Liminal: The Process of Becoming (Research and Strategy 2/2)

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Liminal: The Process of Becoming

Research and Studies

Liminal: The Process of Becoming ArtCenter College of Design Thesis Project for the Masters of Fine Art Graphic Design Program.

First Edition @2022 ArtCenter College of Design All rights reserved under pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

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Research & Strategy Thinking through Making Interview and Insights Historical and Contemporary Practices Inspirations and References

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Bibliography

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RESEARCH AND STUDiES

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A compilation of explorations, interviews and insights, studies on unconventional methodologies, and inspirations and references

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THINKING THRoUGH MAKING

'Thinking through making' is a process methodology in which we develop and solidify our ideas by designing, visualizing, and articulating. The next section documents the different ways I approached this practice.

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Liminal Photo stills from the first film: "Realm Unseen." from the Graduate Thesis 1 Course

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Liminal A zine exploring the the subject of vulnerability at the initial stage of thesis development

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Liminal Here is a visual response and statement to what vulnerability means in the context of design. A working thesis, where I'm learning to be more mindful of how valuable this practice can be.

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Liminal Keywords Exploration Selecting 3 keywords from my working thesis statement. Collecting & analyzing visual data and answering probing questions to understand the research framework.

1. Monoculture 2. Distinct Voice 3. “Thumbprints”

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Liminal 1. monoculture stereotypes, an intentional tactic for ‘nation branding,’ has contributed to monoculture as it promotes simplification and the generalizing of cultures 2. distinct voice criterias of a distinctive style: It asks for details, high sensitivity and awareness, evidence of the environment around us, cultivate space for subjectivity, and encourage the sharing of authority.

3. thumbprints approaching it from your own perspective are the only way to avoid cliches, be more authentic to contributing to diversity

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Thinking through Making

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Liminal After my conversation with Natasha Jen, I decided to visualize the black box: “That is the black box that we don’t see and we don’t talk about in design at all. Yeah, that’s the black box. And that black box is where all the vulnerability, all the tears, all the, you know, all the sleepless nights live in that black box, and I’m sure I can guarantee you every designer has that the bigger the agencies, the bigger the projects that have worked on the bigger to black box.”

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Thinking through Making Then, I decided to visualize the inner-dialogue and reflection about visualizing a light box.

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INTERvIEWs AND INsIGHTs

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ON THE BLACK BOX: AN INTERVIEW WITH NATASHAJEN

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Natasha Jen was generous enough to review my working thesis and provided thoughts and insights on the gaps and blind spots I had around my topic on vulnerability in branding.

She challenged the premise of my thesis as she shared personal experiences of being a leader in this industry.

Jen: What types of feedback would you like to get that will be most helpful to you?

Son: You’ve worked so much with a lot of brands and corporations. I wanted to understand won’t like if you had any insights of where vulnerability could fit into the framework of like the branding process, collaboration culture, because design is with that it can’t live without the other or another, and then the client relationship. So that was initially kind of where I kind of wanted to ask you about your insights.

Jen: Okay, well, good question. But before I try to answer it, can I ask you why you why you would like to tie vulnerability to branding specifically, branding very specific sub genre in graphic design and design. Why branding?

Son: That’s a great question. First, it was more so the feedback that I’ve been receiving was that design is too broad. And so especially in like the research field, like I did, a little bit of research, academia research, is that you need specific state study cases that kind of narrow into a specific example, in order to kind of quote unquote, prove your thesis. So that a good thesis or a good hypothesis. A study allows it to be transferred the method to be transferred to other aspects. And I’m hoping that doing it in specifically branding, would help transfer over to maybe exhibition designs or typeface designs and etc. And then the second aspect of the question that I wanted to answer is that one of the interviewees was talking about how branding is vulnerable to certain clients where he had conversations with certain clients where they would end up crying because this is something that they believe in so much, and he was saying that in order for a brand to be successful, you really need to know your why’s, and it

really usually is embedded from your experiences and the pain points that you see in your life. And so that’s kind of the more honest and pure part of or the idealistic part of branding. I guess you could say.

Jen: Well, I'm not sure that I agree with that, you know, branding work, you know, to be a success, successful brands, the people behind it must kind of go through some sort of, you know, self awakening vulnerable experience in order to create a successful brand. I’ve worked with people who are just joyful, and happy and optimistic and upbeat and you know, energized and they have made great brands, right. So I questioned that correlation between vulnerability and like brand building. I do think that the design profession itself is a very vulnerable profession to begin with.

Designers are living, very vulnerable. Life’s all of this. Why? Because we deal with rejections. Brutal rejections, all the time.

Vulnerability is not even a choice in this profession is in this intensity. Yeah, that’s what makes design profession the design profession. That’s what makes that’s what makes designers, designers. It doesn’t matter where you design it has nothing to do with the media. It has nothing to do with a genre of design, of course, certain genre I think, make designers or put designers into more vulnerable positions than the others.

