I Explain Better In Writing. I Evoke Better Through Design. by Claire Bula

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

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I Explain Better in Writing. I Evoke Better Through Design.

Claire Bula Boston University Graphic Design MFA 2021

For WJB: Who taught me the most important things in this life: that it’s not where you are, it’s who you’re with; how to appreciate the architecture of a dark church; to recognize when, at the very least, the chairs all match; and to never, never, ever give up; especially on myself. EJN: For always being game to take a risk, being open to embracing life’s possibilities, and being my most ardent advocate. CBW: My first, and best, friend; who grounds me, nurtures me, makes me laugh uproariously, and is my model for success in life. BSW: For halting the paralysis by analysis and always putting family first, as well as being first to crack the cold beers. JMW, AIW, & SCW: Who renew me with their limitless joy and enthusiasm. MJC: Who, in a way, saved me; but, more importantly, patiently loved and encouraged me as I figured out how to save myself.

Table of Contents Acknowledgments

Abstract

Evoke Through Design

Explain In Writing

114

Project Descriptions

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Essays

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What Even is Design?

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Is There a (New) Power Developed in Being Broken?

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Designer/Attorney. Same, But Different.

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Flow. That Beautiful Beast, That Beastly Beauty

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Audience of One: The Personal is the Universal

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Design is Reinvention: The Permanent Impermanence of Design

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Limitless: Design’s Superpower is Also its Kryptonite

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Interviews

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Appendix

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Annotated Bibliography

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Colophon

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Acknowledgments

Throughout the creation of this thesis I received a great deal of generous support and assistance from a variety of people. Thank you to my thesis studio professor, Christopher Sleboda, whose expertise was invaluable in formulating the thesis process and guiding our class to create an exceptional and cohesive 2021 MFA graphic design exhibition. I would like to acknowledge my professors throughout my time at Boston University: Kristen Coogan, Christopher Field, James Grady, Daniel Harding, Nicholas Rock, Yael Ort-Dinoor, and Mary Yang. Your encouragement and support are deeply appreciated. Thank you for constantly pushing me to achieve deeper meaning in my projects and challenge me creatively. Your willingness to assist outside of class, listen carefully, and respond thoughtfully has helped me grow immensely over the past two years. Finally, thank you to my studio-mates. Your talent and dedication inspire me daily. Thank you for challenging me in my creative development, your empathetic ears, and becoming friends for a lifetime. Only you will ever understand what it was like to go through a graphic design MFA in a pandemic. If, as Georges Braque says, art turns wounds into light, your work has inspired me and, in fact, turned the wounds of the past year into light. Keep creating light in this wounded world.

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Abstract

Design is the physical manifestation of the limitlessness potential of the human imagination. It’s a means to question, probe, and contemplate. Design drives a cycle of investigation and discovery, revealing insights into an ever-expanding world of possibilities that lie on the horizon. Ideologically, my two guiding tenets (not only in design, but in life) are the concept of multipotentiality—the ability and preference of a person, particularly one of strong intellectual or artistic curiosity, to pursue and excel in different fields—and makeability, or the Dutch concept of Maakbaarheid—the idea that the world around us is inherently shaped by humans, physically and psychologically, and design is the essential factor in that shaping. Philosophically, I adhere to the malleability of life, the idea that everything can, and will, change—it’s simply a matter of how you choose to change it. On a broader level, design is egalitarian and accessible. It provides a means of empowerment on a personal level, to reinvent yourself whenever and however you like, and at a societal level, to remake the world we live in to fit the needs of the community. Philosophy and theory re-imagine what could be. Design creates concrete forms, structures, and language that bring ideas and conjecture into reality, for an audience of one or the whole world. I am naturally averse to ambiguity in life, but in design I prefer it. If something is nascent or nebulous, it’s waiting to be shaped. Design invites exploration, and it imbues people that practice it with a constant motion to improve and learn. I find that what I’m mostly learning is how much more progress there is to make and how much more I want to try. Design doesn’t become easier as you improve; it’s simply an expanding horizon as you grow.

Abstract

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Peaceful

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Guilty 4

Sad 5

Empty/ Lonely 6

Restless/ Unsettled/ Discontent 7

Detached/ Numb 8

Unburdened/ Carefree

Cheerful/ Bouyant

Embraced/ Loved

Calm/ Content

Engaged/ Connected

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Top: National Forest branding signage in Flagstaff, AZ (my photo). Bottom:The United States of Attica, Faith Ringold, 1972.

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ACK IDAY Is not a Holiday

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Interview Translated into Book

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BUMFA2021.com

Sculpture March 3 –12 Aris Hu Hannah Minifie

Graphic Design March 26 –April 6

Painting

Reem Alsanea Jenna Benoit Yiwei Bo Claire Bula Mahnoor Butt Chrissy Casavant Yike Chen Arielle Epstein Kari Everson

Kateri Gemperlein-Schirm Taiyo Hasegawa Byori Hwang Huishi Li Sohini Mukherjee Michael Rosenberg Sloane Schuman Yuanwei Xu

April 15 –26

Davis Arney Bridget Bailey Meera Chauhan Liam Corcoran Sarah Elliott Danielle Fretwell Georganna Greene Amanda Hawkins Landon Jones

Kaitlyn Malinowski Shantel Miller Bradley Milligan Joshua Rondeau Anvi Shah Joan Sullivan Mosheh Tucker Aisling Wilson

MFA 2021 Exhibition Boston University

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery 855 Commonwealth Ave Boston, MA 02215

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Captioning , footnotes, etc. for all the images and text will be in Artigo 7/9

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Iris van Herpen

Anxious/ Distressed 2

Afraid 3

Guilty 4

Composed/ Peaceful

Safe/Assured/ Brave

Unburdened/ Carefree

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Empty/ Lonely 6

Restless/ Unsettled/ Discontent 7

Cheerful/ Bouyant

Embraced/ Loved

Calm/ Content

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WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A CHANCE

TUCK EVERLASTING

PAPER CADAVERS

CHINA’S HIDDEN CHILDREN

WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

500 HIDDEN SECRETS OF COPENHAGEN

NOT FOR TOURISTS BOSTON

CITY WALKS BOSTON

CITY WALKS SEATTLE

SMITHSONIAN ANTHOLOGY OF HIP HOP & RAP

MAD LIBS

ULTIMATE GLORY: FRISBEE, OBSESSION, & WILD YOUTH

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

SKETCHBOOK

PIZZAPEDIA

THERE ARE NO CHILDREN HERE

CRAZY RICH ASIANS

BORN A CRIME

BOBBI BROWN MAKEUP

SKETCHBOOK

THE SECRET LIVES OF COLOR

CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE

JOURNEYS OF A LIFETIME

YOU ARE A BADASS

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Composed/ Peaceful

Safe/Assured/ Brave

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Empty/ Lonely 6

Restless/ Unsettled/ Discontent 7

Cheerful/ Bouyant

Embraced/ Loved

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Multipotentiality in Design A Mapping Exercise

Mapping is an operation that associates each element of a given set with one or more elements of a second set. A territory is a specified sphere of activity or knowledge. A range is the scope of a person’s knowledge or abilities. A methodology is a system of procedures or processes used in a particular area of study or activity. The prompt in this case asked me to create a matrix of territories and ranges that relate to my design methodology. To visualize and make connections between my ideas. To establish, then disrupt hierarchy among my ideas. The goal is to make connections between your ideas and references, to map individual territories, and define a methodology towards your thesis. We were to treat this assignment as a form of research.

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I decided to test my theory that design is a multipotential discipline by mapping the design universe. First, I created a design matrix based on qualities of design. The x-axis stretches from emotional to analytical and the y-axis stretches from specialist to multipotentialite. The gradient aligns colors to the qualities to increase visual recognition and clarity. Next, I placed designers I admire and different design disciplines within that matrix. I placed the designer/artist in the place I believe they fall in the matrix and where I felt they had additional qualities, I used the color related to that quality as an outline on their star shape. The aim being to visualize the overlaps and connections of the creators I look to for inspiration and their disciplines, in order to better understand what influences my methodology and interests in design.

About My Work

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Design History Influences on a Life

This project asked me to describe, define and curate the objects, events, and idiosyncrasies that inspire me as a graphic designer. Then take that collection and design a 100-page book based on my personal curatorial point of view. I have a varied set of interests when it comes to art and design. I love high fashion, street style, and everything in between, so I decided to start there. When you’re from a small town in the Midwest, growing up in the 90’s (read pre-internet), magazines were the conduit to the outside world. And Vogue magazine was my favorite. I’d slice the editorial spreads out and wallpaper my room one page at a time. I also loved the Beastie Boys, they were brash and in your face, but smart and never vulgar. I considered both meaningful forms of art and design, but on opposite sides of the spectrum. So I took the look and feel of Vogue magazine — editorial layouts, sweeping images, classic typography, and a dreamy, high end feeling — and I melded it with Beastie Boy lyrics in beautiful, classic typographic setting using Didot.

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These two styles represent wildly different perspectives and by combining them into one publication I’m demonstrating the equality of their contributions in the world. I may never make work like the Beastie Boys, but I can enjoy and respect their creativity, as well as learn and take inspiration from it. It’s a reminder that it pays dividends to seek out, look at, and consider work you don’t ‘like’ or ‘isn’t your style’. Rarely do I learn from work I enjoy. It’s the work I wouldn’t make, or think I won’t like, that pushes me to explore and understand more. I always learn something new. My visual style is more ‘Vogue’, but my vibe is more ‘Beastie Boys’, so by combining these two disparate styles I’m using the book to span the spectrum of the diverse interests and inspirations that influence my work.

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Reflection Where I've Been

We all come from somewhere, we all have a path to where we are today. And sometimes it helps us to refine where we want to go by taking stock of where we’ve been. This project in the Spring of first year (2020, but pre-pandemic) asked me to reflect on myself and craft a personal visual narrative that contemplated questions that address identity, both personal and design-wise. Then present to the class as a way to mark a point in time. As I was beginning to focus on refining my creative processes, it was important, and maybe essential, to try and articulate it at the outset of the semester. It was nice to take stock of the progress I’d made over the previous year-and-a-half since I started formally pursuing art and design. It’s probably always important to continue these types of reflections; to constantly review and refine your process, to look back and see the progress you’ve made and the avenues you’ve explored. I have found that reflections are most useful once you’ve had a little space and time away from a project, or set of work, to be able to appropriately, honestly, and usefully learn from and appreciate the work. You may like it more, or less, but at the very least it’s an opportunity to mark a point in time.

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Filter of Perspective

Design isn’t made in a vacuum. We all reference the work of others. It inspires and influences in many ways, one of the most important being visual. This project asked me to catalog and analyze the inspiration I collected, saved, archived, or bookmarked to date. Then take stock of the formal strategies and ideas that appear, and identify the threads of connection between everything. Collecting and analyzing work that inspires, impresses, and intrigues me confirmed two things. My taste is eclectic, but it’s consistent. I see a wide variety in styles and outputs that I appreciate and enjoy, but I also see the same artists and themes resurfacing again and again. Even when I find new artists and inspirations, they’re based on the same principles — pushing boundaries, experimenting, and providing delight for the viewer.

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Spectacular

It Was All Wonderful

When you’re on a threshold you don’t know what lies ahead. You may think you know, you may have a plan, but the truth is you never really know what’s coming next. There is so little in life that we actually control… This may seem disheartening and scary, but rest assured, opportunities lie in those transitory gaps of life. I can attest to that. In the midst of heartache and hardship, disaster and despair are you still able to experience joy? Can a terrbile situation sometimes feel like paradise? And after the greatest loss of your life, what have you gained? This project asked us to explore the concept of liminality from a visual perspective. Liminality is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the threshold of/or between two different existential planes. My project was based on another a time in my life very similar to the pandemic of 2020, where I was basically quarantined with my family for six months. In November 2017, my father was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, a rare and incurable brain tumor, guaranteed to end in death. We didn’t know how long he would live, so we were living in a state between life and death. We waited on edge everyday for the next seizure or blood clot or yet to be discovered disaster to happen, just hoping nothing would.

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Most days were a boring and uneventful string of simple tasks, something we welcomed, because that meant Dad had survived another day and he was safe. The tumor made Dad largely incapable of walking and needing 24/7 care, so I spent every day in the house with him. It was a time of anxiety and stillness, of long days and short weeks, where time didn’t seem to pass, except when marked by light or dark, but it was winter, so it was dark most of the time. There was no calendar, no deadlines to meet, time formed around doctor’s appointments and medication schedules. There was a distinct demarcation though between pre- and post-diagnosis. And then there was ‘after’. How do you make the most of time when you know it’s limited? How do you experience joy and remain positive when the outcome is destined to be the opposite of what you desire? In the midst of all that heartache and hardship, disaster and despair it was still possible to experience joy. Surprisingly, if you look carefully enough, sometimes you can experience true happiness in a situation that is hell. I would never have chosen for my dad to die of a brain tumor. It was torture to watch him suffer for six months, but it was also one of the greatest joys of my life to be with him every day. During the worst time of my life I had some of my happiest moments, and, without knowing at the time, that experience built a strength and sensitivity that would change everything. In uncertain and tense times I keep coming back to my father’s words and how he explained our time together between his diagnosis and death, ‘I think every day how lucky we are to have each other. To be able to have this time together is really special. Our world has kind of stopped in a way. We know this is unique time. Most people never get this chance, but, for us, we get the chance to understand how valuable and how special this is. It’s a spectacular experience. It’s not the experience we thought we might have, but it’s really a unique experience and I love every minute of it.’ And what I realize, for myself, is that it’s all liminal, life is a continually liminal experience, if we do it right. It’s all change and adaptation, growth and a constant state of ‘becoming’, and deciding, who we will be next. It’s not the experience we thought we might have. It may take longer than you thought, or hoped. It’s all unique. It’s all spectacular.

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Building Blocks

Hearing My Father's Voice Through a Visual System

This project asked us to explore scale, proportion, rhythm and meaning through designing a two dimensional set of symbols and then translating that symbol set to a three dimensional storytelling device. I selected the topic of the feelings related to grief because it’s something that people don’t understand until they experience it. It’s also extremely challenging communicate to others about effectively with words. I wanted to see if I could create visuals for feelings. I started by creating eight symbols to reflect feelings related to grief: angry, anxious, afraid, guilty, sad, empty/lonely, restless/unsettled, detached. But when I thought about being in a grieving place, what that person wants is a way forward, so I decided to design the eight symbols related to the relief feeling that countered each grief feeling: joyful/hopeful, composed/ peaceful, safe/assured/brave, unburdened/carefree, cheerful/buoyant, embraced/loved, calm/content, engaged/connected.

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My three dimensional objects are a set of custom-cut pine wood blocks for my mother to use as a tool to help her move through feelings of grief related to my dad’s death. They are designed to sit out on a shelf to be viewed as a general visual item and most viewers will see them as purely objects d’art; however, since my mother is the intended audience, an audience of one, she can activate the design more fully. When my mom feels one of the feelings in the set, she can pick up that block and hidden on the bottom are copy drawings of my dad’s handwriting taken from actual letters he wrote with a phrase he would have said to her in that specific situation to ease her mind if he were still alive today. The intent is that she can read the phrase and see his handwriting to be able to hear his voice in her head and move through that difficult emotional moment. People who never pick the block up will not see the personal sentiments on the bottom and be none the wiser, but if they do, that’s fine, they are not secret messages.

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Twelve Months A Visual Autobiography

The original prompt for this project was to write a 1000 word statement about a day in your life exactly five years from today and then create a body of graphic design that you, five years from now, will make. I had challenges with this project from the start. First of all, I don’t think next year is guaranteed, let alone five years from now... I used to believe in that, but after my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor and dead six months later, I just don’t believe in waiting to do anything I want to do anymore. Why wait for a day that may never come when I can just do what I want now? I honestly had no idea where to start, but I love the ocean and I started looking at signal flags. They’re bright, graphic, and I love the layered meaning behind them. Not only do they stand for single letters, but sequences can be strung together to create entire sentences. Then I began exploring signals and coded language as a way to explore an emotional journey. I was interested in messages and information that can be both obvious and obscured at the same time. We all exist with the events of our lives, they’re a part of what shapes us — who we are, our values, our reactions, and how we move through life. We may not tell people everything about ourselves or what’s happened in our lives, but we encounter everyone as a whole sum of their experiences, whether we know it or not. This exhibition is a visual expression of a twelve month period from May 2018–May 2019 where most people I encountered did not know I had just experienced the worst six months of my life, yet they were interacting with that hidden aspect of my life story. The exploration of a simultaneous hidden and obvious language led me to researching nautical flags. Each flag pattern stands for a letter and they can

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be combined to spell out words, or they can be combined into combinations of letters that stand for words. An entire dictionary of words created through combinations of three or four nautical flags. I took the visual forms of the nautical flags, which are known as distress flags, and I wanted to change them into a personal language of visual forms that could express an emotional journey through distress and the process of enduring the state of despair and emerging into a life of limitless potential. I kept the structure of the visual form the same as distress flags to signal to the audience that a coded language exists here and, if they are familiar with nautical flags, it’s likely they will be able to read the messages contained within the panels. However, I wanted to make these symbols my own, so I experimented with color to transform them from a language of distress to a language of evolution, adaptation, and resiliency. I began by hand painting all the flags, then I decided to create them digitally. I began the color exploration by translating the flags into their complementary colors, then I pushed them to a hue of their original color. I wanted a greater intensity of feeling for the audience, so finally I translated those hues into a highly vibrant hue to express the high energy of the emotion, which can be read as positive or negative, but always intense. I ended up with a vibrant set of color forms, rooted in coded communication, but now a language completely my own. A language that can express feeling and rhythm, even if the underlying message is not decoded by the viewer. The exhibition contains 12 panels, representative of the twelve months following my father’s death where I wrestled through time to remake my life in a meaningful and purposeful way. During that time I collected bits and pieces of language in a notebook that provided encouragement or focus or motivation. I would read through them often and add to the notebook whenever I found something that hit home. These items included things my father said or wrote to me, both before and during his illness, song lyrics, quotes, and self-written notes. Each panel represents part of that 12-month journey from May 2018 - May 2019 and the messages on each panel are arranged to reflect the notes I kept or wrote down during that period, my emotional capacity and state at that time, and how I pushed myself through to create a new life. Each panel can be decoded; however, I chose not to include a key to the visual form because they’ve become so much more than the phrases they contain. These panels now represent a journey, anyone’s journey, and that life can contain setbacks and devastations you think you cannot endure, but that sometimes, even in the worst of circumstances, something beautiful emerges. Possibilities still abound. Opportunities for joy and accomplishment that you never fathomed, and that never would have occurred, can materialize. These panels represent a period of time where I was constantly channeling sorrow, pain, and anxiety into joy through the process of making. In that process I remade myself, in the words of George Braque, turning my wounds into light. About My Work

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The Price of Love

An Even, But Uncomfortable, Exchange

What do you value and why? How do you assess worth? Create a design that considers the idea of value within currency systems and beyond based on a text of your choosing and some instances of currency symbols. In the past few years I’ve thought a great deal about what’s truly valuable and why, so I knew I wanted to make this piece about worth and value that can’t be quantified. I started by exploring the question: If everything comes at a cost, but some things are priceless, what is the price of things you cannot buy….? Love is paid in grief dollars Wisdom is paid in youth dollars Empathy is paid in pain dollars Relationship/Companionship is paid in autonomy dollars Parenthood is paid in sacrificing yourself dollars Fame is paid in privacy dollars Then I started thinking about how the people I love are the most valuable thing in my life, they always come first. I’ve also often heard that grief is the price of love, which feels true, but that can’t be the end of the story, can it? I decided to use this project to explore what love costs. And I came up with the following writing/poem to use for the poster:

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Love will cost you Grief, but Grief buys Pain Pain buys Exhaustion Exhaustion buys Strength Strength buys Grit Grit buys Resilience Resilience buys Self-confidence Self-confidence buys Joy Joy buys Love I then proceeded to make a series of nineteen exploratory posters to figure out how to translate this text into a visual form. I researched all types of currency symbols and used those symbols to construct the words in order to contrast the idea of monetary worth and emotional worth. I hope in the end that people realize that love is always worth it. Love buys more love.

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Inquiry as Critique

An Open Source Conversation on Graphic Design

In graphic design theory class we created an image essay by collecting ten found and self-made images we wanted to explore more through writing. The images needed to relate thematically to our class readings and discussions. They could be work we enjoyed, images we made, or a project we made. I selected a mix of found graphic design, designs I find intriguing, and one personal project across a multitude of topics. As I began to collect images, I had lots of questions about them, but not many answers. So, I decided to create a public Google doc to ask those questions and start open conversations about graphic design related to larger societal issues. I included instructions on how to participate and for each image I provide my commentary and leave space for people to leave their own comments.

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I used architect’s daughter as the typeface to create a sense of familiarity and warmth, as it looks like a handwritten typeface. In addition, I am the daughter of an architect. Where I used the work or images of other artists, I highlighted their names to give credit and differentiate from the photos and work I created. The result is an open-source, visual conversation about graphic design. A Google doc provides a broad, accessible platform for people to ask and answer questions and express opinions. Most importantly this document is a place to learn and evolve as designers and people.

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Voting From a Distance A Presidential Election in a Pandemic

For this data visualization project we examined what the 2020 Presidential Election would look like amid the coronavirus pandemic. Research an aspect of how the pandemic may impact traditional voting and create a infographic displaying multiple levels of information that reveal your insights, inform your viewers, and influence their thinking. I addressed the topic of whether we should adopt mail-in and/or remote voting to accommodate for people who felt uncomfortable voting at an in-person polling place. Instead of jumping to adopt a new system so close to an election, I wanted to research existing voting methods that provided the ability to vote from a distance, via the US mail system, thereby allowing people to avoid the need to attend a polling place in person.

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My research revealed five states already have permanent mail in voting and most of the remaining states allow for voting by absentee ballot for any reason, as long as a voter registers by a certain date. Based on this research, I designed an Instagram campaign providing information about how to vote in the November 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, my home state, without having to physically go to a polling place on November 3. The campaign includes registration date and requirements, ballot request date, and ballot return deadline and methods. I used nontraditional political colors to remove partisan bias.

About My Work

139

Modes of Thinking

Divergent + Convergent = Lateral

I’ve always been equal parts ‘right’ and ‘left’ brain — analytical and creative, convergent and divergent. That mode of operating puts me a little in no man’s land when it comes to methodology. When I start a project it’s usually with a question, problem, or interest. Generally I go straight to the dictionary to define the language around what I’m trying to achieve and then it’s on the research, which tends to become a rabbit hole of interesting, if not exactly connected topics. In the beginning, I tend to collect more questions than answers. Then I circle back to the brief, as well as the definitions and goals I wrote at the project’s outset to refocus. I start narrowing the questions that need to be addressed and tucking away the other interesting questions for use on a future project. This is called lateral thinking — combining divergent and convergent modes of thinking. Asking questions creates ideas. Seeking answers necessitates collecting facts. And when I combine the two, I make my strongest work. These two pieces, the postcard above and the poster to the right, demonstrate how I visualize my methodology around design research. Allowing questions to drive creativity and then organizing and carefully editing those questions to ultimately create the design.

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About My Work

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Aakash Nihilani Artist Monograph

Teams within the class selected artists and we were assigned an artist and tasked with creating a book proposal for the artist that is visually engaging, relevant to the field of contemporary graphic design, and that speaks to the unique characteristics of the artist. The proposed design should formally and conceptually express facets of who the artist is, what they make, why they make it, and the impact of their work. Production specifications should be defined as well. Aakash Nihalani’s work is mostly outdoors on walls and in the public as street art. It is characterized by three themes: Illusion of 3D, geometric forms, grids, and objects; Temporary Installations — using paper tape, cardboard, and paint; City Grid — ‘Coming from a suburban neighborhood, I was captivated by the urban architecture of the city — big boxes filled with smaller boxes — an endless network of cubes.’

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Selected typefaces: display — Oskar Inline Two, inspired by 20th Century Dutch lettering on walls and shopfronts. Reminiscent of tape lines with hard, angular edges. Body & captions — Roboto Light, Nihalani said he wants to highlight the unexpected contours of the city and Roboto has elegant and unexpected curves in a san serif typeface. Grid System: based on the Manhattan map with a city grid feel and some unexpected angled streets reminiscent of Broadway. Production: trim size: 11’ x 11’ geometric, based on square or cube. The book will be a hefty size that still feels good in the hands. Unusual in size for a monograph, the book will easily sit atop a stack of books on a coffee table. Cover: Soft and flexible reflects the impermanence of Nihalani’s work; pure magenta as Nihalani often works with CMYK colors and it’s eye catching on a shelf; saddle stitch with cyan thread; Artist’s name debossed into front and back cover to reflect 3D nature of his work. Includes a package of neon washi tape for reader to experiment with their own creations.

About My Work

143

Pilates Remix

A Documentary of Movement

This project asked us to provide two interests and then make a project based on those. Mine were Pilates and documentary movies. Pilates is a specific sequence of thirty-six moves that increases balance, flexibility, and strength through an amalgamation of different physical exercises. I practice it daily and it provides me with mental grounding and calm, as well as physical exercise. I’ve never actually seen myself do Pilates, so I decided to make a documentary of the physical movements and see where it led me. First, I made a video of myself doing Pilates, which takes about an hour in total. I then took still frames from that video for each movement and created a single gestural symbol for each movement to create the ‘alphabet’ or index of movements. The resulting booklet allows the viewer to see stills of the movement from the original video in conjunction with the symbol. I sliced out the photograph of the image on three sides, like a frame, to allow the viewer to see the full movement in relation to the previous movement without turning the page because in Pilates, not only are the moves considered part of the exercise routine, but the transitions between the moves as well.

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About My Work

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Collection Bauhaus

Inspired by The 1923 Weimar Exhibition Poster

This project asked us to research an iconic, historical poster. Learn about its provenance and the designer who created it. Then, re-imagine the poster 50 ways. After creating 50 new posters, design a content specific framework to present your complete collection. Attracted to the geometric shapes, I selected the poster for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar designed by Joost Schmidt. Schmidt developed the poster, which was designed for a competition, in the form of a cross made up of circles and squares. The first section of this project called for us to take the elements of the poster, exactly as they exist, and create 50 new iterations of those elements and reassemble them into 50 new posters.

