Preface The first ras+e project launched from an alley behind a Baltimore dive bar. An amicable drunk, displaced by last call, soliloquized our activities as we erected the prototype: a collapsible 3D cardboard missile, complete with suitcase-handle, and designed for widespread guerrilla-distribution throughout the city. Offering assistance, our chatty new friend climbed onto the tavern’s roof, and flew the missile to ras, while e photographed.
One hundred diverse practitioner interviews became our research, an argument that small interdisciplinary collaboratives can make anything, provided old world authorship is shelved with the Lost Ark. The freestanding essays in this book are intended as contextual encouragements for young designers, forming a model for varied collaborative processes. Each Q+A hits concisely, with additional bits available online. The visuals reference collaboration: Schizocourier is a bastard mashup of the famed monospace, buckets of red draw the line between black and white, graftedillustrationguffaws reference found works, and the grid slams itself. Collaboration Now is Design Punk.
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The MICA GD MFA program is a risk-promoting safety net to test the inherent maybe it will work aspect of all collaborations. We brazenly abused democratic tools—like treating cyanotype as a printmaking medium with photocopier negatives—and discovered design solutions embedded in cross-disciplinary dialogue, an un-billable essential without parallel in the assembly-line production of ad agencies. As designerauthorfacultyimps, we see this Millennial Collaborative Ideal reflected in our peers and students.