For example, like a book design, I think is a little bit more, you know, straightforward to do, right, which puts the designer in a less vulnerable position, but then branding puts designers into an incredibly vulnerable position. Because you’re navigating a really complicated system. That is called a client side and their psychology, their power structure, their fear, their hopes, you know, their aesthetics are all unknown. So sort of have to venture into this territory that you don’t even know what it is. You don’t have a compass. Isn’t that vulnerable? That is vulnerable, and that’s what we call graphic designers. Period. That’s a live every day. That’s a lie that my team lives every day. And it has nothing to do with 41

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branding. Right. That’s why I want to challenge I want to challenge you on this premise. The design profession itself existence, his job as a graphic designer is a very vulnerable position. Yeah, emotionally.

Yeah, it’s not that you know, you know, we’re doing things that will threaten our lives, you know, that we’re not like, you know, health care workers. We’re now firefighters. You know, that as a different kind of vulnerability, but I think that the emotional vulnerability in designers is actually it’s not even a choice.

Son: Yeah, I think when you when you say that, it definitely resonates like I immediately think of my own experience where it’s like there’s just so much like resilience that you have to cultivate. And like, it’s like, you’re creating like a thicker skin, but making sure that doesn’t numb me and like that’s what Rene Brown calls like the flight or fight response, where you always have to fight and fight and fight. For this kind of vulnerability practice. And so I guess that question leads to like hearing everything that I shared. What kind of directions Do you see this going? Like?

Do you because you say that this is something it’s inevitable and it's essential as designers, is there something in this topic that you find that could be potentially like contributing or even beneficial to our community?

Jen: Well, you know, the byproduct to vulnerability or you know, the cause, one of the causes of vulnerability is failure, right?

And failure like personal failure, that is when the work is being rejected. That is, you know, if the work is actually you know, thoughtfully done, beautifully done, but it just doesn’t pass. You know, the complication of client approval, right? Failure is something that you have to talk about when you’re talking about vulnerable because otherwise, you know, it’s just like you’re talking about some sort of psychological condition that you know, that you can draw references from other scholars, you know, such as Brene Brown, but I think that talking about okay, failed projects, for example, right, all those failed, proposals 42

concepts, before one thing actually ever comes out. That is the black box that we don’t see and we don’t talk about in design at all. Yeah, that’s the black box. And that black box is where all the vulnerability, all the tears, all the, you know, all the sleepless nights live in that black box, and I’m sure I can guarantee you every designer has that the bigger the agencies, the bigger the projects that have worked on the bigger to black box.

Son: That’s something I wanted to I want to now tackle the black box. Did you like come up with that term as you go or is that something just said around in like your work?

Jen: Well, you know, I have gone through some really, you know, difficult projects.

Yeah. I’m, like, really, really difficult projects.

I think like, they're beyond vulnerability.

They’re more almost like borderline humiliating and painful. Yeah. So I have experiences Yeah, with this topic, right. And, but, you know, I know that my job as a designer and also as a as a, as a creative director, as somebody who leads a team right is to is to just keep going Yeah, you don’t you don’t let all you know. All these are unimaginable.

You know, terrible things humiliating things stop you right and that thing is the very heart of creativity. Yeah, you need you need to have optimism you need to have stamina, you need to have you know, resilience, in order to actually be creative and not to lose these really important, you know, spirit. I think it’s really important. Yeah, because, you know, still have to keep going. I think giving up is easy. Quitting is easy, right? But continuing to actually do the work.

Son: I think as I’m hearing like, kind of you talking about feels like vulnerability is more so lived and grown like more as like your journey as a designer, like on the mental, emotional. Just journey that you go through.

And something that I was hoping to find or you know, to be honest, like force into is like, I want to create like new a new vernacular of vulnerability in like our design work, like I want to create like new tools or like, new

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methodologies. And so I think that’s where like my heart’s intent was, but the more that I find insights, it sounds like it’s just something that you’re living in rather than something that you’re outputting.

school into the most miserable person 10 years later. For example, I mean, what I’m saying is you can take so many different attitude no angle to this.

Jen: Yeah, it’s something that you live and you live with and you get, hopefully you get better and better at sort of, not just dealing with it, but having a you know, a healthy perspective. On it and kind of and recognizing that, hey, this is this is uh, this is part of the design process, right? And being able to keep going, that I think it takes, it takes practice, you know, because you know, the sort of knee jerk response to any painful experiences. I’m just gonna quit his job. Yeah, I’m gonna quit this project right now. I’m just gonna walk away, right, that’s a knee jerk experience, but then you’ll actually be able to go back and then you know, come front, but you know, work with the people who made you feel bad, I think is a more incredible skill to have.