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The second part of the assignment was to take the 50 new posters and apply them into a new framework to re-contextualize the work in an exciting way. The elements of the poster and limited color palette led me to exploring abstract geometric patterns and motifs in cream, white, red, and black. Inspired by Bauhaus’ commitment to teaching every aspect of the fundamental elements of design across many disciplines including graphic design, architecture, interior design, carpentry, metal, ceramics, stained glass, wall painting, weaving, and typography; I decided to create a collection of homewares. The ensuing final design is a complete catalog for the Bauhaus Collection, a limited edition of bedding, towels, textiles, wallpaper, throw pillows, ceramic wares, aprons, totes, and fabric by the yard. The catalog includes product names, descriptions, and pricing all consistent with the Bauhaus theme of the collection.

About My Work

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Ruth Gikow, Painter

Book Design Based on Audio Interview

Karl Eugene Fortess (1907–1993) was a painter and printmaker who headed the BU School of Visual Arts printmaking department from 1956–1973. Beginning in the 1960s, Fortess created 269 ‘audio-portraits’ (recorded interviews) of prominent American artists. I selected the Ruth Gikow interview from the Karl Fortess Audio Archive at Boston University to translate from listening experience into a reading experience. The assignment required us to listen to and transcribe an interview from the archive, combine it with a supplemental text of our choice, and integrate them into a single book. We were also asked to creatively include a second text within the book that would provide some sort of context or tie into the content of the interview. For my second text, I selected the article Eleven Female Abstract Expressionists You Should Know, which serves to illustrate the position of women painters at the time and contrast Ruth’s work. Gikow was a figurative painter at a time when abstraction was more popular, thus her style bucked the trend of the day. Gikow, like many women painters at the time, felt slighted and under appreciated; however, her husband, Jack Levine, who was also a painter, was quite supportive of her work and she did have a number of solo and group shows during her lifetime — something many of her contemporaries did not, and went on to have a strong academic career as a painting professor.

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I created a layout for the book based on the golden section and used separate scales of that area to denote sections for Fortess and Gikow’s voices. Fortess’ voice is in the largest version of the golden section because he is an open and welcoming interviewer, looking to draw Gikow out. Gikow is in the smallest version of the golden section because she is tight with her answers and not very forthcoming. Fortess is set in the Whitney typeface, a nod to Boston University, as this is the typeface they use. Gikow is set in Ortica, a typeface designed by Benedetta Bovani and published through Collletttivo in 2019, as a nod to female artists. The angularity of the typeface in the display version echoes Gikow’s caustic answers to some questions. I set pull quotes in Ortica bold in large red letters to demonstrate my agitation at some of the more arresting comments Gikow made during the interview. The book also includes images of Gikow’s work to show the reader the type of paintings she was producing during her lifetime. At the center of the book is a large fold-out article on female abstract painters that were contemporaries of Ruth Gikow, but fairly unknown. This was used to contrast her work to the popular work of the time, but also demonstrate the differences between her and her contemporaries in terms of their personal lives and opportunities in the art world.

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Top Runs 2020

Geography and Data as Symbol Set

This information design project asked us to collect personal data and create a set of symbols that could represent that data. I examined the eight routes that I ran the most frequently in 2020 and outlined them on a map, creating 8 forms or symbols. In this way I took numerical and geographic data and transformed it into visual form with color codes for the topography and location of the run itself. The forms now stand on their own as pure visual symbols, but are also embedded with data, as well as imbued with the feelings and emotions of past runs on that route. These symbols can now be used to catalog runs in a way that presents the data in an easily scannable format.

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About My Work

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Quarantine Runs Zine Logging Miles in Photography

For the Fall 2021 studio kick off charrette, we were assigned random groups and asked to work together over Zoom to define design values and create an interaction or event to build community. Our group thought about finding a way to share with others at a distance in the time of COVID-19. We all decided to make a zine that told something about us and our daily lives to get to know each other. We then used those zines to create a little library of books available to the public. I made a zine that cataloged my daily runs from a visual perspective instead of the classic numerical perspective of mileage and time. In this way I introduced myself to my classmates not only through one of the things I enjoy doing outside of design, running, but also some of the qualities I consider core to who I am — commitment, consistency, toughness, and perseverance. Along my runs I snapped photos so my group members could get a sense for where I live and where I’m coming from geographically. The design emphasizes the environment of the run, as well as the daily consistency of my runs every day. The design reflects my perspective on running — that

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it’s less about being the fastest or best runner and more about making a commitment to yourself and improving, or at the very least getting out there, each day. The layout mimics old print maps that allow you to find your location by coordinating a letter and number and then finding the town within that square. I took that familiar structure and flipped it, correlating a photo from each run (or a blank square if I didn’t take a photo that day) with a letter and number. Using that letter and number combination, the reader can find out the actual mileage and date of the run in the caption. As the final piece of this project we all printed and bound a number of our zines and distributed them through the existing distribution channel of Little Libraries throughout the Boston area as a way to connect with the larger community in the time of COVID. We included a link to a Google map we created that shows all the locations of our zines.

About My Work

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Biography as Bookshelf Kari Everson As Books She May Own

Day one of first year studio in 2019 we were partnered up with a random classmate and used The New York Times article ‘The 36 Questions That Lead to Love’ written by Daniel Jones in 2015 to get to know each other. Despite having never met, my partner, Kari Everson, and I spent a couple hours talking through these questions in a surprisingly open and honest conversation. We left studio that day feeling like the closest of friends (and today that is still true). Using the content of our conversation, I was to develop a point of view on Kari, her narrative so to speak, and create a visual biography introducing her to the rest of our class. Thinking about Kari I wanted to demonstrate her intelligence, introspection, and conscientiousness. Kari is extremely thoughtful and generally reserved, but well-informed, opinionated, and able to speak her mind. (All these things remain true about Kari, so maybe there really is some magic in those thirtysix questions…)

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So, I imagined telling Kari’s life story through her bookshelf. What if someone could only understand Kari by looking at the books she owned? What would those books be, what would they communicate about her to a viewer? And how could I get the viewer to contemplate her through the book titles and not focus on the books themselves…? I selected books that would tell Kari’s journey, expressing her unique and remarkable aspects. The resulting poster was a simplified color study of each book cover with the cover titles in a clean sans serif font to allow the viewer to contemplate what the forms represent, and how the titles relate to each other and the theme of the poster.

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Safe Space

A Conversation as Foldable Booklet Poster

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This prompt in typography class asked us to have a real time conversation with a classmate and use the content of that conversation to create a design emphasizing ideas and reflections on your personal understanding of the concept of an exchange. Paired with a fellow second year, Sohini Mukherjee, we decided to delve into some deep questions since we already knew each other pretty well. We used Google docs to have our conversation because it’s been a frequent collaboration platform for us lately. Each of us posed four questions and we each answered all eight questions and commented on each other’s responses. We used some pretty deep and personal questions, so we agreed there would be no judgment regarding the answers, that this was a safe space for conversation. The ensuing conversation only confirmed to me how very similar we all are as humans. Sohini and I have extremely different backgrounds, but the feelings we expressed about the topics brought up in the conversation were very similar. The resulting design is a folded booklet where each question is displayed on it’s own panel. I used different typefaces to represent each of our personalities, Mokoko, a modern serif for Sohini, and Forma DJR Deck, a modern sans serif for me. I used highlighting to help recreate the thread of comments between us. The entire booklet unfolds into a large scale poster titled Safe Space.

About My Work

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Signs & Signage Collecting Type in the Wild

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We’re surrounded by graphic design, we’re just not looking for it. To borrow from the movie Love Actually: type is, in fact, all around us. This prompt asked us to start by observing the world around us and not only notice ‘type in the wild’, but start seeking it out and documenting it with our camera phones. The ultimate intention was to find a theme through documenting and collecting type, then organize that content into a book design. I started this project as a purely exploratory process, photographing any typography I saw from spray paint on the street and hand painted type to slick business signage and neon signs. Being on the go all the time, walking through Boston and driving to the North Shore of Massachusetts. Slowly the theme emerged of signs and signage. I broke it out into six categories and used those categories as chapters ultimately creating a largely photographic survey of type we pass by every day, without even noticing. Hopefully this book inspires people to look around every once in a while because, to co-opt another famous movie, as Ferris Bueller would say, ‘Type moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’

About My Work

159

How to Make a 90′s Mix Tape A Handmade Zine for Kids These Days

The project here had three goals: make a zine, show a personal response to where you are and how you’re feeling at the current moment, and have fun. No right, no wrong, just make. I listened to A LOT of music as a way to cope with the pandemic quarantine. I listened while I worked and especially while I ran. Using Spotify, I can immediately find any song I want, which is kind of amazing. That made me think about how hard it used to be to listen to a specific song exactly when you wanted. You just had to wait for it to come on the radio. You couldn’t really choose what you heard when and you couldn’t replay it again. I also thought about how much I missed my classmates and Professor OrtDinoor. So, I thought back to how I used to make mix tapes for my friends or sister to show them how important they were to me. It was really a labor of love because you curated the list, spent hours waiting for the songs to come on the radio, and then hand decorated the cover and made the song

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list, so you only made mix tapes for really important people. As a ‘love letter’ to my classmates, and a nod to how rapidly evolving technology simultaneously makes life more easy while subtly confiscating its simplicity, I created an instructional zine on how to make a 90’s mix tape. It contains all the steps on physically how to make a mix tape, as well as capturing the handmade aesthetic of the peak of mix tape culture. I made the zine in the manner you would have back in the 90’s as well, hand drawn type and illustrations were scanned in, laid out on the computer and then printed on 8 ½” x 11” sheets of neon paper and saddle stitch stapled. The result was a fun, funky little zine that was a labor of love dedicated to my classmates and Professor Ort-Dinoor.

About My Work

161

Fifty Questions Research Methodology

This project asked us to explore our personal research methodology through conceptual and formal questions. I researched existing texts, within and outside of design, to develop a set of personal questions that relate to the way I think about design, but extend to life in general. I have LOTS of questions and, usually, trying to answer those questions just leads me to more questions. The more I learn, the more I figure out how much I don’t know. The process for this project echoed my process for most of my projects: I started writing down every question that popped into my brain, trying to get the questions out onto a piece of paper as quickly as possible, in ‘stream of consciousness’ writing. I ended up with not fifty questions, but more like three hundred. Then I sorted the questions into categories and selected my favorites from there. The mixture of questions reflects my multipotentialite nature ranging from philosophical —Are feelings facts? — to hilarious —Is a hot dog a sandwich? Credit to the notorious RBG1. 1 Ruth Bader Ginsburg settles it for Stephen Colbert: Hot dogs are sandwiches. ‘Is a hot dog a sandwich?’ Colbert asked Ginsburg, to which she quickly replies, ‘You tell me what a sandwich is and then I’ll tell you if a hot dog is a sandwich.’ https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/22/politics/ruth-baderginsburg-stephen-colbert-workout

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As for output, I used to cross stitch as a kid and that’s a form of design, so I thought it appropriate to use sewing for this discovery process. Questions come and go in our heads, they reorder, some we dwell on for a while and some float away. Given the ephemeral nature of questions I didn’t knot any of the stitching; it can be pulled out at any time. Some of the questions were even left in pencil. Everything is in my handwriting since they’re personal questions. It took a while to hand stitch the questions and that process became a form of meditation on each one. The time it took to stitch each square forced me to roll the question around in my mind and contemplate it in a deeper way than if I simply printed them out on poster or in a booklet. I chose muslin because it’s used to make test garments before using expensive fabric for the final item, which mirrored this process of exploration. The installation is totally flexible — it’s held together with safety pins and I can add or remove squares with ease. This construction accentuates the impermanence of the entire project and the impermanence in life. Questions come and go and some questions will never be answered.

About My Work

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Re-Memory

Collection as Experience

This project asked us to work in teams to think about the process of blending content, story, and design. We were asked to create a collection and make a collaborative project in one of three potential ways: a raw collection and a translation of that, documentation of an experience or event, or personal data collection. The output was to be a poster and some sort of motion graphic or video. We decided to pursue a project around memory and how simple, everyday objects could hold great value because of the memory associated with them instead of their monetary worth. Instead of making three distinct posters and separate projects based on the same collected content, we decided to mix our three very different styles, and thus, our memories, into a single, multi-faceted project. Our poster was a large-scale, 8’ x 8’, collage installation of wheat-pasted posters. The motion portion of the project was time-lapse of the actual creation of the ‘poster’. The entire project became both an experience and event, creating a memory in the process.

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We decided to compose our wheat-pasted piece of many posters in different sizes and styles, overlapping one another over the course of an extended time period. This would help us represent the individuality of memory; how memories can become layered over time, how they deteriorate and they crop back up, and sometimes get forgotten to time. Thus, this project explored the concept of memory in two ways. First, how memory is connected to, and felt through, objects and how a tangible item can hold more, and be worth more, than the monetary value of the object itself. It also explored the creation of an installation piece as a memory itself, the event only happened once and there are some layers of the poster that are no longer visible, so the entire endeavor represents how memory can be created and lost to time.

About My Work

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Extreme Scale Shifting Perspectives

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Deeply feeling the extreme monotony of pandemic life — the same routine, the same location, the isolation — I endeavored to reflect it in a series of experimental projects. The pandemic lifestyle is isolating and repetitive to an extreme level, so this project attempted to communicate that state. I photographed myself in my usual work spot at home and blew it up into a 5’ x 4’ poster as a backdrop, as if my condition was constantly looming over me each day. I then retook photos in front of that poster reflecting how much time I spend in one spot. My intention was to create a series of large scale posters of photos of myself embedded further and further in layers. Then I remembered the paper fortune teller games I made as a kid. That got me thinking about how my ‘fortune’ was the same each day. So, I created a series of paper fortune tellers out of images to show that no matter what day it was I would be to be at home, doing work, in the same location. Finally, I created a digital collage reflective of the fact that all the days are the same and it doesn’t matter what day it is, they all blend together. I imagine this could be a billboard that people would relate to, as this monotony and lack of bearing with relation to time is such a large part of life right now.

About My Work

167

Typography as Response How the News Makes Me Feel

Each week in the Fall of 2019 I chose two stories from the news to respond to in the form of a typographic poster. These were not illustrations for the stories, but commentary. The format constraints were: 8 1/2” x 11” portrait, black and white (including gray) and type only.

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About My Work

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All The Light We Rarely See A Project About Nothing

The wheel's hub holds thirty spokes Utility depends on the hole through the hub. the potter's clay forms a vessel It is the space within that serves. A house id build with solid walls The nothingness of window and door alone renders it usable, That which exists may be transformed What is nonexistent has boundless uses. - Lao-Tse A simple, yet brutal, project prompted by my conversation with Michael Rock. If thesis is not about content, but method, what happens when you remove content altogether and demand that the design be about nothing? ‘Of course, nothing is never nothing, it is always something, but in defining what you mean by Nothing, I hope you will reveal something specific about your thesis.’1 1 Rock, Michael. Multiple Signatures: on Designers, Authors, Readers and Users. Rizzoli International Publications, 2013. p. 96.

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For Spring 2020 studio I took a series of photos of light and shadows for our collection project, but I never ended up using them. I thought they were so interesting in shape and form. I didn’t know how, or if, I would ever use them, but I saved them anyway. Light is the absence of darkness and shadow is the absence of light, so I though I would try and make something out of these photos. I traced the different shadows digitally and then removed the photos to simply leave the lines. I ended up with some interesting shapes and overlays, which I turned into patterns and graphic visuals. I don’t love this project yet, I don’t even think it’s finished. It definitely needs a few more iterations. This project is important because it reminded me that you can create design out of anything, even nothing. It also reminded me to continue revisiting old work or collections that never produced work. By looking carefully, inspiration and design fodder is everywhere, even in the places where you think there’s nothing.

About My Work

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Have One More Try

An Inspirational Poem As Poster... With Rules

This project asked us to turn words of aspiration and inspiration into a poster to inspire and motivate our grad studio community. First, I had to find the right content. I selected the poem ‘The Quitter’ by Robert W. Service. It’s a poem my dad used to recite to me when I was frustrated or down, needed a kick in the rear, or even a laugh. It always got me going and still does. I thought my classmates could also find some encouragement and humor in the poem. There was a twist in this project though. There were five constraints to accommodate in this poster. Constraints that we would randomly draw a from a hat full of paper slips full of wild and obscure adjectives or phrases. My random constraints were: • Portrait • Landscape • Things you see from 10 feet • Urban • Heavy

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First, I oriented the poster in portrait layout. I created the look of a cityscape with 3D type to satisfy the landscape and urban requirements. I used many different weights of the Knockout typeface to help reinforce the texture of an urban landscape and the density of buildings with windows that create points of light peeking through them. Knockout can be a very heavy and bold typeface, so that addressed the heavy element. I used some extremely large and bold type sizes to attract the viewer from far away into approaching the poster. As the viewer approaches the poster, smaller type draws them in to examine the details, thus , satisfying the ‘things you see from 10 feet’ constraint.

About My Work

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A Century of Trend

Pop Culture Data - Baby Names and Color

This information design project asked us to identify a topic and use two to three data sets to chronicle change over time to stimulate a new perspective. We were to correlate related topics to shape a layered informational experience, then visually simplify and summarize our idea through an information graphic. For this project I started thinking about trends in popular society and how trends can alter slightly year over year, but reveal drastic changes when the scope is zoomed out to, say 100 years. I started Googling my own name and looking at the variability in its popularity over time. Then I went down the rabbit hole of looking at the most popular baby names in the United States from 1900 to 2020. Popular baby names don’t have a great societal impact, but they are a reflection of their era. I wanted to find a second data set that was equally banal, but also indicative of a certain era, so I began researching colors. Starting with the Pantone color of the year in 2020, I worked backward to 1900 finding the most popular

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color for each year. I combined the most popular baby name and year with a background color of the corresponding year into a poster composed of a series of squares that were organized into rows of decades. The resulting poster captures the feel of each decade surprisingly well as a visual representation. It also demonstrates how subtle things can shift from year to year, but in retrospect how much changes over the years. I also created a corresponding GIF that cycles through each year’s name/ color combination. Based on the occurrences of 2020, I made a prediction for 2021’s color and most popular baby name.

About My Work

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Branding BU's Art Galleries A Flexible System

This project in visual systems asked us to design an identity system to reflect and position Boston University’s art galleries. The system needed to act as a dynamic container, able to respond to any exhibition, no matter the scale or the medium. The first thing I did to create a new branding system for the BU Art Galleries was to select five words that would embody the new brand. After many hours of mulling and consulting the thesaurus I settled on: accessible, creative, multimodal, vibrant, avant garde, and limitless. I took those words and wrote a mission statement to guide my design work. Boston University Art Galleries are vibrant spaces to connect artists, evolving in their education and practice, to community members through showcasing their creations in accessible, welcoming environments. Unbounded in our ideas, mediums and practice, we invite conversation and create connection through avant garde exploration.

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The galleries are split between two buildings and I wanted to create a system that would acknowledge the unique qualities of the galleries and join them under one brand. I started with BU campus map and drew a shape around each of the two buildings and the street they both sit on. In this way I took the physical location and geography that separates the galleries and joined them into a single mark. I wanted a flexible system to accept any medium or input and portray movement, structure, so I took that mark and created a 3D version that could be oriented in multiple angles.1 I decided the core brand colors would be a simple, clean black and white, and created the main logo in black on white, which can easily be reversed out to white on a black background. Anchored by strong form and typography, as well as the consistency of black and white, this structure provides stable visual continuity. Individual exhibitions can have unique accent colors to help differentiate shows and provide a visual cue that an exhibition space is hosting a new show. The complimentary colors will be drawn from dominant colors of one of the works in the exhibition. I selected the Whitney typeface to balance space efficiency and legibility at a distance in a single design: its compact forms, larger lowercase, ample counters, and open shapes making it clear under any circumstances. It also connects to BU’s overall branding, as well as contemporary art and museums. The slanted terminals reflect the vibrancy and movement of Commonwealth Ave., where the BU galleries reside.

1 https://sagmeister.com/work/casa-da-musica/

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a b o

o u t

design Section Name

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Writing About Design

What is Design? Is There a (New) Power Developed in Being Broken? Designer/Attorney Same, But Different. Flow That Beautiful Beast, That Beastly Beauty Audience of One The Personal is the Universal Design is Reinvention The Permanent Impermanence of Design Limitless Design’s Superpower Is Also Its Kryptonite

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even

design? About Design

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What Even is Design?

Well, Here’s What I Think Anyway...

Design is the physical manifestation of the limitlessness potential of the human imagination. Design makes reinvention possible, bringing ideas, desires and possibilities into reality. It’s a means to question, probe, discover, and contemplate. Design drives a cycle of investigation and discovery, revealing insights to an ever expanding world of possibilities that lie on the horizon. The essential building blocks of design for me are multipotentiality, makeability (more specifically the Dutch concept of Maakbaarheid1), emotion, meaning, and movement. Ideologically, my two guiding tenets, not only in design, but in life, are the concept of multipotentiality — the ability and preference of a person, particularly one of strong intellectual or artistic curiosity, to pursue and excel in different fields — and makeability (the Dutch ideology of Maakbaarheid) — the idea that the world around us is inherently shaped by humans, physically and psychologically, and design is the essential factor in that shaping. Philosophically, I adhere to the malleability of life, the idea that nothing is predetermined, everything is shaped by people, therefore everything can, and will, change, it’s simply a matter of how you choose to change it. These concepts remind me not to prejudge situations or people, but to see them as they are and look for the potential in all things, good and bad.

1 Ericson, Magnus. ‘Design and Ideology — Interview with Experimental Jetset Studio (Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen)’. Forms of Inquiry Catalog. September 15, 2008. https:// www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/design-ideology.

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Process-wise emotion, meaning2, and movement are inextricably entwined with design for me. My process always starts with what I want to communicate, in words and in feelings. I use those drivers to design until I hit a block, then I run to release my brain and the ideas come floating in. Alternately, when sorrow tightens its grip like a vice on my heart, I start designing and feel myself begin to release from emotional paralysis. It’s not a cycle per se, there is no order, but it’s a carefully balanced trifecta between physical movement, emotional expression, and design So much of the work I’m most proud of creating has come out of this combination of emotion, meaning, and physical activity that helps activate my design process. There is nothing I could pour myself into more fully that can lift me back out of any depth than expression through creativity in design. On a broader level, design is egalitarian and accessible. It provides a means of empowerment on a personal level, to reinvent yourself whenever and however you like, and at a societal level, to remake the world we live in to fit the needs of the community. Philosophy and theory re-imagine what could be. Design creates concrete forms, structures, and language that bring ideas and conjecture into reality, for an audience of one or the whole world. I am naturally averse to ambiguity in life, but in design I prefer it. If something is nascent or nebulous it’s waiting to be shaped. Design invites reinvention and exploration. It’s less about what you are making and more why you’re making it and how you are about the making. The more you design, the more fluid, inventive, and experimental you get. We never stop growing or changing as people, that’s the goal anyway, and design is a reflection of that growth process. Design imbues people that practice it with a constant motion to improve and learn. I find that what I’m mostly learning is how much more progress there is to make and how much more I want to try. Design doesn’t become easier as you improve, it’s simply an expanding horizon as you grow. I’ll probably never be able to fully explain what design is, or exactly what a designer does, but that’s fine with me. I’d rather be in a profession that starts a conversation than gives an answer anyway. A designer does anything they want. 2 “Design must be meaningful. And ‘meaningful’ replaces such semantically loaded expressions as ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘cute’, ‘disgusting’, glamorous’, ‘realistic’, ‘obscure’, ‘abstract’, and ‘nice,’ labels convenient to a bankrupt mind when confronted by Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Beethoven’s Eroica, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, In all of these we respond to that which has meaning.” Papanek, Victor. Design for the Real World.

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Is There a (New) Power Developed in Being Broken? Positive Byproducts of Terrible Things

My brand new Macbook has been broken lately and I resorted to jerryrigging my dad’s old 2012 Macbook Air to get things done for school. This cuts both ways, I’m lucky enough to have a backup laptop, but sometimes simply typing on this keyboard feels like a tidal wave of emptiness and loss. His fingers used to tap away on these keys as he inefficiently hunted and pecked for keys to build words. His touch used to grace the trackpad where my fingers now drag, pinch, and spread. Knowing he made all the same gestures feels as though I just might be touching him again in a way. And if the time-space continuum didn’t exist, he’d be here right now working on this computer instead of me. My dad should be here and I’m so angry that he’s not. I’m not angry with him, or at him, or at anyone or anything for that matter. It’s just a feeling that exists, hanging unseen like humidity in the air. I live with it, but sometimes it breaks me down, often at the most innocuous moments. Through some random, cosmic luck, or un-luck, of the draw, my dad got an incurable brain tumor and he died. As we all will. And that’s what makes it so infuriating, it’s so banal. It was always going to be this way. Death is the only thing in life guaranteed to happen to all of us and it happened to

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my dad. Only, when I least expected it. When I wasn’t prepared for it. But, then again, really when are you and how would you prepare for it anyway…? I accept it, the fact exists that he’s not here and through all the brokenness you must push on and continue to live; to grow, to change. But there’s NOWHERE to put that kind of anger, there’s no name for it or box to label with it — ‘they’ did that so I hate ‘them’, ‘it’ caused that, so I hate ‘it’ — so it doesn’t come out. Or, rather, I suppress the overwhelming burning heat in my chest with a clenched jaw as steam rises off my heart and slowly, unintentionally leaks out of my eyes no matter the willpower I devote to controlling them. The water thereby creating, what some would recognize as, tears, a sign of sorrow. But I know they are simply byproducts of inflamed rage that has nowhere to go. My dad was always the one that could intuit exactly what I needed, whether it be a soft landing spot or a swift kick start. And especially now, when I’ve finally come into his milieu, design, and I struggle with it because I love it and I’m not good at it, yet. I want so desperately to be better and I want to ask him how. I find the acute moments of loss more intermittent, but not decreased in their intensity. It’s difficult to explain the feeling of knowing that anyone in your life will listen to you, but you only want to talk to the one person that would actually understand you. And not only understand you, but see you more clearly than you see yourself, and reflect it back to you as an accurate depiction to help you find your own path forward. And trying to explain to someone you love, that they can’t help you or see you in the way you need to be seen and they’re not the right person to understand you, is heartbreaking in itself. So you silently hold it in and wonder why the one person that you wouldn’t even have to explain any of this to isn’t here to respond. So, how can I make things when I’m so sad I feel paralyzed? Actually, the better question is how can I NOT make things when I’m so sad. Otherwise, I will stay paralyzed. So many of the things I’ve made that I’m proud of have come out of or resulted from deep sorrow. There was nothing else to pour myself into more fully that I could also use to help dig myself out of but creativity. Making and creating is the only way through the broken. In re-assembling the pieces to construct something new, I’m constantly discovering that the wreckage unearths pieces that weren’t there before, somehow the destruction has produced new growth from a barren place.

