New Views Conference Poster Project
| In Spring 2008, the GD MFA studio will submit posters to New Views 2, an international conference to be held at the London College of Communication in July 2008.
Brief from conference organizers: Create a poster that uses graphic design as a means to critique and reflect upon its future. :: Visit New Views conference web site :: Format, A2 (420mm x 594mm; 16.5 × 23.38 inches). Possible approaches References Possible themes Some quotes from our readings “Some of the basic, institutional features of design practice have a way of getting tangled up in zealous attempts at self-expression… Most design is done in some kind of collaborative setting, either within a client relationship or in a design studio that utilizes the talents of numerous creative people, thus the origin of any particular idea is increasingly clouded.” Michael Rock, “Graphic Authorship,” 1996 “The author as origin, authority, and ultimate owner of the texts guards against the free will of the reader.” Michael Rock, “Graphic Authorship,” 1996 “If we really want to move beyond the designer-as-hero model of history, we may have to imagine a time when we can ask, ‘What difference does it make who designed it?’” Michael Rock, “Graphic Authorship,” 1996 “In the end, authorship is a device to rethink process and expand design methods. While theories of authorship may change the way work is made, critics must still question what it does and how it does it, not where it comees from.” Michael Rock, “Graphic Authorship,” 1996 “The materiality of a designer’s method is his or her content and through those material/visual moves, a designer speaks.” Michael Rock, “Fuck Content,” 2005 “The content is, in short, always Design itself.” Michael Rock, “Fuck Content,” 2005 “Is the allure of the legitmacy of authorship pulling design away from the defining characteristic of the profession—the designer/client relationship?” Dmitri Siegel, “Designers and Dilettantes, 2007 “Authorship reflects an insecurity about the merit of design on its own terms.” Dmitri Siegel, “Designers and Dilettantes, 2007 “Without the energy and expertise of the client, self-initiated projects rarely attain the cultural significance necessary to become iconic works of design.” Dmitri Siegel, “Designers and Dilettantes, 2007 “For many, a career in graphic design means being a part-time publisher, writer, filmmaker, DJ or artist…. If the designer is author, what becomes of the designer as designer?” Dmitri Siegel, “Designers and Dilettantes, 2007 “The traditional center of design is less and less interesting, as the margins are where true innovation occurs.” Gong Szeto, 2007 “Design is the only profession I can think of in which a great number of its practitioners actually would like to be doing something else.” Scott Stowell, 2007 “Does graphic design equip a person to do anything other than be a graphic designer?” Adrian Shaughnessy, “Graphic Editorship,” 2007 “The problem with American innovation is that it’s all prêt-à -porter and no couture. All business and problem-solving, no culture-making….What do culture-makers do? They identify and propose meaningful cultural points-of-view for the product. They do more than simply respond to user-observations or trend forecasting.” Scott Klinker, “Toward a Cultural Innovation,” 2006 “In the days of top-down media, branding was easy to dismiss as coercive propaganda, where the product was designed first with a persuasive story attached later….Today’s model is story-first/product-second, where the authentic values of the company are proven with great products. This historic change…requires new smarts: we’re called on to strategically shape stories and ideas first, then give them physical form. Sure, these stories can be used to sell more stuff, but they can also change public opinion and inform consumers about the real origin of products.” Scott Klinker, “Toward a Cultural Innovation,” 2006 “Too many of our products are function first/form second—or form first/function second—with narrative, story-telling elements nowhere to be found. How bad would it be if our products began with narrative in the first place; with an idea of the experience of the product in mind, before that product ever had the chance to turn into landfill?” Allan Chochinov, “Creative Gesture or Vapid Prototyping,” 2007 “Design fictions remake the playing field into something beyond a commercial go/no go enterprise; they let designers ask ‘what if?’” Allan Chochinov, “Creative Gesture or Vapid Prototyping,” 2007 “Can you survive without lifestyle magazines?” Daniel van der Velden, “Research and Destroy,” 2005 “Is a designer someone who thinks up ideas, designs, produces and sells, or someone who holds a mouse and drags objects across a computer screen?” Daniel van der Velden, “Research and Destroy,” 2005 “It is not so strange that a branch of graphic design has evolved that no longer hangs around waiting for an assignment, but instead takes action of its own accord. It has polarized into the ‘willing to work,’ who often have little or no control over their own positions, and the ‘out of work,’ who, with little economic support beyond re-channelled subsidies or grants, work on innovation for the sake of innovation.” Daniel van der Velden, “Research and Destroy,” 2005 “Instead of giving the wrong answers, design should instead