Sooner or later, you still have to kind of define right a skeleton of this. You know, the deliverable or you know, the kind of Yeah, I think the skeleton to this, you know, I feel like, you don’t necessarily need to justify anything meaning like, you know, like everybody like, designers, the design industry is the biggest black box industry, right? That can be a thing or you don’t have to actually justify it by saying that’s okay. Huh. I mean, you don’t have to actually try to help people try to make people feel better. You know what I mean?

This can actually be just a really sort of enlightening you know, you know, bird’s eye view, you know, however angle you want to take on the subject. But you don’t necessarily have to say, you know, being vulnerable is part of the design profession. This is our existence. But you need to have resilience.

Let Brene Brown do that. She’s already doing that. You have to find your own version of this.

And that version may not require you to actually justify this. Right. Your whole thing can be Yeah, this whole design industry is just industry that makes people that makes healthy people vulnerable. You know, they can turn a happy kid just graduating from 43

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WALKABOUTS WITH GERARDO HERRERA

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Gerardo Herrera has been an Instructor and Director of Packaging at ArtCenter College of Design for over 14 years. I had the opportunity to converse with him about my thesis, and he shared with me this story. In his classroom, he leads “Walkabouts.” Walkabouts is an exercise where students in those 10 minutes they will make 3 different stops, each of which is an opportunity to think, reflect, and dream.

After these 3 stops, they come together to see what they have come up with through “Creative Weaving.” Students can write and draw pictures on a large butcher paper to express the ideas they had while doing the walkabout. After the students are finished, they begin to present their walkabout experience and creative weaving on the board.

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The students begin their journey from the Hillside Campus of ArtCenter College of Design.

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Students converse while traveling to their next location.

They have their journals ready to capture ideas.

Essentially, this is storytelling a narrative over time.

Being able to have the space to express these ideas is a way to tap into the subconscious.

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Liminal Being able to have this freedom to convey their ideas immediately after the walk solidifies and rejuvenates their ideation development process

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Interviews and Insights Gerardo encourages his students to utilize a mix of media so that their ideas can live in different forms and media types

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Being able to converse with others in person while ideating and conceptualizing can enhance this process

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Interviews and Insights Giving presentations about how you think through your ideas and conceptualized them solidifies your thinking even more

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CHRISTIAN PEREZ MORIN

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Christian Morin-Perez, an Instructor at ArtCenter College of Design, shares some artifacts that have inspired his work as a designer. From DVDs to prior students' work, he explains in detail how each artifact has influenced him.

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Liminal Cranbook This photo was taken at Cranbrook, where I went to grad school. I’d walk past this area on my way to the dining hall every day. The campus is incredible. On this particular day there was this bluish tint everywhere from the snow and there were these accents of warm light coming from lamps from outside and inside the buildings.

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Interviews and Insights Cranbook Poster I was fortunate to make a poster last year for Cranbrook’s Center for Collections and Research where I used the photo as inspiration for the final poster design.

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Liminal Conversations with Paul Rand DVD "I’ve been watching this film regularly since 2011.

The production quality is pretty low by todays standards but the content is incredible. I’ve still never heard someone talk about design like the way Rand does. My favorite quote from it is Rand quoting Mies van der Rohe 'Don’t try to be original, just try to be good'."

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Student Block Print Scan This is a block print that a student of mine created in one of my ACX classes. We started the class doing gesture drawings and discussed how to get at the essence of an object through quick and gestural lines. I asked for a volunteer to do a gesture drawing on a foam plate and she came up with this on the spot, fully improvised. I hang it up on my studio wall next to designs by AM Cassandre and Paul Rand. It reminds me that teaching is an art in itself and that the work of a gifted student is just as inspiring as any great work of art.

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Moleskine Notes These are my Moleskine notebooks from undergrad at ArtCenter. I have one for every term. This particular one is for 4th term. The inside scan is a spread of notes from Ramone Muñoz’s History of Graphic Design class. My ArtCenter notebooks are very special to me and I revisit them often for inspiration and teaching reference, but mostly to relive that special time when I was being introduced to so many new ideas about art and life.

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MONICA SCHLAUG

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Monica Schlaug, an Instructor at ArtCenter College of Design, shares some artifacts that have inspired her work as a designer. From childhood objects to everyday college necessities, she explains how each piece has influenced her.

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Acapulco Dishes and C. Jere “Birds in Flight” Wall Sculpture These are both things I grew up with in my parents’ home. My mom and dad decorated the house with a lot of 1960s/mid-century items. I’ve always loved the composition and energy in the wall sculpture and the color and illustration style in the dishes. In my own design, I tend to gravitate towards bright color and bold forms in most of my work, which is also part of what attracted me to AdamsMorioka’s projects before I applied to join the team there.

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Liminal Angela Bower: Judith Light’s character on Who’s the Boss?