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Design is the same, we break things down to their elements, see what they’re made of, try to recreate them or put the pieces back together in new and different ways. You’ll never know how strong something is — an idea or concept, a form, a person — until you try and break it down. The Japanese art of Kintsugi, or golden joinery, takes physically broken pottery and melds it back together with an adhesive containing dust of gold, silver, or platinum. Each repaired piece not only honors its unique history, but highlights the previous damage in a way that makes it even more beautiful than before. This analogy applies to my life and design methodologies. Life experiences test our mettle and forge us into stronger and more beautiful people as we build empathy through the process of breaking down and rebuilding. The design critique reflects this process in its honesty, sometimes brutal honesty, designs (and designers) can be broken down, even shattered. But that breakdown is just a cycle in the process of building a more thorough, deeply thought out, and more beautiful end design. You have to be willing to try, to be bad at something, oftentimes before you even know how bad you really are. You have to be willing to put yourself on the line, risk yourself to find that delight.1 In design you have to be willing to risk a lot of exposure — your judgment, your taste, your thoughts and ideals. Design is about being your authentic self and if you’re not doing that, it’s obvious. And if you are, it’s scary. Like bombing down a ski hill, or going for a big dive off a diving board, if you don’t ‘full send’ you risk mediocrity in choosing the safe thing or not exposing yourself to the toughest criticism. There’s no halfway or hold back — that’s death. So, yes, ultimately there is beauty in the breakdown. It’s not always easy, or fun, but there’s a better anything on the other side of being broken, whether it’s a better version of yourself or a design. Breaking tells us how resilient we really are and allows us to reset, re-imagine, and then create that next iteration. And, when another break comes, you’ll know that it’s not forever and it’s just the next step in creating the next best version.

1 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/692/the-show-of-delights Ross Gay on Delight: ‘Sometimes [delight] can exist, like a kernel, at the center of misfortune.’ ‘Delight and curiosity are really tied up. You have to be OK with not knowing things. You have to be actually invested and happy about not knowing things.’ ‘I think delight might actually be more profound when you’ve experienced more, including real loss and tragedy.’ ‘When I think of joy, grown up joy is made up of our sorrow, just like it’s made up of what is pleasing to us. Often, it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to talk about delight without talking about these other things. Delight often implies its absence.’

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Designer/Attorney

Same. But Different.

I already went to design school, just without the visual part. It’s called law school. You’ll never believe me, but they’re actually the same — the same process, the same thought pattern, the same assessment, the same mental and emotional skill set — with different outputs. I used to be a Deputy Attorney General for the State of Delaware in the criminal division. I tried real criminal trials for two years (felt like ten). It wasn’t for me, long-term, so I moved on. I still hold two Bar Admissions, but I’ll probably never formally practice law again. Some would say, ‘Law school? And you’re not a lawyer? Ahh, what a waste.’ And, maybe it is in some ways. Didn’t I have a sort of duty to work in the law with that level of education? Since understanding the law is like holding a key to a secret society with its own language and customs that can impact people’s lives in immense ways, shouldn’t I be putting it to good use for those that are not privileged enough to have access? Maybe. But I would also be miserable, so I don’t think I’d be very effective because you can’t help many people when you can’t help yourself. Anyway, I don’t see it like that. I think having a legal education makes me a better designer. In fact, law school taught me all the aspects design, just not the visual output part. Seriously, it did. Don’t believe me? Ok, then let’s review the case (see, still putting that law degree to good use!)

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Attorney

Designer

Receive a fact pattern (a brief of the timeline and facts that occurred at a particular occurrence)

Receive a brief (a summary of the facts of what’s required for the work)

Assess and account for all possible outcomes resulting from the fact pattern, decide which are most likely and the most prudent course forward

Assess and account for all possible interpretations of the work, decide which are most likely and how to refine the work

Client

Add constraints (facts, evidence, time, budget, message)

Add constraints (medium, assets, time, budget, message)

Be creative: take the constraints and bend them, stretch them, push and pull on them to tell the story you need to tell for your client. Complete freedom within the constraints set out

Be creative: take the constraints and bend them, stretch them, push and pull on them to tell the story you need to tell for your client. Complete freedom within the constraints

Attack your own case: look for holes, press and challenge everything to ensure it holds up, or that you have an answer for every rebuttal, make revisions

Critique your work: look for holes, press and challenge everything to ensure it holds up, have a solid reasoning behind your decisions, make revisions

Acknowledge and account for historical precedent

Interpret and communicate your version of the truth

Provide testimony & evidence (something tangible) to establish authority for your position

Provide a graphic object (testimony & evidence) to establish authority for your position

Research: Combing meticulously through records and rule books

Research: Combing meticulously through typesetting rules and historical references

Observe closely: Looking at the fine details everyone else glazes over (like looking at the same thing over and over), watching people and paying attention to more than what they say

Observe closely: looking at the fine details everyone else glazes over (typefaces and leading), watching and understanding people through their actions and not just words

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I use many of the same strategies I used in case preparation in approaching a design. I write out the intended outcome to clarify my goals. I define the vocabulary around the project, meticulously combing through the thesaurus for the exact right word to describe the feelings and mental connections I’m trying to achieve with my work. I research the subject, looking beyond the obvious surface material on google for the inconspicuous gems of information that will help create a deeper connection between my audience and my work. As an attorney and a designer, you’re always building a world. You’re making a case for others to see things as you do. But, if you’re good, you’re NOT arguing to people that your answer is the exact right one or trying to convince them with unequivocal statements. No, in fact, you’re simply laying out information designed to allow them to lead themselves down a particular path and you sit back and tell them ‘you make up your own mind, I’m just here to provide you with information, I trust you — you’re smart enough to figure it out.’ But the design of that pathway is so meticulous that there’s really only one conclusion to reach and, although they have a ‘choice’, there really is no other way to see the situation except exactly as you’ve designed. ‘Everything, anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down. Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement. I remember what Emerson said, ‘All humans convince nobody. They convince nobody because they are presented as arguments. And then we look at them, we weigh them, we turn them over and then we decide against them. But when something is merely said, or better still, hinted at, then there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination, we are ready to accept it. ‘Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody. They convince nobody because they are presented as arguments. Then we look at them, we weigh them, we turn them over, and we decide against them. But when something is merely said or — better still — hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it.’1 Every time you make a piece of work, you’re building a world for your audience; one that needs to be believable in order to make a connection. However, in many ways, making your case as a designer is much more difficult than it is as an attorney. First, you can’t always explain your designs. Designs life out in the world independently, you can’t stand next to 1

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everything you make and tell people why you chose a particular typeface or color. Second, once it’s out in the world that’s it. As a prosecutor, there was always a second chance to make your point, redirect examination of the witness, bring in a different witness, closing arguments, etc. Third, interpretation of art and design is a much more broad playing field. There’s no DNA or video evidence that you can show people to convince them unequivocally of your point of view. The designer has to present all of the research, historical references, typography, visual language, and the actual text, in a way that the audience can readily accept the designer’s story as true and real. The designer uses all the assets, both visual and contextual as evidence to build their case. The challenge here is that there is no explaining, there is no crossexamination or re-direct. Designers must put their work in the world and it has to hold up on its own. You have to account for all possible interpretations of your work (or try to), thinking about it from various angles to refine the intended outcome. The thing most people would never guess about law school is that it teaches you to be creative, inventive, and innovative. The worst cases with bad facts for your client or no evidence, the cases that seem like they can’t be cracked because the precedent weighs too heavily for the other side? That’s where it gets interesting, that’s where you have to get creative. You have to start looking in odd places, differentiating your case from previous ones, and thinking in obtuse ways to figure out just how you’re going to tell your narrative. Sometimes the greatest creativity comes from the tightest constraints. What can you make when your hands are tied behind your back and you’re blind, that’s where it starts to get fun. For me, great creativity has never sprung from freedom. The prompt ‘make anything you want about anything’ is more paralytic to me than inspiring. No, it’s the impossible situations, the tightest boxes to get out of that make the most interesting work. The intellectual challenge of meeting the constraints and simultaneously surprising the viewer The creativity in being a lawyer and being a designer are the same muscle, you just operate in different size boxes. And by learning to get myself out of a small box, I was learning to think like a designer. I’m not saying every designer should go to law school (far from it!), but I would also like to pose a question. Now that you’ve read my essay, do you think I made a good case?

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Flow

That Beautiful Beast. That Beastly Beauty.

Some days you fly out the door and you’re right into a rhythm like water down a grooved stone, the ease of fluid motion feeling nearly effortless. Your feet don’t strike the ground so much as rebound gracefully over and over, feeling as if propelled forward simply by the trampoline of the roadway. You don’t feel your quads or calves contract, just a smooth glide as you’re lifted across the ground as if you were on a bed of rising air over a completely frictionless surface, like an air hockey table. And your upper body is still - erect and facing squarely ahead - with stable hips and shoulders stacked directly atop one another and your obliques cinching all of those tiny muscles in to support your core, but without effort, almost reflexively, as if by tightening everything in allows each joint to move more fluidly. Your collar bones are rolled back, your shoulders pull down away from your ears as your shoulder blades tighten in trussing your spine. Your arms simply swim in their sockets, rhythmically swinging in time, as if two perfect metronomes to echo the cadence of your legs. Some days running is easy. Do you keep going? Because it’s easy? Some days you know you’re heading out to the roads, but you can barely get out the door. You tidy the living room, go to the bathroom, get a drink, send an email, text your sister, try to find a playlist, swear you put your ball cap right on the rack and spend ten minutes looking for it, only to actually find it on the rack. You tie and re-tie your shoes, check the weather for the seventh time, grumbling and debating with yourself about your attire choices. You walk out the door only to come right back in for sunglasses or gloves, or another bathroom stop. And when you finally get going, the muscles in your legs feel like molten lead just beginning to harden

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within the sheath of your skin. Your joints click and drag through every movement as if gummed up by sand and old oil. And your muscles feel like overstretched rubber bands, brittle and dense at the same time. Your body feels loose and unmanageable, gawky and flailing, no matter how hard you try to tighten in and anchor your muscles and joints into their sockets. Each step feels as though the asphalt is suctioning your foot into a prehistoric tar pit, so you have to pry it back out of the road’s clutches to simply take another stride. It’s a slog — plodding along, toiling away through thankless exertion the entire way. Some days running is hard. Do you stop? When it gets hard? In truth, most days aren’t easy, or hard, most days fall in the middle. It’s not the easy days or the hard days that make or break you, but the every day. The consistency of going, every day, is what makes or breaks your running practice. You get something out of every run, even if it’s just the satisfaction of having done it. Some days you don’t want to run, but you want to have run. Design is the same — the exact same. Some days you have it — ideas, breakthroughs, successes, accomplishments — whatever flow means to you. For me, it’s when I’m so consumed with the work that I haven’t looked at a clock for hours and only realize the passage of time with the lack of sunlight through my window. Some days you don’t have it — nothing works, the computer freezes, your ideas go to shit, your plans fall apart, your materials won’t work, you can’t get the right angle, you don’t have the right equipment, the lighting is all wrong, and you can’t seem to accomplish even the tiniest task. It’s the daily practice, the daily grind that helps you make the most gains. You won’t make the most gains every day. Some days you will even go backward, scrap everything and start over, but even in those moments there is progress. I never want to ‘get there’ because that’s the end, if I’ve ‘gotten there’, then it’s over. I’ll always be getting there, on the days I make my best work and on the days I make work I end up trashing. I’ll just keep making. It always cycles back. Do you stop? When it gets hard? When there is no flow? On the days you just ‘don’t have it’ and you can’t make it come to you, do you tell yourself you’re a shit designer, you can’t make anything good, you’ve never made anything good, you can’t figure it out, and you have no place in the design world. What do you decide to be on those days? What do you do? How to you handle it? I go for a run.

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Audience of One

The Personal is the Universal

I think if I could go back in time and give myself a message, it would be to reiterate that my value as an artist doesn’t come from how much I create. I think that mind-set is yoked to capitalism. Being an artist is about how and why you touch people’s lives, even if it’s one person. Even if that’s yourself, in the process of art-making. — Amanda Gorman, Poet Design is about people. It allows for a dialog and interaction, in a way that creates deep connections. Designers share themselves, sometimes very intimately, with their audience and hopefully the audience uses that experience to reflect on themselves, as well as connect to the designer and others more deeply. We’re all unique, but the human experience isn’t as unique as it seems, it’s a little more universal, even though it’s deeply personal. Emotions are universal and the more I share my personal experiences and feelings, especially the ones that no one really shares very often, the more I seem to be able to connect with people who are different from me. At the end of the day, we’re just not that different. Now, I recognize that, of course, we all have expressly different personal truths, paths, advantages,

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and privileges. We’ve overcome different hurdles, odds, and hindrances, and everyone’s accomplished that in different ways. Some paths have surely been quantitatively been easier than others. But I’ve also observed that the most difficult thing to any individual is still the most difficult thing, until they encounter something worse. And, even when experiences are different (your dog dying, your child dying, your parent dying), the feelings you feel, and how deeply you feel them can be similar. You don’t have to have a shared or similar experience of events to share a similar emotional experience. Realizing and recognizing that creates empathy. And showing empathy is a way to love another person without even knowing them well. And what is love anyway? Let’s start where I always start, with language and the dictionary of course. Merriam-Webster defines it as: 1) a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties; 2) affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests; 3) warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion; and 4) unselfish loyal and benevolent sense concern for the good of another. I usually use the dictionary definition to help hone my personal definition of the word. In the case of love, I believe there are different levels and types — there’s love for those closest to us, those you would quite literally lay down life and limb for; there’s love for our casual companions, schoolmates, colleagues, and acquaintances — you wish them well, cheer them on and share in their disappointments, and there’s the general love for mankind — the idea that you love other people in general and don’t wish to do anyone harm. If we’re all so similar at our core, can love, which I will define as empathy for this essay, be designed? Our first project in graduate school tested how design could grow empathy and love. We were paired with a random classmate to go through The New York Times article ‘The 36 Questions That Lead to Love’ written by Daniel Jones in 2015 to see what would result. The prompt asked us to create a biography of our partner, but in retrospect, I think it actually tested whether you can design a way to grow empathy. I was paired up with Kari, a fellow first year MFA student in the first project where we were to discuss these 36 questions and then create a biography project about our partner. So we’re coming at this from the ‘same’ position in the program, but we’re quite different at first glance — at the time I’m 40, already been to graduate school, worked for many years and

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coming back to the MFA program to make a life change. Kari is 23, straight out of undergrad, and just starting her professional life. I’m pretty talkative, outgoing, and un-afraid to ask questions, even when they make me seem more naive than I should. Kari is introspective and only says something when it’s really important. Some would call her pretty quiet to my loud. We were not a likely pair in the beginning. The assignment was to talk for an hour and then get sketching and work on ideas for a few hours and then the professor would come around and talk through our sketches. By the time the professor got around to us, neither of us had sketches because we’d spent the whole time talking about these questions, but then just about life and the program and all sorts of stuff. If we sat next to each other on a plane for four hours I bet we would’ve hardly said five words to each other, but in those couple hours Kari and I realized we had more in common than we thought, and it’s not because we’re the same, cause, we’re not. I’m older, Kari is young. We both like design, sure, but we have different styles and design interests, I’m more print, Kari’s more UI/UX and web. I’m Caucasian and from a ‘traditional’ heterosexual two-parent home with one sister. Kari is adopted from China with a brother adopted from El Salvador by a single mom. I could go on about our differences, but the thing is, through exploring these questions, understanding each other as people it created a basis of shared honesty and vulnerability that has turned us into the type of friends who now FaceTime nearly every day. Now, I’m not saying it’s these questions and I’m not saying it would happen this way every time, but I’d take the bet that if you sit down with just about anyone and go through a list of probing questions (like this one) and answer honestly and openly, that more often than not a certain level of care will develop for the other person. And, since I’m into definitions like that, when I say care I mean empathy and seeing a little of yourself in that person and finding a little softer spot for them in your heart than you did before and maybe, just maybe, now you might go a little more out of your way for them or cut them some slack next time they need it. Fast forward two years and I’m in a design workshop on Zoom led by Elaine Lopez that used these questions as the basis for a conversation. I’m paired up with Greg, a senior in the BFA program, who I’ve been in a few electives

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with before. He’s an enthusiastic guy who gives thoughtful feedback and makes really strong work — I like him, but, actually, I know nothing about him. In this workshop we did three of these questions and after even just three, I feel more empathy for, and from Greg. Again, we were both pretty open and honest in what we shared, so I guess you’d call that vulnerable or putting yourself out there, which takes a certain level of either confidence or not caring what the other person says if you put your truth out there. So, what is all this? What does it have to do with design? Honestly, I’m not sure. But maybe love or caring, on some level, really can be designed. Not romantic love and not some creepy, ‘let’s find the perfect match for you on paper and via genetic testing and then it will work’ way, but just the increase of empathetic caring about and for your fellow person on this crazy journey of life. There are a few things I’ve learned in my life that have helped me become more empathetic, which I also think makes me a better designer. First, everyone has their shit. The crap they’ve been through, shitty hands they’ve been dealt, stuff they’ve had to endure, and survive. It’s just that, usually, you’re not aware of other people’s shit because we don’t go telling everyone we meet our ‘woe is me’ stories. But it’s there, we all have it. Second, no one is as bad as the worst thing they’ve done. In other words, even when people do something bad, they’re still human and they still have the same emotions and desires. (That lesson came from being a prosecutor). So, is there a way to design, or use design to, reveal that truth? Through design, can we cut straight to the honesty part? I ended up interviewing Elaine Lopez for my thesis because I loved her workshop so much and in our conversation I asked her if designing for an audience of one was valid and she gave me an answer that coalesced all these swirling thoughts about connection and people and design. She said: The personal IS universal. Bingo, fireworks, cue the music: that’s how you make something for everyone, you don’t make it for everyone, you make it for yourself, or one person. Everything we’ve personally been through is unique, but there’s nothing any of us have been through that other humans haven’t. So it’s

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those threads of connection and being able to recognize ourselves in others that really pulls us together, that makes us feel and make us relate. As a designer, when you reveal yourself in your design, you’re allowing your audience to recognize themselves in you: to know you, but also to know themselves and connect to themselves through the emotion and meaning you’ve embedded in your design. It takes a great deal of courage to be honest, in design and in life, but I’ve experienced that the more open and honest you are with people, the more open and honest they will be with you. The more the threads of humanity are strengthened, the more we begin to love with each other and create the space for more love in the world. Trust your audience, don’t hesitate to share your personal story with them — they will be more understanding and accepting than you think. And you just might be able to design more empathy into the world.

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Design is Reinvention

The Permanent Impermanence of Design

I always was a designer, I just didn’t see myself that way. Now, nearing the conclusion of design school, it feels a bit like the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Wizard is bestowing physical gifts on the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion. And when he gets to Dorothy, there’s nothing left in his bag for her, but she discovers all she has to do is click her heels three times to go home. And Glinda gently reveals, ‘You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.’ I’ve always had the power to design, maybe I just had to go to design school to figure it out. I’m still a better writer than designer, my technical ability to produce hasn’t quite caught up with my ideas. Design provides a means of empowerment at a personal level, to reinvent yourself whenever you like, and at a societal level, to remake the world we live in to fit the needs of the community. Philosophy and theory reimagine what could be, design generates the concrete forms, structures, and language that bring ideas and conjecture into reality. That can be for one person — scheduling and structuring a day, designing their life — or it could be for a community — coming together around a cause, changing what is into what should be.1 1 All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Papanek, Victor. Design for the Real World.

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Design and the means and method to make whatever we want — objects, communities, societies, worlds, etc. There is no proscribed outcome, but design can help us achieve whatever we want and deal with anything that comes. It also involves the idea of the permanent state of impermanence in life as a positive attribute instead of cause for despair. If nothing is predetermined or set in stone and all things in life are inherently makeable, by individuals and groups, then possibilities abound. What exists today that’s frustrating or imperfect (and what’s not imperfect) can and will change, it just depends on how you want to change them and the effort you put into that endeavor. Another aspect of my thesis is about design as the ultimate tool of potential and the continual process of ‘becoming’ — that the outcome of a design process, as well as the designer themselves, can have many facets or paths or endpoints depending on the unique circumstances of each project, it’s time and place, and purpose, etc. Graphic arts, more than any other art practice embraces the impermanence of life, to the advantage of the discipline. The ‘life’ of a graphic design piece is short, often tied to an event. And design as a discipline it can quickly morph, evolve, and move on to embrace the next set of circumstances... Even the mediums we use — paper, posters, postcards, flyers, gifs, videos — are mostly temporary. They’re not edifices of concrete and steel that stand for centuries. They’re not epitaphs carved in stone. They’re degradable and losable, they’re a moment in a social media scroll, on a big screen, or a glance from a passerby on the street. The process or method is the same, but based on the context, timing, and goals, the outcomes are very different each time. Every time you employ design as a practice, you’re reinventing it a little bit.2 You’re improving your process or learning something. Methodologies aren’t secret or magic, they may not even be unique, but the person employing a methodology and the manner in which they do IS unique.

2 ‘While I still love things, what we do not seems so much more about the process and less about the end result. We’ve developed a design methodology that incorporates talking, sketching, collaborating, doing, connecting, re-doing, writing...’ Georgie Stout. ‘Yeah, methodology development has probably been our longest-running project.’ Michael Rock. Rock, Michael. Multiple Signatures, ‘Talking Over with Susan Sellers and Georgie Stout’, p.28.

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The way I define my process is to begin with inquiry (definitions and research) which drives debate (critique, disagreement, & re-evaluation), which creates a dialog (understanding and exchange) to create a relationship (trust & care). I distill this down to: Inquiry -> Debate -> Dialog -> Relationship Design’s product isn’t a ‘thing’ — it’s the creation and advancement of discourse and the building of relationships. It’s also the control of time: what creates waves? What makes people stop and observe, moves them to respond and discuss? And then what do those waves do? How do they create impact beyond that core event? Because at the end of the day design is about people, creating relationships; both long lasting and fleeting. To create that human connection through your work to people you may never meet or to create it for a lifetime with a colleague or collaborator. That is why we design and what design is. I was always a designer… and, actually, so are you.

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Limitless

Design's Superpower is Also its Kryptonite

Let’s see if you can complete these sentences about these professions with what they do: An architect An author A painter A director A sculptor A programmer A designer I bet you had an immediate answer for the first six and paused at the seventh. There’s been a lot of debate about how to define ‘designer’.1 I’ve read many of them and found the points compelling in each assessment, and yet, my overwhelming feeling after reading these well researched and thought out pieces remains, ‘why do we need to define designer’? It feels as though no other profession seems to struggle with their own definition 1 Designer as Producer — https://www.typotheque.com/articles/the_designer_as_producer Designer as Author — https://2x4.org/ideas/1996/designer-as-author/

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as much as designers, so we continue to frame ourselves in terms of other professions that people readily understand. Designer as author, producer, activist, entrepreneur (although who really knows what that is either…), collaborator, curator, etc. It has been argued that design is so new as a profession that it just doesn’t have the historical arc that painting or architecture have and it’s still developing. However, I would argue that computer programming is a relatively new profession and that’s well understood and doesn’t try to frame itself as other professions to help the public understand what they do or why they should be regarded. No, I think the attribute that makes design struggle with definition is also its greatest strength. Design is nearly indefinable because of its unbounded nature — what you can make, who you can make it for, where it will go — and the boundaries, which were wide to begin with, seem to only be widening, not shrinking. People are not good with ambiguity, they like specificity — who, what, when, what, how — and definitions. So explaining that you can make and do anything with design feels intangible, ethereal even, like it doesn’t exist. I once heard ‘when you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to anyone’, which seems to apply to defining ‘designer’ as well. No one gets it because it’s too big to get your arms around. So, why do we keep trying? Is it because we want to have a good answer when people ask us what we do? Is it because the output you create, the work, is really a small piece of you that you’re putting out in the public realm to be judged and rated and we want to legitimize our profession for a sense of security? Probably both those reasons and many more. But people keep hiring designers, more companies are recognizing design as a corporate asset, and design-thinking only seems to continue to explode. And maybe it’s exactly because of that flexibility, unrestricted output, and methodology we have in our practice that design keeps growing as an industry. Which can only lead me to concluding that it is the limitlessness nature of design that makes it incredibly powerful and adaptable to so many situations.

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I am naturally averse to ambiguity in life. I like what I can rely on and understand, sort and compartmentalize; except when it comes to design. In design I prefer ambiguity, if something is vague or nebulous, it’s waiting to be shaped. The fact that you could work on a catalog one day, a sneaker the next and a fashion show the following week is the fascinating thing about design. It invites reinvention and exploration, even when there’s a specific required outcome. And the more you design, the more fluid, inventive, and experimental you get. We never stop growing or changing as people, that’s the goal anyway, and design is a reflection of that growth process. Design imbues people that practice it with a constant motion to improve and learn. I find that what I’m mostly learning is how much more progress there is to make and how much more I want to try. Design doesn’t become easier as you improve, it simply expands with the more experience you obtain. I’ll probably have the conversation thousands of times: ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a designer.’ ‘So what do you DO?’ But that’s fine with me, I’d rather be in a profession that starts a conversation than gives an answer anyway. An architect designs buildings. An author writes books. A painter paints paintings. A director makes movies. A sculptor makes sculptures. A programmer codes software. A designer does anything they want.