begin asking interesting questions.” Daniel van der Velden, “Research and Destroy,” 2005 “Let the designer take on the debate with the institutions, the brand names or the political parties, without it all being about getting the job or having the job fail. Let designers do some of the serious reading and writing of their own. Let designers offer the surplus value, the uselessness and the authorship of their profession to the world, to politics, to society.” Daniel van der Velden, “Research and Destroy,” 2005 “Like the value of individuality, the attitude of clearly expressing likes and dislikes has been unnecessarily esteemed.” Kenya Hara, Designing Design, 2007 “Once, only kings and aristocrats could voice their appetities, but now everyone enjoys articulating his likes and dislikes; I like Paris; I love Tokyo; I want to visit Buenos Aires. I want to be a baker, a businessperson, a musician. The modern era is a society that can decide everything, based completely on individual subjectivity: domicile, occupation, nutrition.” Kenya Hara, Designing Design, 2007 “The management of desire is democracy, and the competition of desire, the free market economy.” Kenya Hara, Designing Design, 2007 “The stubborn insistence on cultural individuality probably acts as an obstacle to to global harmony and mutual benefit. What will become indispensable to our future generations is not attaching the highest importance to the monopolization of profit or the values of individual cultures. No, it will be the rational mind, which controls the egotistical one by working from a truly global perspective.” Kenya Hara, Designing Design, 2007 “the private property aspect of creativity must be destroyed all are creators and there is no reason of any sort for this division into artists and nonartists” El Lissitzky, “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” 1920 (quoted in Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, “Periodising Collectivism,” Third Text, 2004 “Social life itself has become the medium of expression.” Adapted from Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, “Periodising Collectivism,” Third Text, 2004 “The everyday apocalypse came, and we blogged it.” Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “Are blogs vague? So is Tuesday.” Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “All our movements and activities are being monitored and stored. In the case of blogs, this is carried out not by some invisible and abstract authority but by the subjects themselves who record their everyday life.” Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “Blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of the mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative. They zero out the old structure but do not claim to be its predecessor.” Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “The movement away from the public environment of dot-com offices and Web design firms toward private surroundings reflects the economic move from a collective entrepreneurial culture toward unemployed/freelance individuals.” Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “Weblogs become private homes situated in the ‘global city’ of the Internet and give a familiar taste to cyberspace.” Amir Ebrahami, quoted in Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “We have all become ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by a mere touch of a button.” Richard Foreman, quoted in Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “Where everyone has a right to speak, everyone ends up thinking they have a right to be heard; and when everyone in general thinks they have a right to be heard, then you end up with a situation where nobody in particular is listened to.” Carl Trueman, quoted in Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “Whereas entrepreneurs colonize the future, energized by collective hallucinations, bloggers expose the present in which they find themselves caught.” Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “How many artists collaborate in the making of a work? Almost all. How visible is this togetherness in the artwork? Hardly at all. How much do we know about the process of working together? Next to nothing.” Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 “The network serfdom of immaterial labor turns dispersed workers into laptop-lapdogs who are ready to work at any hour anywhere.” Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, 2007 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: First Call for Papers New Views 2: Conversations and Dialogues in Graphic Design Papers and posters are solicited for an international symposium which seeks to look in depth at the broader questions that graphic designers are facing today in terms of the graphic design profession and educational practices. At the same time, the symposium is meant to generate debate and to provide direction, solutions, and identify what new challenges might lay ahead for practitioners, academics, industry and the profession overall. New Views sets out to offer a platform for enabling academics and practitioners from a broad range of international perspectives and approaches to discuss the current state of their practices. Poster Submissions Digital pdf: A4 no larger than 3Mb file size Audience Structure Themes which to be addressed might include: |
