Category Archives: Reading

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!

The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero

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Book that will be out late 2011

I’ve been teaching for the past 5 years, and I’ve always been a bit frustrated that there isn’t a nice, concise book that overviews the mental state of a successful designer while they go through their creative process. For instance, many say that graphic design is visual communication. A cornerstone of communication is storytelling, and yet you’d be hard-pressed to find any discussion of how to tell stories with design in any design book. This should be remedied.

There are new challenges in the world that need to be discussed, and I think design is a prime lens to consider these topics. As our world moves faster and as things become less stable, it becomes more important for individuals to embrace ambiguity, understand paradox, and realize that two things can conflict and still somehow both be true. We must realize that logic doesn’t always work, and that sometimes nonsense is the best answer. These are the topics I intend to address in the book.

The Shape of Design isn’t going to be a text book. The project will be focused on Why instead of How. We have enough How; it’s time for a thoughtful analysis of our practice and its characteristics so we can better practice our craft. After reading the book, I want you to look at what you do in a whole new light. Design is more than working for clients.

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)

Tim Brown: Change by Design — book notes

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I wrote this as we chatted today:
Design is no longer about making an object, but rather a system in which a need occurs and is resolved. Why this now? In a consumer society, we’ve saturated ourselves with products and waste, and yet our needs still persist. We need to redefine who we are and what we need. Choice is not a matter of 30 brands of toothpaste lining up your drugstore shelf. Rather, it’s choosing and controlling life’s milestones: birth, education, family, health and death. Services need to become more human-centered and less profit-oriented. As designers, we have an edge up on balancing diverse viewpoints in a creative process. Let’s share our skills as we embark on a colossal re-envisioning of ourselves and the things we use.

==================
Brown writes how we need to “extend the perimeter” (205) of the design project, beyond just the making of the artifact, but to the complex system of its use and the need that it fulfills in a broader social spectrum. For example, in the case of the Ararind eye hospital in India, it’s not about the expensive eye lens, but the need of a poor population for care. What this project needed, and got, was an extremely low-cost yet viable solution to the problem.

Ideas in the book, annotated:
Design moving upstream (20)
Project space (35)
Empathy (44)
Wisdom of crowds (58)
Experience design (110, 114)
Storytelling (133, 140 Intel Video, 148)
Interaction design (134)
MBA/design programs (160)
Nurture — medical consultancy (167-9)
Ararind eye hospital, India (209)
Ormondale Elementary (224)
How to, step by step (229)

Change by Design book by Tim Brown

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Book that we should look at written by the CEO of IDEO, fusing business with design thinking.

“Design thinking is not just applicable to so-called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It’s an approach that has been used by organizations such as Kaiser Permanente to increase the quality of patient care by re-examining the ways that their nurses manage shift change or Kraft to rethink supply chain management. This book is for creative business leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.”

jessica helfand, science and design: the new wave

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Excerpt from an article by Jessica Helfand on Design Observer, 10/16/07:

“Last week, I found myself in a hospital where I toured a research lab with an immunologist. He explained how scientists look at pathogens and consider better models for treating disease. Such observation, in turn, leads to more targeted clinical trials and more effective pharmaceutical therapies. But it all begins by looking at cells dividing in a petri dish. A few days later at the AIGA National Conference in Denver, biologist, writer and “biomimicry” enthusiast Janine Benyus identified existing forms in nature — from the abstraction of the Fibonacci series to the specificity of a butterfly wing — as a paradigm for rethinking man-made practices and ensuring a more sustainable future. She discussed the finer points of bird migration and showed breathtaking images of life forms, all of them perfected over time — and none of them new-and-improved.

It’s a fascinating model for design thinking, seemingly antithetical to the pursuit of innovation, yet stunning precisely because it veers wholeheartedly in the opposite direction. It’s the less-is-more of the new age — history as novelty — with scientists the makers, the form-identifiers, the paradigm-shifters. Scientists probe and manipulate and channel and divide; they split and fuse and spike and engineer; but most of all, they look. They are the keen observers of our future because they peer so deeply into our past. They are historians, anthropologists, archaeologists of the body, the mind, the air, the planet, the universe. As a visual maker, to spend any time at all with scientists is to become at once profoundly aware of our similarities and devastated by that which divides us. In an age that is likely to be remembered for its self-absorption, it is an extraordinary thing to witness a lab filled with people devoting themselves passionately to understanding what DNA looks like, or how the immune system behaves, or what infection means for a human being fighting for her life. It’s radical. It’s humbling. And if we don’t begin actively seeking new opportunities to learn, collaborate and contribute to this critical community of thinkers and doers, then we may have good reason to revisit that psychosis study.”

steven heller: the education of a graphic designer

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A collection of useful essays.

Heller, Steven, The Education of a Graphic Designer. Second Edition. New York: Allworth Press, 2005.

Katherine McCoy, Education in an Adolescent Profession, essay from the book:

Design is increasingly in demand in fields of computer science, interactive media, and other disciplines. But we “must retain and enhance graphic design’s core value as a cultural activity. Designers can offer a compensating balance to the coolness and abstractions of technology.” (13)