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Michael Michael Rock is a founding partner and executive creative director of 2x4, Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art and Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture. At 2x4, he leads a wide range of projects, both cultural and commercial, for Prada, Miu Miu, Kanye West, Nike, Target, Hyundai and many others. Rock’s writing on design has appeared in publications worldwide. His critically acclaimed collection of essays and projects, ‘Multiple Signatures,’ was published by Rizzoli International in Spring of 2013. He holds an A.B. in Humanities from Union College and an M.F.A from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Design from the American Academy in Rome.

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Introduction

Ask me who I think of when I think Design (capital D) and it’s Michael Rock. To me, he’s the most famous, iconic, preeminent, and ingenious designer, someone I look up to, almost idolize. I love his work, his studio, his writing, his talks, there’s nothing not to love. So when securing interviews with three designers was announced as part of our thesis, I thought, ‘Could I really email him? Why not? What’s the worst that can happen? But what’s the best that could happen?’ And it was the thought of the best possible outcome that drove me to send emails to every possible email permutation I could think of in the hopes that one might reach him and he would grant a fledgling graphic design graduate student 15, or maybe even a luxurious 20, minutes of his time. Dear Mr. Rock, I realize this is a long shot, but you never know if you don’t ask. I’m working on my thesis for my MFA in graphic design. You’re one of my favorite designers because you’ve figured out how to let design take you in so many directions and an inspiration since long before school. Part of our thesis is conducting interviews with designers who influence our work. I would be grateful for 15-20 minutes of your time to conduct an interview with you which will be included in my final thesis book. My thesis broadly addresses the multipotentiality of design as a means for discovery — enabling personal growth, human connection, and ultimately allowing us, as individuals, and societies, to create whatever life and context we want. Thanks for even considering this! All my very best,

Rock Claire Bula

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And you know what? IT. WORKED. He emailed me back, no joke, a prompt 29 minutes later: Hi Claire. Sure. I’ve cc’ed Shama here to set up a zoom call. Best, Michael Whoa. Seriously? Yes. Seriously. So, I set aside all the work I ‘should’ve been doing’ for the work I wanted to do, filling my brain with everything I’d ever seen Michael write, create, or say. I didn’t quite get through all of it between Tuesday at 10am and Friday at 3:30pm, but I tried… and I tried to figure out how I could best use 15 minutes of this man’s time and not sound like an idiot in the process. And you know what, he ended up giving me an hour. And instead of talking about himself or his work, which I would have HAPPILY listened to him talk about for an hour (and still would), he said, ‘let’s talk about you.’ He asked me about my program, where I was, who I was, and what my ideas were about graphic design. And even though my ideas are pretty nascent and I’m sure they’ve been discovered by others well before me, he was generous and patient. He took my thoughts seriously and had concrete suggestions for me, as well as enthusiasm for what I am interested in. He also offered to keep working with me and when I took him up on that offer, he came through. There’s nothing better than finding out someone you idolize is a kind and giving person, and, to me, that’s what really matters.

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Interview

Claire

So we’re in the thesis process right now, and my thing about the thesis is that design can be anything. It has multiple potential. And I see myself as somebody who has a lot of different interests and that design can facilitate and help me grow, but also help me facilitate the creation of things. Society is movements, whatever. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on that because I keep hearing how I should be. Maybe focusing on one thing or one style or pick a thing and make a thesis about that. But my whole idea about design is that it is the flexibility. It is the question, the answer, the tool, the content, the method, all of that.

Michael

So I mean, let’s pick that apart a little bit because there’s a few different things I think have to frame that. So that makes it doable for you. Because I could see probably what your teachers are worried about is that, you know, it would be impossible for you to get your arms around that topic, you know, and kind of drive it forward somehow. And, you know, and I wonder if you’re attempting to create a kind of totalizing theory. Is that the idea now?

Claire

Yeah. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this concept of the Dutch concept of Maakbaarheid. I’m probably murdering the pronunciation of that, but it’s basically makeability, the idea that you could make anything. But you can also make anything like society or structures. And I’ve also been thinking about this concept around, like power and visuals and design, because I was flying to Arizona this fall. I was looking at the topography of the land and we were reading about colonialism in theory class. And I was like, Well, there’s nothing in this land that says like, ‘the line is here’ or ‘not here.’ And then I was running in this national park and all of a sudden you’re just in a forest and you see a sign that says, like, National Forest here, other forest here. And I’m like, there’s no difference, like all these are fake constructs supported by design, but also by legality. It exists, but it doesn’t exist. And I think you have done a lot of work on that, too.

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Michael

So, I think that there are a couple ways to frame it and think about that. You know, one is this idea of the imagination, the imaginary and, so, if you look at what Michael Hayes at Harvard has done with this idea of the architectural imagination, which is that, you could have a concept and we could talk about concepts. But you need imagination basically to take that concept to make it something that is that relates to makeability, right? Like somehow that concept can drive something. And by imagining this thing which doesn’t yet exist, it allows it to exist, right? So the design imagination is this way to kind of render worlds or render things into existence in different ways. I talk a lot about this idea of the social imaginary and using a couple of different texts for that, primarily Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, and he writes about this question of ‘What is it that makes our world our world, that we think that we live in right, you know?’ And it’s basically everything right? It’s stories, it’s buildings, it’s all these things and those are the things that populate the imaginary world that we live in. And so, as designers, we have to build the stuff that makes that world somehow. I think that aspect of world building is a really interesting thing to pursue and you might look at, if you haven’t seen that book yet, Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking from back in the seventies. And it’s really super interesting especially the first couple of chapters, because it talks about this aspect of how it is that we come to live in this world that we live in and what are the things that we need to understand that. When you think about it, all the stuff that we make are the ingredients to create that sense of ‘the world is coherent’, as an experience or entity, and makes sense. So, that’s one book I would look at Ways of Worldmaking. Another is Benedict Anderson’s book called Imagined Communities, which is a really important book, especially the first half of that, because it is really important and he writes about typography, often. Typography is one thing he writes about, but also about, How is it that we think of ourselves as a nation? Or do we think about it as something else? Like what is that? And

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he writes about the newspaper and how having a national newspaper was really important to start to feel like there was a nation at all because you needed this thing, which sort of like represented it, right? Until you have something that represented you and you could say, ‘okay, this is our paper’ then there was no way to kind of think of yourselves that way, you know? So these became these big mass media tools to start to think of ourselves in more coherent ways across very long distances. And I think that if you take that idea, and think about now what’s happening with, these kind of transnational communities of TikTok or things like that, right? Like that, you could live in these worlds which are completely outside of the national boundary, or even the geographical boundaries. Right. So you could have communities which exist all over the place that you’re in somehow and how do you know you’re in them? So it seems like at the end of this, there are these really big stories that have to do with what you’re relating to about this idea of this kind of totalizing aspect of design, of kind of worldmaking of design. But I think that you probably need to focus a little bit on one of those aspects. So, there’s Charles Taylor and The Contemporary Social Imaginary. That’s one. Chapter two in that book or chapter three is called something like, ‘What is the Social Imaginary’ and he writes about in political terms, but it’s kind of amazing because he wrote the book 10 years ago. But he writes about this idea of ‘when is election legitimate’ and how that’s important. So, it really relates to this moment in time. So, there’s Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, there’s Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. And then you could also look at, I think that there is part of Harari’s book Sapiens that’s on actually the limited liability company (LLC) and he writes about the idea of a company as being an imagined thing that you know that we have to go imagine what the LLC is as an entity, so that it relates really specifically, to something like branding. So, I think that all these ways of thinking about this aspect of coherence and what you know, what makes

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the world coherent that we live in. And how do we, as designers... we’re either working in or outside of that system of coherence and we’re either actively building it or we’re actively deconstructing it at any one time or another. You’re trying to go in it either support or undermine that, right? So, you know, so you could imagine, on the opposite side of your national park sign, there could be a totally different sign, which was telling you something else, right? You know, what’s on the other side of that sign? But how do you turn that into a thesis? I think that’s the question we have to figure out which is, which part of that do you narrow so that you’re able to go, and can go, deep enough into it, so you can also turn that into something that you can make right? So, tell me a little bit about the thesis is a requirement to make a visual project as well. Or is it a written project or how does it work?

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Claire

It’s definitely both. The end output is ultimately a book. We also have a requirement for a website this year and we have an exhibition, but because of space and COVID, our exhibition is in, like, six weeks, so it won’t be the completed thesis. Whatever your thesis is will just be part of it. And then it’ll get photographed and probably go in your book in the end. So you know, it’s essays and research And it’s work I’ve made the entire time here. But the publication, I guess is the big thing.

Michael

So what’s the requirement for the essay part of it?

Claire

They keep it pretty open. Our professor has worked at both RISD and Yale, and he’s showed us examples from things that are like listicles, to like, you know, looking like a regular research paper.

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

Michael

Who is that?

Claire

Christopher Sleboda.

Michael

Oh yeah, I know Chris.

Claire

So he’s giving us a lot of free rein. Obviously, it needs to be well researched. And I started writing it... I would say one of my working titles, is ‘I’m a better writer, But I could tell you more or make you feel more through design’. And my whole life I’ve been a writer. But like I’m getting all over the place with it because I have all these ideas and all these topics and I’m like, this is a total mess. So, yeah, I think I need to somehow narrow it down and edit it down and decide what goes in and what comes out. But I really like this idea of design as the catalyst you can make anything with it. So what are you going to make? How do you support what’s already made? Or how do you deconstruct what’s made that is not working now for society or an item or that it’s not so much about what the outcome is that you take whatever situation you need to address and you apply design to it. And the outcome could be an item of clothing, it could be a paper, it could be a website, but that doesn’t matter to me as much as the ‘why’ behind it.

Michael

Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that you could think about that in a couple different ways, like maybe writing in a certain kind of form would help you with your structure of your writing and somehow so you’re actually writing a manual or something like that. And by adopting the form of a manual allows you to structure your writing somewhat. I was thinking about Ryan McGinley and this kind of branding manual he wrote for his studio, and it’s like hyper-detailed, every single thing, you know, how everyone in the studio has to dress and how it’s in a way extremely like an ironic project. But in a way it allows him to talk about the idea of systemization and of

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you know, some of the things that we’re talking about because he’s doing, he’s demonstrating it through something which is to take it to it’s most absurd, extreme level or like that. And I’ve done a project like that a few times, like, one was, do a project about nothing. And you know, obviously, when you do a project about nothing, then the form of the project becomes everything, right? So you know, the ‘what exactly are you trying to do’ becomes the subject of the project. But I also did a project where I asked the students to go and choose a place. A place that doesn’t normally have a kind of name or an identity and create identity around it. So, one person did that strip of grass that’s between the street and a sidewalk in a suburb, You know, that doesn’t have, like, an official name or anything that nor any kind of identity, but by naming it and giving it an identity and giving a use and a function and the things that can happen there and so like that, like you create this whole kind of a place that never existed before in a way, you know, because it’s just like something that was always there. But it just doesn’t have a system, parts, a language, etc. There’s no way to talk about it, right? So, what do you call that thing? But then you could start seeing there’s a certain kind of activities for it, you could have you could organize programming for it. You could do different things, you know, because you identified it and you’ve given the name and you’ve created a brand around it or identity around it, you know, or someone else did the idea of, like, space in an apartment where a door swings. You know, in that area which again it’s just like it’s an in between space. But, you know, he kind of created this whole thing. It’s kind of where you meet people, where you say goodbye to them and you know all the different kinds of social interactions that happened in this little triangle, you know, kind of thing. And so it kind of gives rise to something which was never there before you know, because it was always just like a kind of in between thing, but by naming it and creating a set of rules around it and a set of customs around it you kind of bring it into existence or something like that.

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And so you could imagine a project for yourself where you did that and then you’re writing was kind of all of the apparatus around that, because you have a you have an introductory essay to this thing. Then you use that define all the devices that you would normally do if you were talking about an auditorium or building or Civic Square or something that it allows you to talk about, sort of how design is this tool, which differentiates and gives us frames that we structure our lives and or something like that, So, I mean, that’s just spitballing. But, could you imagine a project which you’re writing then could be framed by the project, So it allows you to write in a more concise way or more specific way that you’re not just trying to go in like solve all the problems of the world, but you’re doing it this really simple way. So, another example of that is a contemporary example. If you look at Stefano Boeri, the Milanese architect, he’s been designing these spaces for COVID vaccinations and they’re like these actual mobile kind of tent things where they’re doing vaccinations in Italy. But he’s designing all of the iconography and everything around it. They’re all based on this flower, and there’s a whole story around it; why it’s the flower and the spring, and this is happening in the spring, and basically it’s coming out of the darkness. And so he’s kind of creating this whole culture around this thing, which is actually a very specific thing that was just developed for this immediate problem, right? So we didn’t really have a name for what a COVID vaccine ‘thing’ or place is before, but now he’s created a kind of whole identity around it somehow. You could start to talk about what the atmosphere should be like in one of these things. You know what’s the lighting like in it and how do people approach it, and where do you wait, you know? So all these different things are brought into existence because of the architectural imagination of the design imagination to kind of imagine a space that didn’t exist before you, like a public space that didn’t exist before or something like that.

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By focusing it around something, maybe that allows you to use a much more concrete example, But then to spin off into your much bigger ideas somehow you know, like that you’re bringing your idea, your broader ideas into it, or something, you know? But, you know, I think there’s a million different ways to do it and I think that a lot of it also depends on kind of what kind of work you want to make right now. Like, what is it that you like? Do you like to animate or you like books or you like to do architectural spaces. Because you could also reverse engineer it from the kind of things that you want to make and then come up with a project that relates to that somehow.

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Claire

I really enjoy making tangible things as opposed to digital things. I started my artistic practice in watercolor, which was a hobby, and then that morphed. Now, of course, I’m doing all kinds of things, like books and posters and branding and catalogs and all that. My dad was an architect, so I grew up in that world, and I really enjoy that, the world of the physical environmental as well. But I just definitely don’t want to take the engineering and math...

Michael

Haha, no but there’s a lot of ways to practice graphic design in the environment, you know and, in a way, that’s exactly what we’re talking about, which is how do you create spaces or how do you define areas, or how do you give meaning to things in the environment that didn’t have meaning before? And, you know, so is your like, there’s lots of different projects that could come out of that. So now.

Claire

I’m also interested in visualizing things that don’t have a set visual language, like one of the projects I did was to create a symbol set around the variety of feelings around, like grief and loss and then an opposite symbol set for each of those and trying to communicate things that you

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can’t always communicate in words. But you can create, like, a mood or a feeling through the amalgamation, maybe of words and images or just imagery or visual language. Michael

And that, you know, again, seems like it ties into your theory of imagination in general, which is, like, how do you take these things which are inchoate and unknowable, to a certain extent, that don’t have defined edges to them, but, grief is a kind of difficult one. Even if you took the seven stages of grief or something that, like where one ends another begins, it’s not an exact science, right? But then obviously, when you’re trying to draw something, you have to say that this is this and this is that right? Like, you can’t draw in the blurry way that you can have emotions. Right? So, that misalignment in a way between the hard edge of making something in the soft edge of feeling that something.

Claire

Right. Totally. Um, I just wanna be respectful of your time because it’s almost four o’ clock

Michael

Yeah, but well, how can I help you? I just kind of babbled on. But you know

Claire

That already is helpful. I think I kind of get lost in myself sometimes. And it’s good to have external perspective. Sometimes I think our professors want us so much to pursue our own ideas that they don’t weigh in as much as we might like them to.

Michael

And they might not know.

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Claire

And they might not. Yeah.

Michael

I think that that’s a common problem. And I think that the route around that isn’t probably to get them to say more, probably the route around that probably is to establish a constraint for yourself, you know, and then basically recognize that the constraint is arbitrary and embrace the arbitrariness of the constraint and then try to use that if somebody something to work against, you know? So, that’s why I’ll say okay, just for the sake of this project, I’m going to go and suspend disbelief, and I’m only gonna work on it this way. And, then what happens when I push that to its logical conclusion? And accepting the fact that constraint is a totally random thing, because in a way, that’s your point also, right, which is that constraints are these random things that we way we need to go and live our lives, you know, because without them so it is impossible to come take in the massive information that you have raised.

Claire

Right, we need structure to exist. But the structure that exists was just created. It could be any other structure or any other system of living or working or anything.

Michael

Which, has all these different contemporary implications, right, because those structures could be race, those structures could be gender. Those structures, all the different ways we organize the world and you realize that basically, they’re just tools to organize the world. But that doesn’t make them less brutal, less violent, less, you know, anything, because constraints are always separating things. And so constraints usually have people that have been benefited by them and people who are disadvantaged by them. So you have a whole bunch of things that are built into those constraints, that kind of inherent power structures that play out in different ways. So those are there now, too. It’s an extremely contemporary idea that you’re working with. The thing is, how do you go and channel it in a way that you

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could work on a small enough piece of it so that you can you know, that you don’t get lost in the fact that it’s basically like the whole world is atoms and I’m just part of the atoms... Claire

Right, which is how you have to live your life. You could live like everything matters or nothing matters. But you have to make things matter for them to matter.

Michael

Right, you have to have a kind of willing suspension of disbelief in life in general because otherwise it’s impossible to get through each day, you know? Because there’s just so many things we have to overlook that are just illogical in terms of what’s happening. And and I think that’s actually one of the things that design does. I look at, like, design literally makes the guard rails for us to live by. You know, it tells you where to go and where not to go. What’s safe and what’s not safe. You know what you should touch and what you shouldn’t touch how you should think about something, where you should draw your attention. You know, you’re basically completely surrounded by these things which frame all of your activities all the time. You know, every one of them was designed by somebody.

Claire

And some of them, if you don’t know that information, you will literally die.

Michael

Haha, yeah, right. And some of it is like, you know, if you’re not attuned to it, will manipulate you in ways which you don’t want to be manipulated. So, there’s lots of implications to it all. But again, like I said, like I think what you have to do is find a way to slice through that to a certain extent, not narrow your idea, but slice through it, in a sense like, you’re gonna say this is the part, or this is the way that I’m dealing with it right now. And from that I could go and make a much bigger point, right? So you could make the point as broad as you want, but I think that you wanna go and

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Michael

make the object of scrutiny as narrow as possible because that will allow you to kind of build on that and make all kinds of you to make the broadest point you want to make a point. So, starting from something which is maybe seemingly fairly banal or fairly inconsequential. You could still build that up into something that’s quite consequential. I have to go to another meeting. But you know, but feel free to schedule more time with me, or if you want to send me anything, I’m glad to help you any way I can, you know, but also, I’m not convinced that I’m not helpful. It’s fine if you don’t.

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Claire

I find it helpful, and I really appreciate it. So thank you so much. Have a nice weekend. And I’d love to continue to be in touch, if that’s okay.

Michael

Just send me emails and send me stuff. I’m glad to comment on it or schedule time with Shama. She’ll set it up for me.

Claire

Great. Thank you so much. Bye, Michael.

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Elaine Elaine Lopez is a Cuban-American designer, researcher, artist, and educator whose work explores the intersection of cultural identity, equity, and diversity within the field of design. Elaine acquired her BFA from the University of Florida (2007), and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2019), both in Graphic Design. She currently teaches graphic design and Risograph printing at the Maryland Institute College of Art as a recipient of the AICAD Postgraduate Teaching Fellowship.

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Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

Interview

Claire

How are you?

Elaine

Good How are you?

Claire

I’m good.

Elaine

And you’re in Boston now. Right?

Claire

Yeah. I grew up in Wisconsin, and went to school in Indiana and lived, like I told you in Philly, and in San Diego. And now I’m in Boston, I moved here to go to the BU program. I like it.

Elaine

Okay, y’all haven’t been in person for a while. Has you’re studio been open.

Claire

They’re just starting to. You can’t meet as a full class now, but they’re starting to do some small in-person meetings, but personally with my situation, my family and everything. It’s just not gonna work really. It’s too stressful for me. So, I’m just doing zoom. So really, it was first semester of first year, and then till March 13 in person and we’ve been on zoom since then. And I took a summer class. So it’s pretty much been on zoom, which, you know, it just is what it is right? I’m okay with that.

Lopez

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Elaine

And are you done this spring? Is it a two year program?

Claire

It’s just a two-year program. At first I was like, Oh, I couldn’t do a three year program. That’d be way too long. And now I’m like,I want one. I started to figure some things out with regard to my thesis. And I’m like, I don’t feel like I should be publishing a book right now. I feel like they should be starting this next year and then publish the book. So yeah, I don’t know. But I just ran out of time. Two years is not enough to do all of the things that I want to do. And I didn’t really understand that. I had gone to law school and practiced as an attorney for a little while and three years is way too long for law school that should be taking, you can do that. But this is so much more of an exploratory process that I feel like this should be three. But yeah, I guess also I have the rest of my life to continue to keep working on this stuff. So I should just not really think about school as an ending, but like a launching platform instead.

Elaine

I would highly recommend summer schools, especially in Europe. There’s one course that I don’t think they did this summer, obviously, because of COVID. I’m going to type it in the chat because it’s in Dutch.

Claire

I, like you, cannot pronounce anything Dutch.

Elaine

Yeah, werkplaats just probably not, you know, that’s not too tough. So they do a summer school and it’s like two weeks in Urbino in Italy. And it was the most magical time. That’s one of them. There’s also the typography summer school that I think is in London. There’s also a couple here in the States, but I feel like I discovered this stuff later in my career while I was in grad school, and it is awesome. And there’s also the school for poetic computation, which maybe you’ve heard of. That’s in New York.

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

Claire

I did hear of that, because we did a workshop last Friday with Oh my God, why am I blanking on her name? I think her last name is Yen. She’s in Seattle. Mary, set it up.

Elaine

Yeah, okay. Actually, I think that she was in my class.

Claire

It was psychogeography and mapping zoom space.

Elaine

Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Don’t worry about remembering her name. I don’t remember her name either. And I took a class with her for several weeks. So... But I found just all of these things have been really... they can kind of extend that they felt like I did the workplaats that summer school the summer between my first and second year of grad school. And that was so it was just so nice to be exposed to a different way of learning design and practicing design, just meeting people from all over the world. And I feel like all these different schools kind of provide that. So if you know, these two years didn’t feel like enough, I encourage you to keep checking out. And then there’s kind of like a community of people that do all these summer schools, like you’ll meet a lot of great folks. And it’s just a really great way to continue that practice, of studying design and of just being exposed to new different things.

Claire

Yeah, I think this is actually kind of like a good lead into my thesis because I have been lost researching like, last semester, I’ve always been a person that’s like, I am hard worker, and I will commit to something and see it through, but I’m interested in a lot of different things. And I never want to have to choose one thing and do that for the rest of your life. But all the things that I do kind of build on each other. So I guess I’ve found through my research that’s called like, the multipotentialite. That you don’t have expertise and all these things, but enough knowledge in these things. And

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then you like bringing disparate things together, or discovering new things through that methodology of learning in a lot of different streams. So thinking about like design, and there are so many different materialities, styles, outputs, types of clients, types of projects, and all that stuff. I love the variety of that. And I also love the concentrated work stream of, you get a prompt or a project, I always I tend to have like a look up the words and I research into like those structures. So I have, a methodology of the way I approach projects. But I’m always trying to find diversity. The output isn’t always the same. I think if you look at my work it makes sense, but it’s not like one style all the time, which I used to kind of feel like Oh God, I don’t know my style, like I don’t know what I’m doing. And now I’m like, you know what, maybe I should flip that and view it more like I work in a way that produces the right type of outcome and style for the time, place, and necessities. So I’m trying to put together my thesis around the idea that design is the catalyst to bring ideas, philosophies, you know, things that people wish were changed or different or new into reality, and design brings it into reality. So I’ve been looking at these books, like a lot of philosophy books weirdly about like ways of world making, and imagine communities because everything that we have was created, right? Like our system of government, our social groups, everything So, and also like how potential plays into that, right? Just because something exists, we can inherently make something or remake something. And because it exists does not mean that it has to exist this way, us as people or our society, or like our lives with our friends and family, and that design is like the thing that makes it inherently makeable or remake a ball. So I was talking to Vi about that, and she was like, You should talk to Elaine. And I was like, Oh, my God, I just mentally Yeah. So I would love to just hear what you have to say about that. And, yeah, I don’t know if that makes sense to you, or I’m rambling.

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Elaine

No, absolutely. And I think it’s such a healthy way to look at design. Honestly, my own career has been a perfect example of what you just described, like I kind of started design with whatever job I could get, you know, and then I made my way into advertising. And then after a few years of that, I transitioned to Human Centered Design, and then moved into social impact, and then went to grad school at RISD, which is like this whole other thing, and now I’m teaching. And so it’s like, design is constant and there are so many different things you can do with design to keep it exciting. And I think you’ll, feel that as you work, whether you work in a company or something else, after a few years, you’re like, Okay, I got the gist of it. What else? What’s next, right? There’s always this desire for like, what’s next? What can I do with what I’ve learned, and these skills definitely build upon each other, and then kind of leave, like I’m in this position. So funny, I was on a call before this, and I was just literally talking about, like, I have all these different skill sets, I’ve worked with all these different types of clients, but it’s really hard to articulate that to someone, right? And then you know, especially in finding clients, or like, I can almost like customize like, okay, I want to work with that client, here are some, here’s a selection of work that like fits that specific thing. But I still have all these other skill sets. I do think design is in a weird place where I don’t know, I think that’s good, I think a lot of people are like this, right? Because a lot of people have had different careers and for all sorts of different reasons. So it’s a healthy perspective to have. And I definitely think like you’re going to be successful in this field, if that’s the perspective you’re taking, because that’s kind of what everyone has to be like, every project is different. You have to learn about the topic and then create something and then the next project might be something else entirely. And you have to sort of become a mini expert in that area, and then do whatever that and that will sort of lead you to the next thing. So I think it’s definitely, yeah, you’re in the right place. If you if you enjoy working like this, this is the right profession.

