixar? pg 012
robots? 016
Seattle Central Library pg 022
music industry- mash up music, Girl Talk
From a published interview with M/M Paris (Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak) (Design and Art, Alex Coles editor, Whitechapel and MIT, 2007):
Mathias Augustyniak: “…the more you are a specialist in your field, the closer you get to the essence of things. Only then can you start to have a possible relationship with another field — and this is where things start to become interesting. Being specialists gives us a point of entry — a keyhole through which we can look onto the world. It is in this spirit of specialism that we meet and work with artists.” (188)
On their collaboration with artists Huyghe, Parreno, Gillick: “As graphic design is situated at the crossroads between many different activities it seemed the perfect place from which to establish this kind of fulfilling exchange with practitioners from other disciplines.” (190)
Augustyniak: “From one field to another, there should be respect.” (190)
Augustyniak: “We are interested in dialogue between specialists” (191)
On p. 191, Augustyniak describes a collaboration they did with artists Pierre Huyghe, Phillipe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for the Venice Biennale 1999. Each of the three artists was given a room, but when the artists decided to band together and project a single film in one room, the other two rooms were left empty to the dismay of the curators. M/M jumped in and created title sequences as paintings on the walls in the flanking two rooms, so the public would have a pre- and post-viewing experience, while seeing the film in the middle. This is such a nice and concrete explanation of the collaborative process. Designers are concrete, we speak in terms of things and actions!
Designers seem to constantly worry about whether they are equal to artists, or simply their “butlers,” as M/M say. They argue that true interdisciplinarity can only happen when designers are elevated to become equals, and not subordinates. That’s another theme of the profession, moving from service to autonomy.
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
Janine M. Benyus
Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses To Humanitarian Crises
Architecture for Humanity
Design with the Other 90%: Cities
Cynthia E. Smith
Design for the Other 90%
Cynthia E. Smith
Here’s the pdf of the article: groupthink_lehrer
Groupthink, by Jonah Lehrer, Article in the New Yorker, Jan 30, 2012 pp. 22 — 27
“The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.” (27)
Article in this week’s New Yorker discusses ways of encouraging creativity in the workplace. Citing scientific studies, Lehrer argues that brainstorming does not work because its cardinal “rule” of reserving criticism is prescribed, and therefore unrealistic. Creativity is messy, he says, and it thrives in the tense reality of human relations. Data has shown that brainstorming sessions are not nearly as productive as we have come to think. People are more effective, in fact, when they work alone as well as together, but mostly if they cross paths with other creatives in unexpected ways.
Brainstorming was invented by Alex Osborn, an ad exec. Osborn defined it in Chapter 33 of his book “Your Creative Power,” published in 1948, as “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.” It presupposed an absence of criticism and negative feedback. This, Lehrer says, doesn’t always work, as group dynamics cannot be prescribed. Instead, “…when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself.” (27)
Further, Lehrer writes about the importance of the “place” of creativity. The cubicle paradigm has led to isolation, depriving people of productive, cross-disciplinary encounters. He writes about how when Steve Jobs was building Pixar’s headquarters, he purposefully placed office space around a central atrium where people would be forced to walk to to get to their mailboxes, conferences and bathrooms. He did this to encourage chance meetings in corridors.
His biggest point is the importance of flexible workspace that, through its very architecture, encourages a meeting of the minds. A prime example is “Building 20” on the MIT campus, built as a temporary structure for WWII radar research. Meant to be demolished at the end of the war, through a set of circumstances the building was left standing and over the years housed a hodge-podge of departments. Since it wasn’t pristine, its tenants were free to tear down and build walls, and even floors. They could customize their spaces as they saw fit. Over the years the building has given seen some the most creative output this country has produced — Noam Chomsky’s linguistics, the Bose speaker company founded by grad student Amar Bose, and a slew of engineering discoveries.
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This is right up our alley for the SPACE chapter. It’s great to read scientific confirmation that schools need to have flexible spaces and that departments should be housed in such a way to encourage cross-disciplinary chance encounters. It also makes me wonder how to make such “chance encounters” happen within the structure of a class.