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Claire

How did you approach your thesis essay? Because I think, like, I’m, I have this like, all encompassing theory of design, right. But it’s really been difficult for me to like, write about that in a concrete way. So I’ve been trying to think about, like how to pull in some resources, and then give some examples of like, how everything is created by design, but you can’t say like, everything is by design, and then trying to like, translate that into specific projects. I would just love to hear about like, maybe your thesis process and your I assume you guys might have done a thesis book, I’m guessing.

Elaine

Yeah. And you can download it from my website, the whole thing is there. So you can read it if you want. It was very. Yeah, we did a lot of writing for ours. And I did skim a little bit of what you sent, right? So thinking about. Yeah, remember, you said you enjoy writing, right,?

Claire

I do. Yeah. So my undergrad was American Studies. So that’s largely like literature, reading, and then writing. And then I went to law school, and that’s all writing. And then I worked in like marketing and a couple other things. And so it’s a lot of what my creation has been more writing. But then, like, I had this opportunity. I can’t remember we talked about this when we were talking last but my dad got sick. He got a brain tumor. And I just, my sister and I both quit our jobs. We moved home, he needed like a lot of care. And in some ways, we were lucky enough that like we had the means to be able to just like quit our jobs and move home and help take care of him. But then, during that time, I was just like, in the house all the time. It was like quarantine except we were the only ones quarantined. Yeah, and so as people A lot and he was just like, why didn’t you ever, you know, do like a design career or something? I was like, I don’t know, I have no good answer. So I have this like writing side, and like a visual creative side. And I’m not as advanced as at the visual creative side yet. So it’s like, my two sides are not fighting, but like, unbalanced. And I’m trying to get to the other one, because I feel like I can express more through that.

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

Elaine

But writing is such a useful skill for designers. And I actually think it’s something designers often... I feel like this is a really great opportunity for you. So I kind of came into grad school with the opposite experience, like I had worked for so long, but you don’t really write at all when you work. And going to grad school for me was like, I kind of really loved that part of graduate school, like reading and writing and having these discussions. And so I kind of took the writing piece really seriously. And my thesis advisor, I started meeting with someone at the Writing Center, every like few weeks we would meet and she had me just write, just start to express like myself in writing, which is something I didn’t have a lot of experience in. And my work started to become autobiographical in a way. I started to pick apart the process of thesis and just one of the reasons I went to grad school was to look at the inequality within the field of design. So I really didn’t see a lot of diversity while I’d been working. And I really wanted to like take a step back and understand why. So a lot of my reading was around discrimination and all of that. And so, I started to look at the inequities of even graduate school, right? Like, at one point, I was like, oh, no mother has ever been through this program, because it’s so intense, like, there’d been a couple fathers whose wives were taking care of the kids, but there was no mother, you know, the act of even being in that program was so like... There was so much wrong with that. So I started kind of pointing to the flaws of that system of like, the intense workload and the stress and the struggle of like writing a thesis, like the demands it puts on me, and I started writing this kind of journal. In summary, my thesis became a lot about my experience as a first generation person going through this really elite program, and like what that means for the field of design? And what can we do to make design more equitable and more accessible to more people like me. And so I wrote my thesis directly to future students, who may experience that alienation that comes from going into these programs like, and realizing, oh, everyone is rich, and like, I’m not like, I don’t fit into this

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place. And so yeah, I thought about my audience a lot with my thesis, which I think is something I think it’s something we don’t think about with thesis very often enough, right? It’s like, Who is this for? Right? Who’s going to read this? Right? And how can what you write help someone in the future. And what I discovered is like most people who read theses are people working on a thesis, its future students that are either in that program, or actually programs all around the world, a ton of people have downloaded it. And I’ve had people come up and say like, Oh, it was really helpful just to like, through your honesty of what it what it was going through that program, like what you know, and then and then sharing some of the research I was doing around like, pedagogy and making things more, or even the reasons of systemic racism, right, and looking at that stuff through the lens of design. So for me that that’s probably the best advice I can give you is think about who you’re writing this to, right and let that sort of shape what you say, and I feel like you have such a unique, it’s not even a unique experience. But I believe there should be a lot more people like you entering the field of design, right? People who have different experiences, who can bring that into design, I think writing is such a valuable skill within design. That’s often not nurtured in designers. Unless you go to grad school, you’re really not writing, like most people who study design in undergrad, don’t write that much. And then you kind of enter the field and like, let’s say you want to start your own practice, you need to write proposals, and you need to write all this stuff. And it’s like, oh, your website. I know projects require writing all the time. And so it’s, there’s so many holes, and there’s so many opportunities in the field of design that I feel like what you’re doing is really important, and you should talk about talk honestly about that. Right? Like ‘I’m better at writing’, is what you say, lean into that. I think it’s like, speak your truth. Speak to the fact that you, know, this experience in your life like brought you to this moment that made you question why you didn’t study and I think there’s probably so many people out there who want to do design or thinking and maybe feel like they can’t, you know, and your thesis could probably help that person say, oh, maybe I can do this, right? Maybe I can transfer these skills into this field that I’ve always dreamed of doing. And your thesis can be sort of a guide map or just to explain even just sharing what you’re going through, is so helpful for other people. Because ultimately, I feel like that’s what I loved reading theses when I was working on my own, because I just felt like, this is how all these this problem to read that.

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There’s probably people who’ve done this before, but I don’t think anyone’s written about that, like as sensitively as you have, or like, the way that you’re thinking about it. So that’s sort of your contribution to the field of design is coming into it later with this, with this writing with writing as your sort of superpower, what does it mean to be a designer that writes, Claire

I think you mentioned something about belonging and I feel like everybody feels to some extent, like, they don’t belong, and they want to belong. And that’s something I’ve been like, kind of like, throwing around with the sense of design, because I think I have a lot of conversations with people who wish they were x or wish they were y. But I’m like, but you but you are like you already are. And we did like a type project where we had a conversation with another student in our class, and we were just, it’s funny, like, what this is kind of getting outside of design, I don’t know how to connect it back to design. But it’s like, we are all different. But we are all the same. We want to belong, we want to be seen for who we are and valued for who we are as people. And like, we all feel that sense of like, I don’t know, if I belong here, like, whether you’re coming in as a 22 year old or like a 40 year old who had a career or like, whatever, right? And so I sort of come at it from this place of like, well, everybody’s here in the same boat. And let’s all like, I’m not good at this, how did you do that? I’m better at this, I’ll help you do this type of thing. And I’m trying to like figure out how to tie in all these other things. I’m interested in terms of like, vulnerability, and acknowledging people for who they are and acknowledging like, their strengths and their potential and capabilities, because I think so many people tell them themselves, no, like, No, I’m not gonna apply, I’ll never get in or like, I’m just not good enough. And the truth is, like, you probably are, and you should make ‘them’ tell you no, before you tell yourself, no type of thing. But how does that to tie that to design?

Elaine

Why do you think that doesn’t tie to design? Because I think that that does like, in speaking to the fact that a lot of people feel this. I think this insecurity within the field of design is a really like, rich area that exists. Like everyone has insecurity in design. And I think most people are just relieved to hear someone else say, it’s just like, yeah, I feel insecure about this, like, Oh, me too. I was just scared. Like, there’s all this posturing and design that’s really, like, annoying and outdated and not really helpful anymore. So yeah, speaking your truth, and like bringing that in, I think ties to design because yeah, I think a lot of this stuff, if you look at the history of design, and who’s practiced design historically and right, who design was for that’s like, when you start looking at those systems, you

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realize like, Oh, yeah, that’s why most people feel inadequate, because it was like, Paul Rand, right. And like everyone else, that’s like, not the reality of the world, right? There’s a lot of different people entering this field for different reasons and working on all sorts of different things. And let’s make that okay, right, let’s, make it okay to only be good at one thing, or to be good at different things than the things that are celebrated in this industry. And there’s just, I think there’s a lot of work to be done in general in the design industry to make it more equitable or to make it less stressful. Like this is supposed to be fun. No, I think we forgot. Yeah, along the way, and we’re making it so much more work and stress than it needs to be. And I don’t know what to do about that. Seems like your thesis is addressing.

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Claire

I don’t know if I have any answers, though. I mean, the only answer I not answer, but the only thing that I have found that I think is maybe helpful to other people is like yeah, you critique and you want to like show people, some places where they might not have thought of something or they just might not have recognized that. There could be another opportunity there. But I also think we so little like, recognize, like what people do well, even without that, like, we’re doing the branding for our MFA, all the MFA is right. And I know one of our team members like worked super hard on this motion graphic. And it’s not her strong suit. And it turned out awesome. And I was like, You know what? We all said it in the chat. But I texted her later and was like, I want you to know that I personally think you did such a great job. I know how hard you worked. I know that like, this is something you’ve been developing, they look amazing. And we could not do this team without you. And she was like, Oh, my God, I wasn’t sure if people liked it, or didn’t like it. I was like, we like it. And we had learned it from last semester, we went to Amsterdam for like, two weeks. When we did one day motion graphic. I was like, you should send this to Roy who did this program with us. He’d be so proud of you like, and she was like, you’re right, I should send it to Roy. This is good. And I was like, Alright, why would you not think this is good? This is amazing, like. So that’s the only like, answer I have is like calling people out for when they do good stuff. As much as like, recognizing places that they have opportunities to, like, improve their work as well. Yeah. But I don’t know.

Elaine

Yeah. No. And it’s funny. I had, one experience before I went to grad school, I was working with Rick Valicenti, who’s like, National Design Award winning designer, like he has been doing this forever, every you know, wonderful guy, great person. And I was like, pulling some references. And

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

like, we were looking at separate project. And he was like, Oh, look at that. Like, when you when you look at that you wonder why bother doing and I was like, you’re Rick, like, you’re not allowed to feel that way. Like if you feel that way. Well look to where you are. Yeah, no. And then that’s I think, for me, that was a moment where I realized like, Oh, this feeling never goes away. Right? This inadequacy, or like, everyone always has like, a strange chip on their shoulder for whatever reason, right? Whether they’re too young or too old, or too, whatever, right like that. And I don’t know why. Design is like that. I think critiquing is obviously a part of it. Right? When you’re like making stuff and putting it out there for people to like, give you feedback all the time. And that, like, you know, is harsh. But there’s something off about that. I don’t know, I just don’t feel other industries are like this, maybe? Or maybe they are and I just don’t know, because I’ve only done design, but perhaps there are parallels that you can draw with your prior experiences to help remedy either these issues or like, do you see parallels in what you did formerly? And like, design? Claire

In some ways, yes. But I see them a lot more with like, different segments of the population, like when I was an attorney, women attorneys would always be like, a little more like, is this good enough. And all the women that I knew were amazing, and they prepared, usually better than the guys did. Because they kind of had to in and any person of color, because it was like, here’s the bar, and it’s a white dude. And it’s like, 90% white dudes. And so you better like do twice as well. To have them think that you’re, you know, passable?

Elaine

Yeah,

Claire

Kind of thing. So. And in, you know, what, I don’t know, I never like had that conversation with. Maybe I had it with like, one of the white guys, but I never really had that conversation with them. Right? Because like, you know, I don’t know, the bravado is just like, why would you ask that question? Because they obviously think they’re amazing anyway. Not that they weren’t nice, but it’s just like a different experience. But I don’t know if maybe it’s designed like, I feel like in law, you can compartmentalize, like, this is not my life. This is a different person’s life. And I’m just dealing with like, the factual legal side of it. Whereas design, I feel like, is a lot more like writing in the sense that you’re putting part of what, when you put what you think out there, which is part of design, like I think this is good, and

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it’s a judgement about yourself and what you’re saying about yourself. That feels a lot scarier, because you’re saying like, I’m good. And this is what I’m putting out there. And someone might be like, That’s terrible. And so then you’re like, I’m terrible. As you which is not the equation, like you should be, but I think it’s a little more of a personal thing than just like a transactional thing? Yeah. If that makes sense there,

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Elaine

Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. And I think that’s exactly what’s wrong. I almost wish we could compartmentalize things a little bit more. And I have had experiences within design. Where, yeah, I’m just like, I’m just doing this for a pay, you know, I’m not gonna worry so much about like, you know, what this says about me, I’m just doing this project because I need the paycheck. And we’re just going to get this done and move on. And like, it gets easier over time to have that attitude. Oh, thank you. Well, we wonder. Oh, great.

Claire

Do you think you could I have a hard time personally compartmentalizing? Like, that’s why I had to stop being a prosecutor because I was like, I can’t do this anymore. Yeah, I can’t. I can’t not think about the people involved. Like, go home and think about the defendant, their family, their children, the victim, their family, their children like, and it was so hard for me to like, there was so not black and white in almost every situation. And I think the only thing I like really learned and took away from the criminal justice system is no person is as bad as the worst thing they’ve done. Yeah. And like, I saw myself becoming like a much more callous person’s like, I don’t want to be this person. I’m out of here. So I could not compartmentalize and I still can’t. And I think like, you think that’s even possible and designed to just like compartmentalize, like, I made this and they don’t like it, whatever. Or that it’s better to like, infuse yourself in it, and invest in it and say, like, if they don’t like it, it’s just not the right fit. It’s not about me.

Elaine

You know, I think it’s a little bit of all, I don’t know, I I have been like super invested in stuff I’ve worked on and then you end up like fried at the end. And I think that can be unhealthy too. So I’ve gotten better about just like, knowing my limits and saying like, Okay, this is this is all this is gonna be, that’s fine. And that’s okay with it. Right? And I think you know, it’s hard because sometimes we have really high expectations for ourselves, right? We’re like, what we see in our heads is this, like, big thing, and then you

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

start doing it, and you realize, like, oh, boy, that’s gonna be too much work for me. So let me like, make it easier for myself. And learning how to do that, I think is a really useful skill, like, finding that balance of like, yes, you have to care, obviously, so that you enjoy doing the thing you’re doing, right, you don’t like super boring, but also like, being mindful of yourself and your health. And like, Yeah, all of that stuff is important. Because I’ve seen it, I think that’s kind of where I’ve been burned, right is like giving my all to my work to design all that and then realizing like, being disappointed afterwards, because at the end of the day, it’s you know, still a job, right? Like, that’s what the money is for. All unless it’s like, I think that’s the nice thing about grad school where it’s like, this is for you, right, you’re writing this thesis for you. I’m a firm believer that your thesis is already inside of you, when you enter grad school and every project, everything you do is an attempt to like, get it out of you, right, like every project is shaped. And when you look at all of that work, that story there, now it’s a matter of you crafting it together and sharing that with the world in a way that helps other people or helps you also like in a lot of ways, this thesis is going to be the beginning of your practice. And so I think, find that balance, right, like, definitely pour yourself into it. But also cut yourself some slack and say like, my thesis is going to be how I feel in this moment and the reflection of these past two years. And this is what I think right now and know that that will probably change. And it will evolve with you as a designer. But it also like, I treat my thesis as this, like, I pick it apart now like I had all these projects that I started and no, I feel like I’ll either share a workshop here in there that came out of my thesis, or I’ll give a lecture of the whole thesis or there are projects like I can bring to life now in the real world or just even talk about and share with others to inspire them to make more work. So it’s like, try to see this thesis as like functional for you and continue to like follow these inquiries that you’re curious about. Because I think I mean, I agree with everything you’re saying. And I feel like you’re definitely on the right track. And you’re doing all the right things by like asking to speak to people too. And just like yeah, like seeing different perspectives. This is this is the work of a designer, it’s all about people. It’s about talking to people and then it’s about making something that’s going to help someone either better understand something or inspire someone you know, to do something that’s like ultimately what I believe the goal of the timing is right. It’s like making these things. And then that might look different than whatever job you have after this, right? That’s the other thing. The reality may be that you get this great opportunity at a company that does maybe something completely unrelated to your thesis. But that’s okay. Because you’re going to learn something there. You know, either whether that’s like, being in a studio for the first time, I don’t know, well, if you worked

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in marketing before, so you know, the vibe of like, a studio, but even just like working as a designer, might be a new experience for you. You’ll learn from that. And eventually, you’ll probably get bored and move on to the next thing. And it’s just this like, never ending progression of things that happen. Yeah, I’m rambling. I don’t know if that makes. Claire

No, it totally makes sense.

Elaine

I’m like, Yeah, no, it’s good. It’s good. I really like it.

Claire

Do you think designing for an audience of one is a valid concept? We’ve been talking about that in other classes, but we also mentioned audience, and I think I get into, I fall into this trap of trying to design for everyone, all the time. And I had this revelation in a class where my professor was like, ‘what is your audience?’ And I was making something related to grief and I was like, ‘I had my mom in mind.’ And she was like, ‘What if your only audience was your mom? Then what would you make? How would you translate this into a 3d object?’ So that really helped me focus. So I don’t know if you have other thoughts about audience or how to get yourself out of this place of feeling like everything you make needs to be for everyone.

Elaine

I’m a big believer in ‘through the personal is the universal’. So if you do make this project specifically for your mom, that’s actually probably going to resonate with more people than if you were designing something for all the people, right? Like, by sharing your very unique experience, that is actually what helps people to connect. And a lot of my projects are just hyper focused on Cuba, which is just one place, right? But those projects speak to so many people of different cultures, actually, because I am going there, right? Like, I’m going into what does it mean to not know your culture until later, like, how does it feel to research this stuff, or even just wanting to share this stuff that I’m learning with other people, right, that resonates with people from other cultures, in fact, it’s not even like, it’s technically for Cuban people. But that’s like the least of people who’ve probably seen it, because it just resonates so strongly with other people who are making work around culture and identity. And so I think making something for your mom or making something based on your personal experiences, it’s going to

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be the best way to actually reach maybe the most people, or at least the right people who are looking for content about that very experience that you’ve had. And that’s what you have to offer really is like your personal experience. And that’s why I think your story is so important to tell, right? I really, I encourage you to get very personal with your thesis, this is for you, right? And what does it mean to write very frankly, about your experiences and changing careers? And what happened with your dad, right? Like, if you’re comfortable with writing about that stuff? I think that’s the stuff that really connects with people, because there’s always going to be someone you know, going into grad school, and they’re gonna have, you know, something that happens to them, or their family, or what does it mean to be a caretaker? Like all of that stuff? Is I feel like the stuff we don’t talk about enough, right? And that was the stuff that people need to hear. So go personal, share you, right? Claim your stake, this is your moment in time you’re doing this, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, like there’s so much going on, and the best you can do is to share your story. And the things that you’ve discovered through this process. And that’s what’s going to connect, I believe, to the most people. Claire

Elaine

Yeah, definitely. I think, I don’t shy away from talking about it, because I’m comfortable with talking about it. It’s fine. Like, it’s something that’s going to happen to everybody, like something bad is gonna happen to everybody. I don’t want it to, but it will. And like when those things happen, we so rarely know, like, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I had no idea what to do, right? Like, no, just like every day like oh, no, of urgency. Okay, yeah. But I’ve, like, when I talk to people about it, they’re like, everyone has their own story. And it’s, they could be completely different. It could be like a different level. It could be losing a pet. It could be like, whatever. But the biggest thing that has happened to you is the biggest thing that has happened to you. Yeah. So like, the scale doesn’t matter. The feeling is the same. Or there’s no scale. That’s not really what I meant to say. Yeah, like the exact scenario doesn’t matter. It’s like what you’re talking about connects with people.

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Debbie Debbie Millman is a writer, designer, educator, artist, brand consultant and host of the podcast Design Matters.

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Introduction

Debbie Millman is one of these people that I look at and say ‘How in the world did she do that?’ She’s strung together a series of pursuits in her working life that extend across advertising, design, education, and journalism with such ease that one could only dream of being half as adept at morphing and reinventing themselves over and over in that way. Debbie goes for what she wants, figures out how to make it happen and how to make it work for her life. And when she’s ready to move on, she does that too. I’ve listened to Debbie’s podcast, ‘Design Matters’ for a number of years, I started listening well before design school. A little secret about me, I really don’t like podcasts very much; they’re a dime a dozen, everybody’s mother’s sister’s cousin’s brother’s neighbor has one and most of the time it’s because they like the sound of their own voice and they think they’re an expert on something. Most podcasts are just the host/interviewer taking up most of the talking time when you really came to hear the guest. And that’s why Debbie stands out so much to me. Her podcasts pull stories and ideas and insights out of her guests that I don’t hear anywhere else, she is a true journalist. Debbie cuts through all the introductory things you’ve read and heard from her guests thousands of times and she really delves into who they are and why they do what they do. And she lets them do the talking, because she’s confident enough to know that she’s bringing the content to the table that her listeners really want (and she most definitely is delivering on that promise). So, when I settled on this idea that design is the physical manifestation of the multipotentialite, I knew I had to talk to Debbie. It took a little creativity and a little persistence to get in her radar, but once I was there she was so kind and generous with her time, as well as her incredible candor. So, here’s my conversation with Debbie Millman.

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Claire

My thesis revolves around design as sort of a process of becoming and discovering that the output is almost secondary, that it will be whatever it needs for that specific situation, client, event, timing, etc. all of these sorts of things. But that design itself is the means to explore multi-potentials, but also to make discoveries and to bring concepts into reality. So my thesis is sort of revolving around this idea that design as a totally flexible means of worldmaking on a lot of different levels. So, I wanted to talk to you because I feel like you’ve done that a lot in your career, exercising flexibly and applying design different ways. So maybe talk to me a little bit about the specialist designer versus sort of the designer who operates in a lot of different milieus.

Debbie

Well, I wouldn’t say that it was necessarily a conscious thing. I have always been interested in a lot of different things and design was where I could apply a lot of my interests. So it wasn’t like I came to design first. It was more the panoply of interests that I had led me to a career as a designer because I could refocus my direction more easily. So that could include design that could include writing, that could include branding. So it was really a catch all for the variety, the variety of things that I could do.

Claire

And do you feel like that as a framework in and of itself design was just so much more flexible than say, selecting just one path and then trying to like work in that

Debbie

I’ve never, ever wanted to select one path. And I actually wrote a piece about that in my book. Look Both Ways called ‘Pick One’. I’ve never focused on just one thing. The only time I did focus on just one thing was from 1995 to 2003. And that was a sacrifice in a lot of ways. It was one that I made willingly and one that at the time, now looking back on it, I’m glad that I did. In 1995, I joined

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Sterling and it was the first time in my professional career that I really felt consistently ‘good’ on things, good about doing something. I felt like I was successful and I really felt success for the first time. And, having not ever felt that way before, I just wanted you to feel it as often as I could. And so at that point I did pretty much abandon all of my own personal work that I was primarily doing as an antidote to all my professional failures. And, you know, in that personal self-generated work, the only person judging me was me, so I just did it for the pleasure. And so then by 2003, I had started to feel like I was beginning to lose my creative soul. And that’s when I started writing again more professionally. And that’s when, in 2004, I started to plan what, ultimately, became the podcast [Design Matters] I launched in 2005. In 2007 I published my first book. So it was really after that. But that eight years where I sort of gave up everything and just sort of ‘picked one’ ended up giving me the financial freedom to also be able to do a lot of those other things. So it was a bit of a sacrifice at the time, but one, you know, if I were to course the journey of my life, I would say putting in that time in those years resulted in my being able to do a lot of the things that I’m doing now. Claire

I don’t know if you’ve heard of this concept of the opposite of a specialist as a multipotentialite? They have tons of different interests and they want to follow them all. And they’re consummate learners. And I think I identify with your feeling of “I have so many interests. Why should I just pick one?

Debbie

What are they called? What is the name of the word?

Claire

Multipotentialite. I can put it in a chat. I found this while I was researching my end of semester presentation and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is me.” I’m not a polymath. I definitely don’t know everything about everything, but I know a little bit about some things and I’m really interested in finding

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out about them. And so I think, for me, I’m trying to put together my thesis around the idea that design is a multipotentialite endeavor and supports the multipotentialite person. And that as society moves forward, it’s becoming more accepted, and actually valued more, that people are more flexible and adaptable.

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Debbie

Yeah. I mean, I do think designers now have to do more, you know, when I graduated college to be a designer, you needed to know layout and paste up and have a good eye, and now you need to be able to, you have to know coding, retouching, topography, image development, photography, all of that. I mean, you have to be a multipotentialite. Yeah.

Claire

Do you think that is something that is trending? Not just like the tasks of doing a lot of things, but the idea that a person doesn’t necessarily have to be a specialist in just one thing, do you think adaptability and flexibility is valued more in design or that it’s still moving that way. Do you feel there’s more opportunity to sort of flex over the borders of design, like fashion designer, graphic designer, spatial designer, etc. are open to anyone who is a designer?

Debbie

Oh yeah. I don’t think that there are those delineations anymore. As a matter of fact, I was just reading somebody’s thread, she’s an illustrator and I guess a potential client came to her, was upset that she also didn’t animate. And she was like, “since when did an illustrator also have to be an animator, but a lot of them are now. I just did an interview with a photographer whose website is organized in a way that shows off her various expertises, if that’s a word, she does food, photography, portraiture, interior, and it’s all together. It is not like interiors and then all the work and portraiture and all the work, it’s just all there. So I do think that people expect that now.

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

Claire

So what would you say drives your work the most? The purpose/why behind it? The materials/what? Or the method/the how? where do you start from either what you want to do or how you choose projects?

Debbie

Purpose.

Claire

Why is that important to your design practice or how you function?

Debbie

It’s just important to everything I do. ‘What is the purpose of this?’ It’s just embedded in how I live my life. So it’s just natural that that would extend to my work.

Claire

So I really like to combine the visual and the verbal, because my past life up until now involved a lot of writing, even actually trying cases in court. And I feel like graphic design is really about creating a mood and environment and maybe like a feeling or being able to encompass a feeling from both. Can you talk about the balance of those and how you integrate them within your work and your projects?

Debbie

Well, it makes everything twice as challenging because the quality of the writing has to be as good as the quality of the visuals and vice versa. And then they have to be integrated as a third element. So you have two various elements that come together. They both have to be equally good and they also have to be fully integrated. So I think it makes for a much more challenging endeavor. However, I do think, for me, it’s the most fulfilling way to work. I feel that I’m much more compelled by visual imagery that has a typographic component. And maybe that makes it more conceptual or I don’t know. I’m not exactly sure why I’m attracted to that so much. But it’s not just in the work that I make, but also the work that I like to look at.

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Claire

That makes perfect sense. I think sometimes I feel like I can really express myself in one way with writing, but in a completely different way through visual form and I can’t achieve what I want through only writing or only visual, so it’s the amalgamation of them that gets me all the way to what I want to express. I’d like to talk about impact a little bit and how you measure impact in terms of design and not just from a business metric sense, like money or KPIs, etc. Do you think about things in terms of quality, quantity, or something else, like how many people see it and like, how do those personal calculations of impact play into your decisions about design?

Debbie

Unfortunately, the sort of potential audience engagement or ‘likeability’ never factors into what I do. And that sometimes gets me into trouble with my partners at Print magazine. It’s probably curtailed some of the potential audience that I might have for my podcast. I tend to do what I’m interested in doing and hope that the people that are interested in my work will come along for the ride. I’ve never, ever been motivated by clicks and downloads. And, I hope I never am because I think that will make me a hack. You know, I don’t know if you’ve read Seth Godin’s recent book called The Practice. I think it’s a wonderful book about who you write for, who you make for, and who you create for, and I am not a content mill and I never want to be a content mill. I never want to actually make ‘content’, you know? I’m a writer and an artist or a designer and I make art or I make design or I write editorial. You know, I’m not, I have no interest in ever doing anything that has the words content or asset in it. But you know, I’m old school.

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Claire

Do you think designing or creating for an audience of one is valid?

Debbie

That’s what I did with Design Matters. Now I also, I don’t know if design matters would be as popular now, if I was just launching it in 2021, than if I launched it back in 2005, you know, my audience has grown over 16 years. And it’s not unusual for somebody to write to me and say, Oh, I’ve been listening to you since 2009, or I’ve been listening to you since 2007. You know, that to me is what I do this for. You know, I tend to reach people and to move people. If I was interested in volumetric growth (which I really I’d love), I might have considered much earlier changing the name to something else because Design Matters, isn’t the most engaging name if somebody isn’t interested in design, but very well may be interested in David Byrne or Jenna Lyons or any of the people that I’m interviewing that aren’t really ‘designers’. All that being said, going back to your first question, I feel like I’m lucky that I was one of the first in the area, in the field, because I think that’s helped generate my audience. If I started a design podcast tomorrow, I don’t know if it would resonate as much just because there’s so much out there now. First mover advantage really helped me here, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Claire

Well, I also have to say that you’re not giving yourself enough credit for the level of research. And like, I mean, I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts and a lot of people interview people all the time and the detail and just incredible breadth and depth of effort that you put into before you get on the air is so evident and like head and shoulders above many, many, many of them.

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Debbie

Thank you. Thank you. You know, that’s for me, the part of the show that I like as much as the interview. I go into, if I get into a zone, when I’m researching, you know, I could look up and three hours will have gone by and I won’t have even felt the time. So that I think is when you know you’re truly enjoying something.

Claire

Do you feel like that’s part of the design?

Debbie

Oh yeah. It’s not even about how you design the arc of a life, which is how I’ve tried to reorganize the positioning of the show, but also how I organize and design the arc of the interview because. I say that a good interview is sort of like a game of pool where you’re not only trying to get the billiard balls into the pockets on the table. You’re also trying to leave the billiard balls in a place where you can get the next ball into the pocket. And so, that, for me, is how I try to set up the interview where I’m able to go anywhere my interviewee takes the conversation because I know enough about their lives and their work and their practice to be able to understand where they could potentially go and be prepared for that.

Claire

So, I know that you do a lot of work with branding and I was researching how visuals and systems help create and enforce power structures. So I’m thinking about and looking at things like maps and colonial vs. indigenous symbology, and signs. I’m looking at design as this all encompassing, world making concept or tool. For example, land boundaries are real, but not real. They exist, that’s true, but they were just made up by a person and applied onto the land. And they’re sort of stood up by design - documents, signage, etc. So if you can create all of these things, you can also deconstruct them and reconstruct them. I’d love to hear your thoughts on design and power structures — how design communicates power and how it supports or deconstructs existing structures.

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

Debbie

Well, they’re all constructs, you know, we’ve created them. We embed these structures with meaning. They don’t have meaning on their own. They’re not created organically, it’s not something we pick off a tree — they don’t grow on their own. We direct them. So it’s all construct — everything is, even a brand. You know, the Nike logo is also the Newport logo upside down and the capital one logo on its side. So we embed these marks, via marketing, with meaning, it’s all manufactured. So everything that we construct to either exclude people or include people is built with consensus. If we don’t have consensus then it either fails or it topples, if it has consensus, then it builds. You know, I was doing a lot of research yesterday on the expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement, and there’s virtually no differentiation in the signage and in the level of outrage in Sweden, Germany, France, Ghana, Somalia, Argentina, Australia, Canada, basically around the entire world. I was looking at all of this visual signage, all the marches and other than occasionally a difference in the race of the people in the photos, you wouldn’t even know where these marches were and that’s pretty extraordinary. So, we create meaning we are able to dismantle or build the constructs that we believe are necessary or unnecessary. You know, people talk about evil corporations. I’m like the corporation doesn’t have a heart. It doesn’t have a soul. It’s not breathing. It doesn’t have DNA. It’s people that make it, so if there’s anything evil, it’s the people.

Claire

Debbie

Do you think that sort of homogeneity of the look and feel of the BLM movement would be possible before the launch and ubiquitous nature of social media? Oh, without a doubt. We all agree with the crucifix means, you know, we all agree with the star of David means, we all agree with the peace sign me. We all agree, now, what the swastika means, even though it had many, many, many different meanings over millennia prior to the

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Nazis appropriating it. So yes, I do. It just took a lot less time for the BLM movement to build that consensus. But no, I think we can see how meaning has developed with consensus over the last 10,000 years.

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Claire

Do you think that routine and regimen and structure help you, or are you more of an intuition, improvisation, and impromptu type of functioning designer? Because one of my other premises is that routine actually supports creativity more than just trying to wait for some lightning strike of an idea to pop up in your head.

Debbie

Yeah. I definitely think routine helps. The most productive times that I’ve had were when I was working at Sterling and had a day job and also a night job working at SVA There was a period of time where I was doing both and the podcast and my writing and books and so forth - super productive. Then, when I stopped working at Sterling and had a lot more time ostensibly to do all the things that I thought I was going to do, I became less productive. And now, in this last year, my routine is pretty much staying at home 24/7, I’ve been super productive again. Again I have this routine. So yes, I do believe that routine supports productivity.

Claire

And the final question is, what outside of design fuels do you, how do you recharge, rejuvenate, renourish yourself?

Debbie

Spending time with my wife, you know, I recently got married, so that’s been, you know, a huge, huge impact to the joy in my life. So that, and our dog. Just like our little family.

Claire

That’s nice. That’s so great. It always comes back to the people that you love, right? I’d rather be in the worst place with the people I love than the best place with none of them.

Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

Debbie

Yeah. She’s, ready to get out there again and be done with this, but I’m, you know, just from a purely personal point of view, I know that there’s a lot of tragedy. My brother got sick, but I’ve been super lucky. Neither, one of us has gotten sick. Roxanne’s parents are living in our guest house. So, I’m very content right now. I don’t feel the need to have any kind of different routine because I like my routine.

Claire

I know, I have to say, I feel slightly the same because my boyfriend is a professional track coach and he travels the world for all these track meets and he’s been home for like a whole year and I get to see him every day and I’m just like, ‘Oh, this is great’, but it’s going to change. So just enjoy it while you’re here. Great. Well, thank you again. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it and I really enjoyed our talk and I look forward to all the other things that you do and I’ve written down those notes that you gave me, so I’ll look into those resources as well.

Debbie

So excellent. Very happy to help! Send me a copy of your thesis.

Claire

Absolutely, of course. Because you’re going to be in it, so, of course I will.

Debbie

Excellent. Excellent. Thank you Claire, very, very nice to meet you and thank you for thinking of me.

Claire

Thank you so nice to meet you as well.

Debbie

Thank you. Okay, bye.

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Appendix

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Summer Letter An Intention for Thesis

DEAR NICK, For me, design has always been about communicating a concept, eliciting an emotion, and creating (or identifying) common experience in a way that words alone cannot. Design is about the human experience — identifying it, acknowledging it, helping us understand our place in the world, and how we relate to each other. I always start with the concept, the ‘why’ behind my design, which is also largely how I live my life. The concept, or goal, drives my decisions related to materials and form. A design thesis should define your place in the design world, at least at this point in time. A place in the world is an ever changing condition, but each of us has principles and ideals that make up who we are. A design thesis should communicate to the world, in a visual sense, an opinion or principle held by the designer, their unique view, a stand on the human condition, a novel idea. That idea or principle should be well researched, so the response the designer is putting into the world comes from a place of knowledge. The visual form should enhance the audience’s understanding of the topic and the designer’s opinion about that topic. Design is about people. Designers share themselves as people with their audience and hopefully the audience uses that experience with the design to reflect on themselves, as well as connect to the designer and other people more deeply. As always, I have varied interests (which is probably why I’m back in graduate school at 41). I’ve never been able to choose just one major or one professional role because it’s all so interesting. I have a lot of topics and ideas rattling around in my head right now, and not just because we’ve all been living the weirdest year anyone’s experienced to date. Honestly, the last three years have been the strangest and most surprising, both in terrible and wonderful ways, of my life. This year doesn’t even rank first for worst among them. The topic that’s been frequently bouncing in and out of my mind, and that so many people have been talking to me about recently is the concept of impermanence and dealing with the impermanence that is life. Ironically, nothing in this life is permanent except impermanence, so we constantly live in an evolving state. Sometimes the changes are so slow we don’t notice at all, the concept of long days and short years, and sometimes it’s so abrupt that it upends everything, the call you get on a random Tuesday that shatters your reality. The concept of impermanence is unsettling and humans struggle to fight against it all the time in the ways we construct our lives. We make schedules and five-year plans, we create patterns and form habits, we put down roots, get married, have children, and on and on. Yet all these actions that help us feel a

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sense of permanence, do not, in fact, make anything permanent. I’m not saying any of these things are bad, or that we shouldn’t do them. The fact that life is so impermanent means that we should do the things we want, take the risks, embrace the actions that will make our life fulfilled. Many people despair over the impermanence of life, but I contend that life’s impermanence is one of the best qualities about it. Impermanence holds a promise for a better tomorrow, a better future. If things were to always remain the same, there is no hope for something better, no reason to try new things, do more, or work harder. It won’t always be this way means that difficult and trying times cannot last, injustices can be changed, conditions can be improved, and life can improve. The converse is also necessarily true, your most joyful and exuberant times won’t last either, so pay attention to those things that are right and good and appreciate them, try to perpetuate them and identify what’s right about the place you’re in, even when things are falling apart. The most content, clear-minded, purposeful, and present I’ve ever felt in life was the six months that my dad was dying from a brain tumor. Every day was the same, so it felt like nothing was changing, but each day he was slipping more closely toward dying. During those six months I never worried about what would happen after because I was too focused on the present. After he died, I worried so much about how impermanent everything in life is. I made lists and plans and routines, trying to grasp at a settled life. In the past two years since he died, I’ve tried to work at embracing impermanence as an opportunity, like I did in the six months of his illness, and accept the state of life’s impermanence free me from becoming anxious about trivial worries and serious problems and simply do something about them. The impermanence of life feels acutely present around the world; sparking fear, apprehension, and worry. But what if, through a design thesis project, I could create an understanding of change that empowers people, frees them to embrace what could be and/or more deeply appreciate what is (or at least aspects of what is), because it will never be this way again. I’d like to find a way to visually, experientially, express that the impermanence of life is the birthplace of hope and promise, while permanence is the pressure cooker of stagnation and despair.

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Related topics that may be part of this project, through research or visual exploration, include: • •

•

• •

Movement - Exploring the concept of movement as a way to visualize about the passage of time. Movement of materials, the body, nature, both in video/animation and in a 2D space or environment Delight, Wonder, & Enthrallment - Creating an intense emotional rush, a euphoria through an immersive experience. A visual, spacial, and auditory that triggers an emotional response, not necessarily sad, but that rush of adrenaline feeling where your emotions “well up” inside you to the point where they pour out physically or audibly, often triggered by a song, dance performance, a space, etc. Incongruity - Mixing contrasting concepts as a way of relating how multi-dimensional individuals are and how they adapt to changing dynamics in their lives. Demonstrating how people and places embody contradictions. Simplicity & Minimalist - What does it take to live, what do you really need? What is just noise that’s distracting us from being present and finding fulfillment? Repetition - Why do we do the same things over and over, why will we play a song on repeat? Why do we repeat actions that don’t make us happy? Repetition compulsion.

Form and medium will necessarily be driven from the concept and message or feelings I want to the audience to explore. Methods and materials I’m thinking about and interested in include: • Creating an ephemeral work, an experience that only happens once. • Handmade materials, materials that will deteriorate. Potentially mixed into digital, but if impermanence is going to be a theme, digital potentially has too permanence… • Maybe mixing handmade and digital as the preservation/documentation method • Works on paper, watercolor • Work with textiles • An event or creation that is left to the elements • Geometric assemblies, straight lines, patterns.

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Since this idea is nebulous in nature, this Fall I want to focus on research, collection, and refinement of the overall concept. I often have the most difficult time with the editing portion of any project, as I want to take it in all directions at massive scale, so I will need your guidance to help me think through things clearly and objectively. I will rely on you to challenge me to push further or through roadblocks that I encounter and to embrace an experimental and critical eye for my work. I’m excited to see what this could be and to have your mentorship as I explore the possibilities.

WA R M R E G A R D S , CLAIRE

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Thesis Taxonomy

The Importance of the Words We Choose

Taxonomy

Claire Bula MFA Studio II Fall 2020 Professor Nick Rock December 12, 2020

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Introduction

The words we choose are important. Precise use of language helps us examine the exact meaning we’re trying to convey and it helps listeners or readers understand that message without ambiguity. However, words can be defined differently from person to person. Definitions are often influenced by life experience and personal perspective. The intention of the speaker, or author, can be distorted based on the listener/ reader’s perception of the word and the dictionary definition doesn’t always align with the public vernacular. This publication reveals the influence and importance of word selection in my Design Inquiry Presentation, as well as my personal perspective on specific definitions. It also includes an appendix of significant terms that helped shape this presentation, but were not actually spoken in it.

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MFA Design Inquiry Presentation

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Appendix - Influential Terms

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A Author - A writer of a book, article, or report. Authority - Something people really only have over their own lives.

B Brand - The totality of an entity’s (usually a corporation, but now also applies to individuals with the rise of social media) reputation including visual identity, action, and behavior.

C Canon - An accepted principle or rule. A criterion or standard of judgment ‘the canons of good taste’. A body of principles, rules, standards, or norms Codification - the action or process of arranging laws or rules according to a system or plan. Control - An imaginary construct. Cosmopolitan - Having wide international sophistication: Worldly. Composed of persons, constituents, or elements from all or many parts of the world. A city with a cosmopolitan population. Having worldwide rather than limited or provincial scope or bearing.

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D Decentered - to cause to lose or shift from an established center or focus especially: to disconnect from practical or theoretical assumptions of origin, priority, or essence Deconstruction - A philosophical or critical method which asserts that meanings, metaphysical constructs, and hierarchical oppositions (as between key terms in a philosophical or literary work) are always rendered unstable by their dependence on ultimately arbitrary signifiers Default - Failure to do something required by duty or law: neglect. A selection made usually automatically or without active consideration due to lack of a viable alternative. A selection automatically used by a program in the absence of a choice made by the user. Using the default settings Design paradigm - The constellation of beliefs, rules, knowledge, etc. that is valid for a particular design community. Determinism - the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. The opposite of determinism is some kind of indeterminism (otherwise called nondeterminism) or randomness. Determinism is often contrasted with free will. Duality - A theory that considers reality to consist of two irreducible elements or modes. The quality or state of being dual or of having a dual nature. A doctrine that the universe is under the dominion of two opposing principles one of which is good and the other evil. View of human beings as constituted of two irreducible elements.

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E Epiphany - a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience. Euphemism - a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing. Experience - Something physically perceived through multiple senses. An event that is encountered over a period of time; which can be as short as seconds or as long as decades. Something - knowledge, skills, memory, feelings - carried with you throughout your life. Becoming better equipped to handle an event you encounter over and over again. Explicate - analyze and develop (an idea or principle) in detail.

F Floating signifier - signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified. As such a 'floating signifier' may mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean. Such a floating signifier—which is said to possess "symbolic value zero"— necessarily results to "allow symbolic thought to operate despite the contradiction inherent in it".

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H Harbinger - A person or thing that announces or signals the approach of another. Hegemony - leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others. Leadership, dominance.

I Inessential - Not necessary, extra, something able to be given up without feeling any sacrifice or loss. Isotope - A series of visual symbols (pictograms) to convey information in a simple, non-verbal way

L Liminal - Relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

M Make - To conceive, as an idea. To construct, in a physical sense.

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N Normal - The current state or stasis. A constantly changing state, although perceived as a static state of being; whatever currently is. Nostalgia - A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.

P Paradigm - Typical example or pattern of something; a model. A set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles. Parergon - Something subordinate or accessory, especially an ornamental accessory or embellishment. Subordinate activity or work : work undertaken in addition to one's main employment Pluralism - A condition or system in which two or more states, groups, principles, sources of authority, etc., coexist. The practice of holding more than one office or church benefice at a time. Provincial - A person who lives in or comes from the provinces. A person who lacks urban sophistication or broad-mindedness. Only interested in what you already know, geographically, socially, and culturally. Incurious. Insular. Unwilling to learn about other people and cultures. Thinking the way it’s done where you’re from is the only way to be.

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R Reductivism - Another term for minimalism/another term for reductionism

S Success - the accomplishment of an aim or purpose

T Time - The system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another. Duration regarded as belonging to the present life as distinct from the life to come or from eternity; finite duration. A human construct that can feel limiting or eternal, depending on the circumstances. Elastic in nature.

U Ugly - not preferred by an individual’s aesthetic. Not visually appealing from one person’s point of view. Whatever you think is ugly.

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V Vestige - Trace, mark, or visible sign left by something (such as an ancient city or a condition or practice) vanished or lost. Vernacular - The language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region. Architecture concerned with domestic and functional rather than public or monumental buildings.

W Work - exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something; labor; toil. Productive or operative activity.

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Fifty Questions The Final List 10.1.20 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

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What’s next? How can I meld all my different facets? (Why do we say no to ourselves, limit ourselves unnecessarily? Why the pressure to focus on or choose one thing? What can I do for the world? What is a legacy? What is impact? (What impact do I want to have? What do I want people to ask themselves based on what I make? How many does it take for impact, is it about quantity or quality?) Can you re-frame a bad thing into a good thing? Can bad things, though they remain bad, still create or result in good things? Is there a reason for everything? How do you define a person? A life? (How do you encapsulate the totality of a life in words?) Are the little things the big things? Are we ever really in control? What should I be noticing that I’m missing? Why do I get paralyzed by analysis, can I get to action faster? (Analysis or action? Why do we always sit around and think about how instead of just doing something?) Why am I so regimented? (How can I be more free/less restrained (Why do I care so much about the details? The way it’s done? How can I get to the ‘I just don’t give an F’ place (in a good way)?) Is today always day one? How are people able to adapt to any condition, good or bad, and survive? (Why are humans able to adapt to any condition/context and still survive (for the most part)?) Why is the anticipation of change more traumatic than the change itself? Why does tragedy often spur the greatest growth and achievement? Should you just follow your intuition or logic? Why does everything always turn out better when you just follow your gut intuition, rather than try to analyze it and do the rational thing? How come my dad isn’t here to talk to? What would he say? (How do I make sense of that?) Are feelings facts? Can I care for others through design? Why is the world so ugly and so beautiful? Is anything ever really finished? If time did not exist, could you be present with anyone? (Be in a geographical place and meet up with someone that has already died? Or someone that you never even lived with at the same time as?) Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is everything at the expense of something else?

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27. What is the American Dream? Will it/does it make people happy? 28. What is normal, is normal just the ‘current context’? (Was normal good? Is normal good?) 29. How will people perceive me through what I make? 30. What drives cycles of style? Do they matter? (How do design cycles drive progress and innovation Why do things go out of style? Why does something become popular?) 31. What is relevant, original and authentic? (and how do you make work like that? Avoid cliché, replication?) 32. Why do we echo chamber the negative and forget the positive? 33. Does it matter how you define design? (What is design? Is it craft? art? commercial? What is the heart of design? Form? Beauty? Function? Utility? User-friendliness? The idea? The concept? The maker?) 34. Can ideas be exhausted? 35. Answers or questions? 36. Are people lucky or do they just make the best of what they have? 37. Do the chairs at least all match? 38. What’s worth sacrificing for? 39. Are true and real the same thing? (If it’s real, is it true? If it’s true, is it real? Are truth, reality, and fact objective or subjective? Are they the same thing or different? (Can something be a fact for one person and not another? Can something be real, but not true? Can something be true, but not real?) 40. How does memory work? Why do we remember/forget what we do (What is the value of memory/remembering? Why do we cling to the past/nostalgia? Why do we remember?) 41. Is asking why always good? (Is asking/dwelling on why always a good thing?) 42. What are the rules? (Why have I lived my life for so long by ‘the rules’? What are ‘the rules’? Why should we follow them? How do we break them? Who makes them? Who perpetuates them, and why?) 43. Is resilience only forged through hardship? (Are grit and resilience the same thing and how do you build them or support/encourage people in building them? What is grit? What is resilience? Why do some people seem to have more of them? Can you get more of them? How?) 44. Why isn’t the world just? 45. Why can we see others more clearly than ourselves? 46. What do I value most? 47. How can I be solid and elastic? (How can you be true to yourself and adaptable? Ability to transition between spheres so easily?) 48. Which feelings are the most valuable? 49. Are things really any different today? (Are humans the same as ever?) 50. Will we ever stop asking unanswerable questions? (Should we ever stop asking questions? Why are there so many unanswered questions?

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Thesis Journal Fall 2020

9.11.20 I’ve been watching documentaries about Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, CSNY, and Creem Magazine, etc. because I love the music, but there’s so much design inspiration in there too. It’s not necessarily my style (psychedelic, 60’s, counterculture), but I respect and am inspired by their creativity and innovation. What really intrigues me about these artists (I’ll just lump it together that way because we’re talking about everyone from musicians to writers to designers) is their ability to just do stuff. They didn’t wait for funding or analyze whether it was a good idea to start a band or launch a magazine. They didn’t care one bit that they had no experience or credentials, or really any ‘business’ doing what they were doing, they just did it. And their whys were really simple: ‘I want to’, ‘I like it’, ‘I want to be in this world’. They were ‘fill in the blank’ - photographers, journalists, musicians, artists, designers - largely because they said they were and then just did it - wrote or sang or took pictures, etc. They didn’t need permission, they didn’t WANT permission. And they used what they had, they didn’t worry about what they didn’t have. Oh, no money for a professional printer and regular magazine paper and a perfect binder? So what, Rolling Stone was originally printed on tabloid paper and folded in half because that’s what they had. No professional journalists with big names? Find some friends or up-and-coming writers who want to contribute. No photographer, again, phone a friend. And what blows my mind is that these people became exactly what they set out to be, it’s like they willed it into being. They became some pretty big names Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Annie Liebovitz, etc. (I’m sure there’s lots of stories about ‘failed’ magazines, bands, photographers, etc. who never made a ‘big name’ for themselves, but so what? Did they love it? Did they enjoy what they were doing. I’m gonna bet yes. Also, everything runs its course, nothing lasts forever, so if you can make something good, enjoy yourself, and stand for some principles while you do it, why not?). I think there are so many ways that I hold myself back, follow the rules, etc., that other people just don’t subscribe to and sometimes I get a flicker of ability to just go for it, but lots of times I don’t, which, honestly, annoys me about myself. Sometimes I look at my classmates’ response to a brief, admiringly, and think, ‘oh I didn’t think we were allowed to do that’, which is pretty much BS (on my part). Of course you’re allowed to do ‘that’, who’s gonna stop you? The rules are only made by you,

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the designer. This was something I saw a lot in Amsterdam, just a totally different attitude towards design. The designers there were always talking about how Americans are much more theoretical about design and they are not. One wasn’t better than the other, but just a different approach. In Amsterdam it seems they lean more towards just starting to make stuff and not necessarily having to define why or justify every decision, sometimes they don’t end up justifying or analyzing the decisions they made at all, it’s just they made them. It seemed like there were less rules there in the sense that I feel I can not make a design decision without having a very specific reason and when you would ask them what was the reason behind a certain decision sometimes they answer was simply, ‘I wanted to’ or ‘I liked it’ and that was totally fine. I’m also really thinking about tools and production. My computer just straight up stopped taking a charge last Friday. Now it only intermittently works and it’s at Apple for repairs (cross your fingers…). So we got this assignment in Editorial to do a book layout of a Wikipedia article and I was kind of freaking out, like ‘what am I going to do if I don’t have InDesign to do this typesetting and layout, blah blah blah’. I actually thought back to my Amsterdam trip last Spring and thought about the Wim Crouwel show at the Stedelijk Museum (https://www.stedelijk.nl/ en/exhibitions/wim-crouwel). It was one of my favorite parts of the trip because you got to see behind the posters what he was doing to get to them - the drawings and compositions and how it actually worked, not just the end project. So I said to myself, well, Wim Crouwel didn’t have InDesign and when he started he didn’t even have a computer, so there is definitely a way to do this without a computer. He just drew stuff and did layouts and photographed them, so you could do that too. I started making plans to potentially do the layout by hand and scan it into the computer and just try my best to conform to the parameters of the brief. Maybe I could use word, maybe I could use PowerPoint. I just made plans with other tools I thought I could rely on. Ultimately I was able to revive an old computer and use adobe cloud, BUT maybe it would have been a lot more interesting to try and draw it and scan it in. Probably an outrageous amount of work, but probably also just a great process and learning experience. Especially right now, where so many aspects of our lives are online and I’m seeing everyone do more digital drawings and motion graphics because of that restraint, it really makes me want to so something that is tangible - work by hand with real supplies that’s not an apple pen with procreate or a wacom tablet, or adobe projects. I want to make work you can hold

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in your hands with tools (at least in part) that I held in my hand and used tangible supplies to make something. I’m not knocking the move by others to embrace digital more deeply during this time, I totally admire it and I want to work on those skills, but I think because the knee jerk reaction right now across our entire lives is to just ‘move it online’ - school, meetings, happy hour, interactions with family and friends, theater, dance, art shows, etc. it just makes me crave tangible reality and creations more. I just want to rebel against that situation and make things I can touch and experience off a screen. I think a thesis should make a statement, stand for something, but I’m not sure that it has to be a ‘said’ thing or even a specific thing that I want to say. I watched Naomi Osaka win the US Open yesterday. Osaka has been wearing masks with names of black people who’ve suffered death due to police brutality including Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tamir Rice. In the post-match interview the reporter, Tom Rinaldi, asked Osaka about the message behind her wearing these masks and her response was perfect. Here’s the exchange: Tom Rinaldi: ‘You said from the beginning you had seven matches, seven masks, seven names. What was the message you wanted to send Naomi?’ Naomi Osaka: ‘Well, what was the message that you got? Was more the question. I feel like the point is to make people start talking.’ Right now as I think about thesis, I don’t have a ‘thing I want to say’, like this burning statement I HAVE to get out in the world because it’s so unique and people don’t know it and they need to. But maybe it’s a little more subtle, like Naomi, and making it more about setting the stage for people to take away their own message based on what I’ve presented.

9.18.20 My Pilates instructor was talking about ballet and how it’s a regimented practice, you take class every day, it’s very sharp, precise, and highly structured. Then in rehearsals or performances you get to move intuitively. And we need that structure in order to trust yourself, let yourself go.

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I have a hard time letting go, breaking rules. I have such an easier time following a structured process, I do specific things every day, not just some days, EVERY day. Often it’s just rules that I make for myself, but I like that structure and order and even when I try to ‘shake it up’ I end up with the same thing, especially in my design work. So, I’ve got the precision and structure down. So how do I get to the place where I can let go and ‘move’ intuitively? Am I just not there yet? Do I not trust myself? Will I ever be there, or are you always ‘getting there’? In classes with the BFAs I’m consistently challenged by them (in good ways, I love having class with them) because they seem so free. I’m not trying to compare myself to them, but just wondering when the ‘letting go’ will or can happen for me. But maybe I’m just not like that, maybe I need rules to function? So, should my thesis explore this concept of letting go of certain things and embracing others? People hang on to so much stuff. Literally stuff, like things, but also guilt, dreams, what could/should have been, what they wished for and they don’t do anything with what they have or what exists. It’s like when circumstances change they wish for them to be different, but they don’t embrace what they have. I’m not saying you don’t have to mourn a loss or recognize that you wished for things to be different, but that doesn’t change what is, and we have to function within what is. Wistfulness, nostalgia (in a, ‘I wish for this state to be again’, not the ‘I’m working towards this state’ kind of thing) just seem useless, maybe even indulgent - allowing yourself to put limits on what you are capable of because X didn’t happen, or Y isn’t the case anymore. The other thing that ROYALLY pissed me off this week was an interview with Chris Rock in the New York Times this past Wednesday. Here’s what he said that got me all riled up: The other day I realized I’ve never met an elderly person that was cared for by their friends. Every elderly person I know that’s got any trouble is cared for by a spouse or a child. Sometimes they have like five kids but only one helps. Where are your friends? Your friends are probably not going to be there when it really counts. [Laughs.] When my dad was dying in the hospital, where were his friends? My grandmother, where were her friends? Don’t get me wrong, you get sick in your 20s, your friends will come to the hospital. It’s an adventure. [Laughs.] You get sick in your 60s, they farm it out. ‘You go Wednesday and I’ll go Sunday.’ Enjoy them while you have them. But if you think your friends are your long-term solution to loneliness, you’re an idiot.

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My reaction to that is just a big F YOU. I mean I get what he’s saying, ‘family is everything’ and I don’t disagree with that necessarily, but I hate the ‘rules’ or underlying societal context of American culture that basically says only people who get married and have kids ‘leave a legacy’ or ‘truly know what love it’, it’s such bullshit. And this is just perpetuating WASP colonial standards of what life means, what’s good, what’s not good. And, honestly, I expected more from him. I mean I get that friends often won’t come to your aid, but maybe they’re not really friends. AND, I’ve personally witnessed children not coming to their parents’ aid, through no fault of the parents. It’s not the name/label of the relationship that counts, it’s the quality of it. And that could mean a child to a parent, but it could mean a best friend, it could mean a grandparent, it could mean your dad’s college roommate, his wife, and their kids being closer to you and caring more about you than any blood relative, so I resent that Chris Rock. I’m offended. And I never thought you’d be part of the WASP patriarchy. Disappointing.

9.25.20 I have mostly been spending this week (and really each week) trying to make my life work - get my homework done, fit in time for physical activity and make a little time for my family. Honestly, when school starts I feel like I get selfish because I have to spend so much time on it that I feel like I’m ignoring my family and not participating in our life together. I know they understand, but also, it’s not really fair. So I did make time this weekend to go with my boyfriend to his son’s first college cross country race and it was so worth it, even though I probably should have done homework all weekend. But, then again, he’ll never have another first cross country race and he’s been away from us since August 2 and there will be plenty of homework, and time is elastic, so I’m glad I went. I didn’t really get any ‘concrete’ thinking done about my thesis this week. I wish it was something I could just ‘do’, like reading things and responding to them, but it doesn’t seem to be working that way for me, it’s not a ‘task’ I can complete, if that makes sense, part of it has to be exploration and intuition driven and I feel like I haven’t had time for that, but the answer is, ‘make time’, because you have as much time as you need for things that are important.

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I did notice something on our drive back. We were on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut and every bridge that goes over the Merritt is unique in design. The decoration doesn’t have any ‘physical use’, it doesn’t make the bridge work better or more efficiently and the bridges aren’t correlated to exits, so they don’t necessarily serve as visual markers to indicate something to drivers about the route. However, they did make the drive more beautiful and interesting. I wasn’t sure if I was right, so I googled it when I got home and I was right that each bridge on the Merritt is unique and that was designed into the driving experience to make a more beautiful highway and driving experience. ‘The Merritt is significant in the history of transportation because it culminated a generation of experiments in combining the talents of engineers, landscape architects, and architects to create parkways that served recreational purposes and gave aesthetic pleasure while providing safe transportation. In it, all the best features developed in its predecessors were put together to create the quintessential parkway.’ - http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/legacies/loc.afc.afc-legacies.200002790/ default.html Today it seems like everything is about efficiency and no one would EVER design a highway to infuse joy, beauty, and delight for drivers. So what about designing for joy? Or designing in joy? Why can’t that be part of the equation? I think it should be. You can accomplish all kinds of goals and design joy in as easily as you can leave it out, but wouldn’t it be better to infuse it? When did we forget about delight and surprise and joy? Or when did we decide those weren’t important? It’s like how STEM is all the rage, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not against science, math, or engineering at all, but what about beauty and emotion? Why are those seen as ‘lesser’, when they are more basic human experiences that everyone feels or desires?

10.2.20 So we watched this Nova episode on how writing and the materials related to writing, shaped so much about how information was disseminated and how people consumed information which was totally fascinating.

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Back when papyrus was developed books were everywhere and people had regular access to them in a broad way throughout the Roman Empire because they brought it back from Egypt and disseminated it throughout their extensive domain. Papyrus was not only inexpensive, but physically really each to write on, so the writing process and reproduction process was faster and cheaper. Regular, everyday people owned books (at the time they were scrolls, not bound books like we know them) and more people could read because Once papyrus became hard to get, because the Romans’ power started dwindling and they couldn’t get it from Egypt, Europe turned to parchment, which is made from animal skins. Making parchment is time consuming and EXPENSIVE. And, parchment is a really slow surface to write on so writing and copying took a really long time. So books became rare and expensive and less people were able to read. But the lettering (blackletter) that they used in the middle ages was so regular and rectangular that Gutenberg was able to standardize it into movable type pretty easily. By contrast, Arabic was more lyrical and was much more difficult to put into a standardized movable type system. And because Gutenberg decided to print the bible, as opposed to a novel, poetry, or a science of philosophy book it was much more widely distributed and became the predominant language of printing, etc. All of this is to say that the availability of materials drove a lot more than what books and writing looked like - it truly impacted people’s lives, what was expensive or valuable, and what languages were more widely distributed. It was really striking to me that the materials, not necessarily the content or the dominance of a society, were driving global trends. Things were happening, or not happening, that drastically changed and impacted the development of societies based on what kind of writing materials were available. It was materiality driving art and behavior, not the idea behind it. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make my thesis work a tangible/tactile experience, so I thought this was pretty interesting. It was a great show and I totally recommend it, I was riveted, which also makes me a total nerd, but, what’s new? https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-how-writing-changed-the-world/

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10.9.20 I’m not really sure how I stumbled upon these OK GO videos, I think it was through research for my image essay for Theory or just the rabbit holes I’m trying to explore for ‘Words That Matter’ in Studio…? In any event, I’ve known the band for a long time, I like their music and I remember their Treadmill video for Here It Goes Again in 2006, but I didn’t realize they were upping the ante with every turn of the wheel. I mean, WHO ARE THESE GUYS?? They’re insane. Can you even call these guys a band anymore or are they performance artists? Directors? Set hands? Fabricators/ builders? Artists? Designers? I don’t know, which makes me love them more. I feel like they’ve evolved well beyond their original existence and become something undefinable. They’re figuring things out and creating one of a kind experiences and documenting them so they’re real, experience-able by larger audiences. This one really got me - Obsession - they use printers, like hundreds of them to create a video screen behind the band and they use the sound of the printers and the paper falling to be part of the song and work with the back beat. I mean, how do you even synchronize that many printers and how do you account for the paper falling from different heights, I mean… come on… I love how they are constantly creating unbelievable scenarios and then revealing the framework or BTS of how they did it, like exposing the magic of whatever incredible experience they created. It’s like an invitation to be an insider in the secret. Hilariously they now have to put disclaimers at the beginning of all of their videos stating ‘these are real, this really happened, it’s not CGI or Photoshop or whatever’, which is probably another reason they reveal something about the creation of them in the video as well. And now they’re even making commercials for companies, so are they designers too? Who knows. But this is also a discussion we have in theory all the time, what is design, what is a designer, what is our realm. I think it’s anything and everything we want to get our hands on. OK GO kinda proves that. The videos also have nothing to do with the content of the songs, they are not,

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in any way, acting out the lyrics of what they are saying, so it’s kind of this weird combination of a song with asynchronous, incongruous imagery which leads you to watch more closely rather than zoning out. But it’s also a surprise, like a delight, because you think you’re usually going to just ‘see’ the song when you watch a video. Part of me has no idea what this has to do with my thesis, but maybe I want to create the feeling I felt watching these videos for the people who experience my thesis - a sense of wonder, curiosity, enrapture, delight, exhilaration… Honestly I could NOT STOP watching these videos and I was, like, laughing out loud and smiling at them the whole time. I probably spent over an hour on their website just clicking through them. Their use of everyday objects and simple ‘tricks’ like alignment, color, or camera angles was just so clever. I really enjoyed the physical nature of everything and that not of it was digitally created, but it created a modern and innovative end experience. Maybe there’s something in that… or just bringing people delight and joy… maybe that. But seriously, watch the videos… Obsession https://youtu.be/LgmxMuW6Fsc https://okgo.net/2017/11/17/obsession-bts-paper-mapping/ Writings on the Wall https://youtu.be/m86ae_e_ptU The One Moment https://youtu.be/QvW61K2s0tA Here It Goes Again https://okgo.net/2006/07/31/here-it-goes-again-official-video/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_Go_videography

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10.16.20 I think I’m just percolating on thesis lately. Like my classmates I feel the demands of the semester which are compounded by the stresses of life - the election, coronavirus, managing family stuff, etc. I feel like I’m the repository of everyone in my life’s stress, fear, anxiety, pain, sadness, etc. and when I need to help one of my family members manage that everything else takes a back seat, so I’m not even sure if I’ve made anything good, or, more importantly, been able to do what I need to for myself or my work or thesis. But, that’s life. You don’t get to choose. I guess if our current situation, and really, the last few years, has shown me anything it’s that there are no rules, there’s no ahead or behind, there’s just what is. Given the LFA format and the fact that I haven’t seen my mom, sister, brother-in-law, or nieces since Christmas, when my boyfriend needed to drive to Flagstaff for work he suggested I go with him and surprise them. So, LFA has become LFE (learn from everywhere) and, for the most part it’s working out ok. I feel pretty behind, but a year is a lot of life to miss when kids are little and the longest I’ve ever gone not seeing my mom and sister. So... Making it work. It was pretty worth feeling a little behind to show up at my nieces front door and surprise them last Thursday. They couldn’t believe it. Now on to Flagstaff and maybe some sort of inspiration will hit me on the trip or a project will come of it, not sure yet.

10.23.20 I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of home lately. Everyone is talking about being at home, being trapped at home, being trapped with family (which I have a lot of feelings about…), so it got me thinking about home and place. What is home anyway? Is it a place? Is it a feeling? How do you define it? How can a place feel like home when you’re in it for the first time? How can a place you’ve lived most of your life stop feeling like home?

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I’m really thinking about home not so much as a place, but as feeling. So many people are stuck in places they don’t feel comfortable so they don’t feel at home. That could mean their actual home with their families or whoever they are cohabitating with, but it could also mean people who don’t feel comfortable in our country right now. You could be born and raised here and not feel comfortable. You could arrive here as an immigrant and not feel comfortable. And honestly, that sucks, I hate when people feel unwelcome or uncomfortable and that’s on me, on us as a society. So, how can I extend beyond myself to make more people feel welcome, comfortable, and ‘at home’ - in my personal life, at BU, in my community, and in the greater American society? On a more personal level, I’ve had this weird opportunity given the LFA set up at BU this semester. I mentioned before, but I hadn’t seen my family since Christmas 2019 and my boyfriend needed to drive out to Flagstaff, AZ for work, so we took a detour on the way and spent four days in Madison, WI with my mom, sister, brother-in-law, and three nieces (who are basically like my kids). I love them all to death and I miss them so much all the time when I’m in Boston, I used to see them all every day and being with them again was so great, but I gotta say, it didn’t feel like home. My dad’s not there anymore and it just never will feel right without him. I feel more at home in Boston now and I’ve only lived there just over a year. That’s so weird. I wonder if I will ever really feel at home again on this earth without my dad here… I don’t think so. My dad used to say all the time, ‘It’s not where you are, it’s who you’re with’ and I’ve always ascribed to that philosophy but I think I really know it now. There are certain people in my life that when I’m with them any sense of anxiety or fear or uncomfortableness dissipates. My dad used to be that for me, and no one will ever give me that sense of utter calm and contentment, but there are some people that are pretty close. Even when we’re in a place I’ve never been, that’s completely foreign, as long as they are there, I’m good. I’m not sure what this has to do with my thesis yet, but I think it has something to do with it. I’ve been thinking about emotion, inclusivity, place, installation, experience, shared experience and maybe this ‘home’ thing is relevant both in a timely way, given the current circumstances with COVID, BLM, immigration issues, etc., and in a timeless way - the search for ‘home’ - a place in the world, your place in the world, purpose, meaning, contentment.

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10.30.20 I legit feel like I haven’t made anything this semester or focused on my thesis as in what the output should be. Sometimes I feel like I’m just better at helping other people in their design processes than helping myself. Like I can’t get out of my own way, I keep following rules that aren’t even there. I constantly feel like when I’m in class I’m thinking to myself ‘Oh, I didn’t know we could do that’, when the professor never made any rules like the ones that were in my head. Maybe that’s the challenge of coming back to school after working for so long, you just have all those BS corporate rules in your head. I need to find a way to just break that brain pattern. I think I’m a little better at it this year, but I need to, like, brainwash the corporate out of me… I’ve also been worried, I was worried about flying home, worried about what I will do after graduation, worried about my family, just overwhelmed by all that. I really couldn’t shake the anxiety this week, everything that usually works (running, Pilates, working, being with my favorite people) just wasn’t and I had a hard time making headway on anything. So trying to think about some overarching project is, like, not on my radar when I feel like I’m more in survival mode. I’m glad that I have more ideas for the Extreme Scale project than I had for Remix, which is probably NOT where I should be focusing my time, but I kind of want to make a couple things/try a couple things for Extreme Scale. I do feel like I can do something (maybe) interesting for that. I feel like we had a good studio this week with a lot of discussion and suggestions of references and threads, so that felt nice. It’s been weird being disconnected from my classmates, even though I ‘see’ them a lot…

11.6.20 This week I’ve really been into my theory presentation and usually I kind of struggle to make sense of and understand theory. One of the articles I was responsible for dealt with how graphic design supported the taking of land from Native Americans in the colonial period. I dove deeply into the history of colonialism and traced it

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back to John Locke and his philosophical writings. He’s said to be the father of liberalism and the American Revolutionary ideals and while some of these theories are well-intentioned, it’s also easy to see how he applied those theories to benefit English colonialism and his benefactor and deprive Native Americans of their land. From a graphic design point of view, there is a whole visual language that supported colonialism and perpetuated not only stealing land, but the stereotype of Native Americans as ‘savages’. It carried through so many marketing campaigns for weapons and ammunition, but also food and shoes and tons of products and it still continues today, most notably in my mind with regard to sports teams. I never really thought about how graphic design reinforces authority when it comes to the law, but it’s so clear to me now - the visual language of legal power is all about intimidation and looking ‘official’ and grandiose: fancy typography - black letter, serif typefaces with lots of detail, maximalist typography; decorative borders with intricate detailing; seals - flat printed, gold foil, embossed, wax seals, etc. And mix that in with legalese which is another language and totally intimidating in and of itself because a ton of it is in Latin and you have a method of control. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16EbsyZIn2yk2sDIcgChooGSeVt3f2_6E2_ BPBQ5NsGQ/edit?usp=sharing The other thing I’ve been thinking about this week is broken things and dying and loss. It’s coming up on the anniversary of my dad’s diagnosis with his brain tumor (it was right before Thanksgiving) and the days get shorter and the semester gets harder and it’s the time you just want to lay down and be done with it, but you have to keep going, there is no other choice. So, I was looking at Kintsugi ‘golden joinery’ or ‘golden repair’ - the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. It’s related to the idea of wabi sabi and promotes embracing flaws and imperfections to create an even stronger, more beautiful piece of art. Every break is unique and actually highlights the ‘scars’ as a part of the design. This is also a metaphor for healing - we will all break, we all have our struggles and our despairs, but in the process of working through being broken, we can realize new things about ourselves, find new joys, and recognize how truly resilient we actually are. Related to this I was thinking about how you generally don’t see the scars that

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people carry with them, they are inside, on their heart or soul and everyone has them, they just don’t always share them publicly. This is one of the things that is a shared human experience - loss and suffering and I don’t know if there’s a way to express empathy not only for those hidden conditions of suffering, but also to demonstrate that ‘everyone has their shit’, you just don’t know their shit…?

11.13.20 I feel like water — spreading out, running in different directions - shallow and all over the place, unformed, unfocused, and constantly spreading further and further from the place I started. I’m not sure if that’s good, I mean it is good to explore, but this doesn’t feel like that. This feels like I’ve let something get too far away from me and I can’t reign it in. I had some ideas for thesis work, but they keep slipping away from my brain as I get overwhelmed. And, in an effort to help (in many ways, school, family, just other people), I’ve spread myself way too thin and potentially concentrated on things that I shouldn’t have. Well, that’s not true, it’s not that I shouldn’t concentrate on those other things, that’s life, but maybe I should be more selfish, or self-focused. But it’s just not my nature, it’s my nature to help where I can and give to the point where I then am a little overextended… it’s my own fault, well decision, because I feel like helping is not really a fault, but sometimes it does make my own life more difficult. But, it’s who I am, I will never change, I’d rather be over-extended than underextended, that’s proved itself over and over for 40+ years, so that’s not changing. And, I’d rather make sure someone I care about is ok, or the group is ok before my own personal endeavor being perfect… so… With regard to thesis, I feel like I have a warehouse filled with filing cabinets of various notes and interests and ideas and I just emptied them out and spread them across the room and I can’t figure out how they thread together. I think they do, but the big picture is escaping me and I keep getting pulled too deeply into random elective class projects and not focusing on this, which should probably be my focus. I need to take a step back and stop worrying so much about the weekly grind and focus on the presentation. Not that I want to do work that isn’t A+, but I need to prioritize and I can’t go hard on every single project that I have right now and deal with everything with my family and still be a full, well-rounded person in life.

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11.20.20 I made a bunch of progress in my presentation for the end of the semester. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that my thesis isn’t going to be a single project/ proof of a concept, but a more methodological approach, which of course, is more challenging for me, because I really like having a single goal to accomplish and just working towards that. This will be more chaotic, messy, experimental and complex… and the output could be nebulous… I really prefer order, clean, simple, but then again I make everything complicated for myself, so this is not really a surprise to me. My dad used to always say I had to do things the hard way/learn for myself, instead of taking his word for it… which makes me think that maybe I’ve always learned by doing? Or making? I always have to ‘see for myself’, whether something will work or not, before I know it to be true. Maybe this whole methodology thesis IS for me because it will give me a chance to see for myself about a lot of things. I’m curious if there will be a surprising outcome or some revelation once I look back across the work, or even my whole time in school. In the process of building I found the word multipotentialite, which helped me actually understand my basic way of existing, or have a term to put to not ever being able choose a singular path in life. A multipotentialite has many interests, creative pursuits, and paths spanning multiple fields or areas. They have no ‘one true calling’ the way specialists do. Multipotentialites thrive on learning, exploring, and mastering new skills. If multipotentialite is my approach to life, then design is a perfect fit as my approach to working. Design itself is a multipotential pursuit - the word itself encompasses an entire process from conceiving a plan, sketching, creating, executing, and constructing. The field of design, especially graphic design spreads far and wide along an ever expanding spectrum that reaches from hand lettering and installations to motion graphics and coding AI. The methodology I’m swirling around is design is a process of evolution/evolving a cycle of asking questions, making discoveries, and changing/growing/improving based on what that process reveals. And then asking, again ‘what’s next?’ My concern now is, how will I activate this into a thesis? Into work? I’m not sure... I’m better at responding to prompts than creating them, but it’s probably time to

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move past a responsive/reactive design practice into a more causal/proactive/ self-initiated practice. A contributory practice that offers something to the design discourse rather than a siphon, sucking things out. Nope, I change my mind, it has to be siphoning out of the design discourse as an important part of learning, evolving, and growing, so it has to be both input and extraction…

11.27.20 I basically just kept editing my presentation - trying to hone it down to the essentials, but I keep running way over 10 minutes. I’m also trying to figure out how to approach actually making work now that I have a ‘direction’. I guess that’s a problem for the break, haha. I feel like maybe that will involve going back through lots of theory readings, exploring things that professors and other people have sent me that I haven’t had time to parse through, etc. Maybe I’ll find some concrete projects out of that. I tried to take a break over Thanksgiving…

12.4.20 I didn’t really find anything this week. It’s nice that the presentation is behind me, but I’m already trying to figure out how to tackle the challenge I’ve set out for my thesis. I’m going to need to put some more thought into what it means. Although this is exactly what I said I shouldn’t do, I said I should start making and see where it leads, not be analytical and all ‘planny’ about it. I’m just worried that if I go the ‘make work and see where it leads route’ that I won’t end up with anything. And that’s not really an option. Kristen posed a question to me in the chat that I’ve been chewing on a little bit (while I stress out about rounding out the semester) - ‘I wonder, do you have to make objects? Can you design experiences? A workshop, a forum, a podcast? You have such a powerful voice and message, I feel the potential exists far beyond concrete

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form. Make something serial. Invent the format for thesis. Make it your vocation after thesis. Why does it have to end in March? Think: Scratching the Surface podcast. Started as a thesis project examining design criticism. And three or four years later, he’s still at it.’ I’ve, at times, thought about making an experience. But what should it be? I mean everyone and their freaking mother, brother, and cousin’s girlfriend’s dog walker’s three-year-old child has a podcast… sooo… I would want it to be an in person experience and… we’re in a pandemic. And I would want it to be accessible, but I don’t want to make digital stuff like an app or a website... I kind of want it to be an installation, but that’s not necessarily widely accessible because it has to be a certain date, time, and location, so the audience is small.

Maybe I’m just feeling overwhelmed because I feel like so much is resting/riding on this and then I’m gonna have to figure out a job and I don’t really want to give up the freedom of my current life. I don’t mind working and working hard, but the idea of going back to an office is like… BARF Honestly I wish I could feel relieved and thrilled about giving my presentation, but I don’t. Maybe it’s because it was over zoom so there’s no real reaction/feedback during or after the presentation. Maybe it’s just because I’m always ‘on to the next thing’ and whatever I did yesterday is just yesterday and you need to refocus on the next thing. Maybe I just need a break, but I think I just need to get reinvigorated and I’m not sure a break is going to do that for me…

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Design Inquiry Presentation Speech Full Text, Fall 2020

Where I've Been Multipotentialite - How I Function I never had an answer for the question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I’ve always had a hard time choosing just one, whether it’s a career or an ice cream flavor. My life is a case study in the inability to choose: I’ve lived in 8 states; Competed in over 13 sports and tried nearly every extracurricular activity in existence. My undergrad major was a conglomerate of history, English, government, sociology, and anthropology. This is my second stint in grad school and I’ve had 15 jobs spanning 9 industries. Now, it’s not that I suffer from a lack of focus or commitment; It’s just that I don’t understand, why, with all the possibilities in this world, we’re encouraged to choose just one. Why does it have to be this or that? Why not this AND that? Learning about and trying new things fuels me and if something sparks my interest I’ll dive in head first. This is also probably why I’m constantly finding myself in over my head, but it’s never boring. I’d call myself an expert in approximately zero fields, but I know just enough about a variety of topics to connect seemingly disparate ideas or people in synergistic ways. And this semester I finally found a word for that, besides indecisive, it’s Multipotentialite. Multipotentialites thrive on learning, exploring, and mastering new skills; they have many interests, paths, and creative pursuits spanning multiple fields. Pretty much me to a T. Something specific in the definition caught my eye - Multipotentialites are not polymaths, but potential polymaths. I’ve always liked the idea of potential. I never needed the assurance of success to entice me into trying something new, the potential to succeed was enough for me. Potential is the abundance of opportunities

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and possibilities, some you haven’t even imagined yet, and all it’s right there for the taking, all you have to do is start. Potential; however, by nature, is unrealized, so it goes hand in hand with hard work, discipline, and self-motivation. Potential applies to individuals and societies alike everything can and will change, you just have to decide how you want to change it and go do it. This personal philosophy aligns pretty tightly with a Dutch concept I discovered through the design studio Experimental Jetset, it’s called Maakbaarheid Maakbaarheid translates literally to ‘makeability’ in a physical sense, but in the Netherlands, in addition to meaning physical making, it also has strong philosophical, political, and sociological connotations around the malleability of society - the ability to make change in the world around you through social democracy. I have a strong interest in equity and justice (which is probably why, in a former life, I went to law school and was a prosecutor), so it makes sense that I align with the Dutch definition of makeability and why I bring that lens to my design perspective. Maakbaarheid, to me, radiates hope and the potential for change - that nothing is predestined or predetermined, we make it ourselves. I used to be kind of embarrassed about not having a single path, like I was scattered or uncommitted, so I wasn’t very valuable, but I‘ve learned that it’s just a different worldview and set of experience that I bring to the table. It’s the view that potential is everywhere - what do other people know, is there a different way to do this, what else could we make, how can we change things? What else is possible?

Life Pause/Reflection By 2017 I had a solid career in marketing and was just about to start a big job at a national corporation. Everything seemed pretty good, but I didn’t realize anything was wrong until something actually went wrong. I got a call at work the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, My dad had an incurable brain tumor and he was going into emergency surgery, so get on the next flight home. I left San Diego with a suitcase packed for two weeks, but what I didn’t know when I got on the plane was, I was never going back. My life became completely focused on taking care of my dad 24/7. Days ceased to

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exist and time became a series of hours plodding toward an unwelcome conclusion, marked only by treatments, appointments, meals, and medications. Even though I was devastated by the prospect of my dad dying, I was content being with him all day, every day and knowing my exact purpose in life. So for the six months while I took care of my dad, I was literally inside the house nearly the entire time: A) It was winter in Wisconsin (and you think Boston is bad...) and B) Along with my dad’s cancer came extreme physical impairments and a proclivity for random and massive seizures prompting a 911-level emergency, so leaving for even 20 minutes was pretty tough. When I found some old watercolors in the house I started painting, just kind of experimenting really, with some pretty not great results at first. But, slowly painting became a part of my daily regimen and then I started a creative challenge to watercolor 100 days in a row, because, well, why not. My dad quietly noticed and one day he asked me why I never pursued a creative career I literally had no answer for him. ‘You’ve always been creative and you really seem to love it,’ he said, ‘you should do something with that in your career.’ And I said, ‘Dad, it’s too late. It just makes more sense to just get another job in marketing. I’d have to go back to school and I already went to grad school. What, I’m just going to start over?’ He looked at me, dead serious, and said, ‘Why not? I loved being an architect and work is such a big part of life. Life is short, you have time, you should find something you love as much as I did. Who cares if you have to start over, it’ll be worth it.’ That conversation watered the seed of an idea that had long been dormant. In the void after my dad died I went from thinking hour by hour to constantly contemplating my future and how to rebuild my life. There were lots of questions, but I couldn’t really get stuck in the ‘why’ of it all, I knew the only way I could move forward was to ask ‘what’s next?’

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I had basically hit the pause button on life, so I had the opportunity to do anything I wanted. Now, I’m not saying I was particularly happy or even excited about it really, I would’ve traded a clean slate to have my dad back in a heartbeat. I was exhausted and pretty lost. But I knew two things: One - My dad wasn’t coming back and Two - Opportunities don’t always arrive at opportune times. Over the course of that long goodbye I realized how unhappy and unfulfilled I’d actually been in my life. But the only person that could change that was me, and my dad was right, it didn’t matter if I had to start over.

Where I Am Fast forward about two-and-a-half years and here I am making this presentation. I’ve tried to treat grad school this time around more like an adventure; a chance I could take on myself. I’ve embraced unexpected opportunities, asked every question (even the ones I thought might be stupid), and tried to free myself from perceived rules, pushing myself into uncomfortable places. I’ve been more focused on trying interesting things instead of trying to be interesting. I’ve taken the artists and creative methods I’ve enjoyed for most of my life and merged them with my new discoveries; slowly connecting the dots to figure out where I fit in the matrix of design. I’ve been soaking up knowledge from everyone around me, professors and classmates alike, and I’ve learned as much, or more from them, as I have from studying famous designers. Sometimes I get ideas from great feedback or learn about new methods, but other times it’s just figuring out to not be such a rule follower or take everything so literally.

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Where I Will Go I have never been very interested in defining myself by what I’ve done. I’d much rather focus on what I’m doing or what I want to do next. You are shaped, to a degree, by your past, but you are not your past. It’s important to choose which parts of your past to carry and consult, which to let go. Not all of it is worth the weight on your journey. The past is full of things you wouldn’t change for the world and things you can’t change, but, for better or worse, it’s gone. OK Claire, so what does any of this have to do with your design thesis? Well, pretty much everything. If multipotentialite is my approach to life, then, design is a natural method of exploring for me. Design IS multipotentialite - its definition encompasses the entire cycle from idea, to planning and iterating, to production. And the field of design, especially graphic design, spreads far and wide along an ever expanding spectrum that reaches from hand lettering to installation to motion graphics and artificial intelligence. My thesis exploration combines multipotentiality with the ideology around Maakbaarheid, the makeability of both items and society, the idea that nothing is predetermined, but created. My thesis will explore design as a conduit for discovery in pursuit of evolution and will consist of asking questions, making discoveries, and changing based on those revelations. And then, continuing to ask again ‘what’s next?’ So, here’s what I know about what this looks like: I don’t know what I’m going to make and that’s pretty scary, but recently I heard David Byrne of the Talking Heads discussing the development of his show American Utopia, and he said ‘It seems to me that in creating something a vision comes together intuitively, gradually, bit by bit, little by little, and we don’t always know the totality of what we’ve made until we can actually see, hear, and taste it.’ So, part of my challenge is to make work in a construct where the end is fluid and I’m not aimed at a specific conclusion.

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This will not be a single project, but a series of endeavors resulting in a collection that illustrates an approach to design. In some ways it is nothing more than a snapshot of work from a specific period of time in my evolution as a designer. The goal being the designer I am today will not be here next May, hopefully replaced with an evolved version. I’m looking to involve the following three things in my process: Rigor Leaning into my inclination towards a methodical approach to work. Can a practice in the ordinary, a daily repetition, produce something extraordinary? Investigation Looking into questions that address subjective concepts or are unanswerable. Exploring things like: What matters - Why do we value certain items or achievements more than others? Why do we do the things we do? Emotion - What is memory? Is grief the price of love? Impact - What is it? How do we make it? Power - How is it created? What does it look like? How can it be harnessed? Humanity - What does it mean to be human? What pulls us together, what pushes us apart? Hand Making Embracing my love for physical making and trying to upend my tendency to lead with analysis and start the process with the making. Exploring materiality, form, craft, scale, deconstruction, color, and type to discover the unexpected. If in life everything can change and everything will change, whether we want it to or not, how do you embrace that reality with a sense of optimism, not foreboding, and view change as opportunity instead of obstacle? And how do you balance doing what you want to do (because life IS short, even if it is a cliche), and doing what you can for others with your talents and assets? Can those pursuits be merged? At the end of the day the big question for me to explore will not revolve around ‘what kind of designer will I be or what will I make’, but more around ‘what of me can I bring to design and how can I help shape the world around me?’ I’m excited to find that out and I’m gonna start the way I always do, by asking, ‘what’s next!?’

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Annotated Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2016. Recommended reading by Michael Rock on how communities are created. This book was influential in delving into the sociological side of design and how communities create belonging and meaning - a sense of identity within a context of identities. This book helped me pinpoint exactly why writing is so important to my design practice. Language and text is the basis of understanding. To discuss something, to challenge something, to express ourselves, we must have a shared way to talk about it. Shared language and vocabulary are the basis of how to create anything, once we name things we can talk about them, once we know how to talk about them, we can make them.

ArtTube, ArtTube, et al. “Dutch Profiles.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/ dutchdesignprofiles/videos.

Netherlands. The interviews with both wellknown and upcoming Dutch designers focus on their conceptual approach and the context of their projects. Specific videos include: Jergen Bey, Irma Boom, Dick Bruna, Wim Crouwel, Droog Design, G-Star, Iris van Herpen, Rem Koolhaas OMA, Karl Martens, NEXT Architects, Studio Dumbar, Thonik, Jan van Toorn, and Marcel Wanders Betsky, Aaron. Thonik: Why We Design. Lars Müller Publishers, 2019. This book was highly influential on multiple levels for me. First, thonik are firmly rooted in the ‘why’ behind their design, as am I. They have a motto ‘if the concept is good, the rest will follow’. They always start with concept first and build the visual design around a tight concept. I read a lot about their process as I was building, evaluating, and refining my current design process. Second, I reference this book often for ideas relating to branding and typographic work. Third, I look at this book for structure, organization, and layout ideas.

Research on Dutch design. Dutch Profiles are short documentaries about architects, graphic, product and fashion designers in the

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Ericson, Magnus. ‘Design and Ideology - Interview with Experimental Jetset Studio (Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen)’. Forms of Inquiry Catalog. September 15, 2008. https://www. experimentaljetset.nl/archive/design-ideology. Where I first learned about the concept of Maakbaarheid and connected with it as a form of anti-determinism and that design is the thing to ideate and build things that need creating and tear down things that need revamping.

Bierut, Michael, and Jessica Helfand. “S2E6: Michael Rock.” Design Observer, 5 Apr. 2017, designobserver.com/feature/s2e6-michaelrock/39539. General research on Michael Rock and his design concepts.

Boeri, Stefano. “Anti-Covid-19 Vaccination Campaign.” Stefano Boeri Architetti, 16 Dec. 2020, www.stefanoboeriarchitetti.net/en/ project/anti-covid-19-vaccination-campaign/. Research on how design brings something that doesn’t exist into existence and the creation of the social imaginary.

Boeri, Stefano. “Anti-Covid-19 Vaccination Campaign.” YouTube, YouTube, 16 Dec. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbeRAC5Xks&feature=youtu.be.

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Research on how design brings something that doesn’t exist into existence and the creation of the social imaginary.

Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press, 2018. Researching design theory as social theory and extracting design from a capitalistic sphere. This book helped me think about how design can apply to the human experience on a larger scale, addressing environment, experience, social structure, politics, and beyond. This applies to my theory that design principles infiltrate and influence every part of human life.

Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights: Essays. Algonquin Books,February 12, 2019. Ross is a poet and English professor at Indiana University. I read a number of the essays in this book to discover how he goes about discovering delight in the everyday, the mundane, to see if there could be a connection to discovering things about design in the same way. It’s where I started developing the concept of trying to find my discipline in the practice of routine. I also looked at how he wrote his personal essays to make them universally palatable and appealing.

Glass, Ira, et al. “The Show of Delights.” This American Life, 11 Feb. 2021, www. thisamericanlife.org/692/the-show-of-delights.

Great Britain, Team, et al. “Pete Reed.” SoundCloud, 27 July 2020, soundcloud.com/ teamgb/pete-reed.

How delight and pain are intertwined and creating things out of pain to produce delight. As part of my research into emotion and how that can play into the design process and the output I listened to this podcast. Through this podcast I became aware of Ross Gay and his work on delight, including his book, The Book of Delights. This helped me start thinking about how to infuse my personal experience and seemingly banal experiences into my work and my thesis writing. I really connected with the moment in the podcast when Bim Adewunmi has the following exchange with Ross Gay:

Listening to this podcast, which basically has nothing to do with design, actually got me thinking about how design applies to reinvention throughout a person’s life. We’re constantly re-making ourselves, whether it’s by personal choice or force of circumstances. The only permanent state in life is impermanence and design is the constant that helps us manage that reality of life, whether it’s creating a tool that eases a physical limitation or simply redesigning a daily routine that helps alter our state of mind. This podcast helped put some concrete language around how to remain positive through change that’s not positive and take charge of your own outcomes and how design really plays into the ability to do that for yourself.

Bim Adewunmui, ‘One of the things he discovered is the mechanics of how to find delight every day as a discipline. Because delight doesn't just arrive, you need to actively go looking for it.’ Ross Gay, ‘Being in a state of trying to train your curiosity, and trying to train this sense of not knowing. Delight and curiosity are really tied up. You have to be OK with not knowing things. You have to be actually invested and happy about not knowing things.’ This got me thinking about why I design and how the driver behind my design is really about curiosity and how I embrace not knowing things as a strategy to push myself into uncomfortable places.

Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Hacket Publishing Company, 1978. Recommended reading by Michael Rock. Examination of the actual worlds we inhabit, how they are created, and how they are related to one another. Since my theory of design is that it is an all encompassing means to create reality (as opposed to philosophy which posits reality), this book was especially helpful in defining how worldmaking works and what constitutes bringing things into existence. The central theme of the book tightly aligns with my

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theory on design, that anything is makeable and we simply have to decide what we want to make. “Facts are fabricated and [that] knowing or understanding is more a matter of finding than making.” This book was also central to and affirmative of my experience that too much freedom is paralytic, that we need ‘guardrails’ in order to actually create something. Design provides those ‘guardrails’ with objectives and constraints, through those we define success for any given project.

Harari, Yuval. “Chapter 2: The Tree of Knowledge, Section 5: The Peugeot Lion and Chapter 16: The Capitalist Creed.” Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, Harper Perennial, 2018, pp. 29–333. Historical and sociological exploration of the creation of corporations. Looking at creating an entity and how they are ‘legal fictions’. Addresses the concept of imagined realities.

Jones, Daniel. “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Jan. 2015, www.nytimes. com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-orsmall.html. I’ve used this in many different projects. I’ve read this article many times before design school, but reading after entering design

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school got me thinking about how much we as humans are the same and how sharing personal snippets can create connection; the concept of the personal as the universal. Not that we experience the same things, but that humans experience the same emotions and emotional understanding can lead to greater care with one another. It also got me thinking about how to infuse care and empathy into my design work.

Lee, Chris. “This Was Written On Stolen Indigenous Land.” Decolonising Design, 11 Apr. 2017, www.decolonisingdesign.com/guestcontributions/2017/guest-post-this-was-writtenon-stolen-indigenous-land/. Research into graphic design and power structures. This article was the first piece that got me thinking about reality - what is real and how realities are made. It prompted my thinking about how much design plays a role in bringing an idea or concept into actual existence and that without design and the tangible outputs of design concepts would remain hypothetical. It also prompted me to think about how humans create every social construct - laws, property, corporations, religions, groups, etc. and design is a part of ritualizing and legitimizing every construct that exists in the world.

Lupton, Ellen. Thinking with Type: a Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students. Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. General research on typography, typesetting, and layout.

Meggs, Philip B., and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs' History of Graphic Design. Wiley, 2016.

striking and influential were: Marina Abramovic, David Byrne, Lisa Congdon, Brene Brown, Barbara Kruger, & Shepard Fairey.

Research on the history of graphic design

Miller, Mary Alice. “Meet the Designer Obsessed With the Stories That Live Inside Our Data.” Vanity Fair, Conde Nast, 7 Nov. 2019, www. vanityfair.com/style/2019/11/giorgia-lupi-andother-stories-collection-interview. Combining data visualization and hand making - illustrating the theory of multipotentialite and how design can combine two disparate ideas or disciplines into a successful endeavor with a new output,

Millman, Debbie. “2013, Michael Rock.” Design Matters Media, 2013, www. designmattersmedia.com/podcast/2013/ Michael-Rock. General background research on Michael Rock and Debbie Millman, both interview subjects in this book.

Millman, Debbie. “Debbie Millman: Design Matters.” Design Matters Media, 2005, www. designmattersmedia.com/designmatters. I listened to a number of the podcasts from this site in researching my thesis. Podcasts began in 2005 and are consistently being released to this day. The episodes I found especially

Papanek, Victor Josef. Design for the Real World. Thames & Hudson, 2019. In thinking about design as an allencompassing theory, an important aspect is that all humans are also designers and therefore design is an egalitarian pursuit and equally accessible and employable by anyone. I wanted to see if there were any academic texts that proposed a similar viewpoint and in that search I found Papenek’s book. In 1972, at the time of its original publication in the United States, the book was ridiculed and attacked by the design ‘establishment’ as a Utopian, idiosyncratic pipe dream. The issues discussed and addressed however are quite pertinent today - environmentalism, reuse and recycling, energy consumption, etc. The very beginning of the book set the tone for me and started me thinking about the concept of a ‘designer’ and who and what that actually is. I started thinking that we’re all designers and I always was a designer, even before design school. “All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design,

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to make it a thing-by-iteslf, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life” (Papenek, p.3) Papanek defines design as “the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order,” (Papenek, p. 4), which can clearly apply to any human at any age under any pursuit. Papenek also started me thinking about what makes a design ‘good’. Form? Function? Beauty? Popularity? Papenek proposes a structure for assessing ‘function’ in design by looking at six aspects (method, association, aesthetics, need, telesis, and use) and balancing the “soft-hard, feeling-thinking, intuitive-intellectual mix” that determines each of these criteria. I especially connected with this idea that all design is a mix of the intuitive and the analytical, as I intertwine both inextricably in my approach to design, and life.

Popham, Sir Home Riggs. Telegraphic Signals; Or Marine Vocabulary. T. Egerton, Military Library, near Whitehall, 1803. Research related to languages and communication. Used directly in 'Twelve Months' and Grief/Relief Blocks projects, but also generally sparked an interest in the ways humans communicate visually and how to transform language into visual systems. Rock, Michael. Multiple Signatures: on Designers, Authors, Readers and Users. Rizzoli International Publications, 2013.

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This book has probably been the most influential design book I’ve encountered. The format alone - multiple interviews and writings mixed in with project examples that show both the behind the scenes process, as well as beautiful finished pieces - embodies my thesis concept that the function and output of design can be anything. Further, the actual content of each section has been highly influential on my perspective and criticality as a designer. Michael Rock and studio 2x4, to me, embody everything that is great about design - it’s flexibility, it’s potential, and it’s limitlessness.

Roll, Rich. “Why Late Bloomers Win: David Epstein | Rich Roll Podcast.” YouTube, YouTube, 8 Sept. 2019, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QYLrNeJX9XU. This podcast helped me look at my tendency to sample all sorts of interests as a legitimate methodology. This interview with David Epstein, who wrote the book Why Late Bloomers Win, explores why breadth is the ally of depth and why generalists, not specialists, are the ones most primed to excel. This helped me start thinking about the multipotentialite and start looking for a way to explain a multi-modal means of operation.

Shorto, Russell. Amsterdam: a History of the World's Most Liberal City. Abacus, 2014.

Research into imagined realities becoming realities, especially with regard to the invention of the multinational corporate entity and the concept/reality of an aftermarket trade, better known as a stock market (including short selling, derivatives, and futures trading), and the liberal capitalist system in general. This book describes how ‘the company’ was created, designed, by Amsterdammers in the late 1500s and today the imagined reality of companies proliferate the global economy today.

Soulellis, Paul. “Soulellis.com.” Soulellis.com, 2020, soulellis.com/. General research on form, communication, and experimental efforts in graphic design. Pushing and blurring the boundary between authorship and design.

Strelka Institute. “Michael Rock. Lecture ‘Empire of Screens.’” YouTube, YouTube, 27 Mar. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ewXan6t74. General research on Michael Rock and his design concepts.

Surface Magazine, director. Michael Rock on the Role of Social Imaginary in Shaping Belief. Vimeo, 11 Feb. 2021, vimeo.com/431846219. (Rock, Michael. Michael Rock on the Role of Social Imaginary in Shaping Belief https:// vimeo.com/431846219

Research on Michael Rock and the concept of the social imaginary. Looking at how design is the driver of bringing ideas into existence by creating both physical and intangible entities and items.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press, 2004. Research on the philosophical sociological concept of the social imaginary, as differentiated from social theory. The social imaginary is related to how people see themselves fitting in the world. It is ‘not expressed in theoretical terms, but carried in images, stories, and legends.” This led me to confirm that realities are created through design - narrative and visual married into an entity - and then solidified through practices that are designed, adopted and reinforced through repetition. Imagined realities are realities and can be experienced by large groups and the entire world. Imagined realities help humans define their place in the world and create a sense of belonging through shared beliefs, experience, and ritual. The status quo is not permanent, it can be dismantled and the ‘moral order’ will help drive that change. A large part of toppling the status quo or bringing an idea into reality is the strong connection to the visual and how humans connect and legitimize realities by continued reference to a similar past realities.

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Wapnick, Emilie. “Why Some of Us Don't Have One True Calling.” TED, TEDx Bend, Apr. 2015, www.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_ why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_ calling?language=en. This TED Talk by Emilie Wapnick gave me the vocabulary to talk about my approach to design, and life, with a specific and definable term. It helped me figure out that some of us, maybe most of us, including me, don’t have ‘One True Calling’, but a desire and proclivity to explore multiple paths and that multiplicity is actually a strength.

Wang, Lisa. “Role Call: Michael Rock, Creative Director.” The Business of Fashion, The Business of Fashion, 30 June 2014, www. businessoffashion.com/articles/workplacetalent/role-call-michael-rock-creative-director? source=NextStoryPrompt. General research on Michael Rock and his design perspective. Weitzman School of Design. “The Weitzman School Presents Michael Rock.” Vimeo, 16 Mar. 2021, vimeo.com/436445980. General research on Michael Rock and his design perspective.

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Website References Sub-header Artigo Regular 18

http://2020.virtualartbookfair.com/en/exhibitions/dutch-artist-book/03 https://2x4.org/ https://www.are.na/paul-soulellis/urgency-reader-2 https://atelierbaudelaire.com/en/home#intro-section https://benfry.com/ https://birdinflight.com/inspiration/sources/20171031-kyiv-biennial-2017-experimental-jetset-design. html https://www.creativeboom.com/ https://www.creativereview.co.uk/city-city-interview-experimental-jetset/ http://davidbyrne.com/ http://designhub.rmit.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/superstructurenewspaper-part18p.pdf https://www.design-research.be/ https://www.design-research.be/by-womxn/ https://designresearch.sva.edu/research/we-call-it-freedom-village-brooklyn-illinoiss-radicaltactics-of-black-place-making/ https://www.dezeen.com/ https://www.dezeen.com/2020/05/06/iris-van-herpen-exclusive-video-interview-vdf/ https://www.dusendusen.com/ https://extrapolationfactory.com/ http://www.eyemagazine.com/ http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-lorraine-wild https://filmphotoclass.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/2859a862342a409386e1cf860b5b2913.jpg https://www.ideo.com/blog https://www.itsnicethat.com/ https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/deborah-sussman-show https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/experimental-jetset-interview-280616 https://www.kmichaelhays.com/ https://www.kapitza.com/ https://kottke.org/21/01/can-you-know-brokenness-without-being-broken https://medium.com/scratchingthesurfacefm/an-interview-with-experimental-jetset-91b49c245a6

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https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/this-is-what-democracy-looked-like https://oa.letterformarchive.org/ https://www.oasejournal.nl/en/Issues https://www.spd.org/ https://www.swiss-miss.com/ https://www.rubberbandproducts.com/blogs/stories/in-conversation-with-experimental-jetset http://untold-stories.net/?p=Who_Owns_The_City https://walkerart.org/magazine/bootlegging-experimental-jetset com/2019/10/2859a862342a409386e1cf860b5b2913.jpg https://www.ideo.com/blog

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Colophon

Published by Claire Bula 808 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA 02446 ©2021 Boston University All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Reference images in this book are reproduced without permission for educational purposes only. Requests for permission to reproduce material should be sent to claire.bula@gmail.com This book was designed and produced by Claire Bula Content was created by Claire Bula unless otherwise noted 808 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA 02446 Typefaces: Body copy, captions, and footnotes are set in Artigo. Artigo is an old style inspired typeface system for text designed by Joana Correia of Nova Type. It was inspired by the handwriting aspect of the first roman types but it intends to be a contemporary interpretation. Its abilities are in small text with personality. Nova Type experiments with new ideas to create something designers love to use — something to shape text like an architect and infuse content with emotion. Description adapted from novatypefoundry.com/ fonts/artigo

Headers and subheaders are set in Forma DJR Deck. Kinda like Helvetica, except for absolutely everything about it, Forma was designed by David Jonathan Ross, a Massachusetts type designer. Forma’s rationality is tempered by its warmth, and its trademark single-story a sets it apart from the rest. Looking beyond its obvious Helveticaishness, David saw the culmination of an entire era of typography: an era when formal purity was the ultimate design achievement, when the spacing of headlines was outrageously tight, and when neutral neo-grotesque sans serifs were actually something fresh and exciting to read. Description adapted from djr.com/forma Printed and bound by Mixam 7 x 9.5 inches

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Section Name

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I Explain Better In Writing. I Evoke Better Through Design.

Articles inside

Appendix

Annotated Bibliography

Colophon

Project Descriptions

What Even is Design?

Is There a (New) Power Developed in Being Broken?

Acknowledgments

Abstract