I watched a lot of TV a kid, it was the 80’s! While most girls watching this sitcom were mainly interested in Alyssa Milano, I loved Judith Light’s character, Angela Bower. She was an ad exec, creative and confident. Although she was fictional, I remember clearly thinking of her as a role model for a creative career.

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MUNI Fast Passes When I was in college in San Francisco, I rode the bus everywhere. I lived in Haight Ashbury and attended both the University of San Francisco and the Academy of Art College as part of a cooperative program. My boyfriend was at San Francisco State. Going between all three campuses, plus my internships and the stores/vendors I needed to visit for my projects, I spent a lot of time observing the city. Watching people and places provided me with countless ideas. I believe that being curious and interested in the world around us is part of what allows us to design effectively and with empathy. Also, I loved the color combos and typography of the passes themselves.

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SITE VISIT: TYPECRAFT

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David Mayes was generous to invite me to visit Typecraft and show me a glimpse into the printing process. Seeing how meticulous and thorough the print process is developed a sense of reverence for the excellence and craftsmanship involved. When these two elements are present, the projects have another layer of meaning and feeling.

The highlight of this visit were the make-ready's, a test print that ensures that everything is working as it should. There were huge bins and stacks of printed sheets. Some were waiting to be reused again. In the following section, I show a few scans of make-ready's I found.

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Interviews and Insights Intricate workings of different print machines

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HIsToRICAL AND CoNTEMPoRARy PRACTICEs

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MONTESSOURI METHODOLOGIES

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In 1906, Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian educator, physician, and scientist, who had just judged an international competition on the subjects of scientific pedagogy and experimental psychology, was invited to create a childcare center in San Lorenzo, a poor, inner-city district of Rome. There, she would be working with some of the area’s most disadvantaged, and previously unschooled, children. She opened the doors on January 6, 1907, calling the center the Casa dei Bambini—Italian for “Children’s House.” Dr. Montessori was determined to make the Casa a quality educational environment for these youngsters, whom many had thought were unable to learn—and she did. While the children were unruly at first, they soon showed great interest in working with puzzles, learning to prepare meals and clean their environment, and engaging in hands-on learning experiences.

Dr. Montessori observed that before long, the children exhibited calm, peaceful behavior, periods of deep concentration, and a sense of order in caring for their environment. She saw that the children absorbed knowledge from their surroundings, essentially teaching themselves.

Utilizing scientific observation and experience gained from her earlier work with young children, Dr. Montessori designed unique learning materials for them, many of which are still in use in Montessori classrooms today, and created a classroom environment that fostered the children’s natural desire to learn. News of the school’s success soon spread through Italy. On April 7, 1907, Dr. Montessori opened a second Casa dei Bambini, also in San Lorenzo. And on October 18, 1907, in Milan, she opened a third Casa. The success of Montessori’s schools sparked interest around the world. Dignitaries traveled to Rome from countries far and wide to witness, firsthand, the “miracle children” who exhibited concentration, attention, and spontaneous self-discipline.

The innovative Montessori Method also began to attract the attention of prominent educators eager to learn it. Some were

taught by Dr. Montessori herself. Her courses drew students from as far as Chile and Australia, and within a few years there were Montessori schools on 5 continents.

In 1909, Dr. Montessori published her first book, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile nelle Case dei Bambini. Within 3 years it had been translated into 10 languages. Its first 5,000 copies in English, succinctly titled The Montessori Method, sold out in 4 days. By 1910, Montessori schools could be found throughout Western Europe and were being established around the world. In 1911, the first Montessori school opened in the United States. By 1914, 187 English-language articles and books had been written about Montessori education. One article, in the highly popular McClure’s Magazine, described Dr. Montessori as “an educational wonder-worker.” Dr. Montessori began to turn her attention to the education of elementary-aged children in 1916. In the international training course that year, Dr. Montessori focused nearly half of her lectures on newly created elementary materials. A year later, she published L’autoeducazionne nelle Scuole Elementari, describing her thoughts on the education of children ages 7 – 11. (The English title of the book is The Advanced Montessori Method.)

The Montessori Movement in the U.S. burned out as quickly as it had spread.

Language barriers, World War I travel limitations, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the disdain of a few influential educators all contributed to the decline. William Kilpatrick, a highly regarded figure in the progressive education movement, and a former student of John Dewey, was one such detractor. He critiqued the Montessori Method in his book, The Montessori System Examined. A popular scholar in the early 20th century, Kilpatrick criticized Dr. Montessori’s credentials, perspectives, and overall philosophy. He dismissed her beliefs of the role of the teacher, ideal classroom size, and classroom materials. And, he rejected her interpretation of the doctrine 77

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of development, as well as the amount of freedom the children have in a Montessori school. Kilpatrick’s negative assessment of Montessori quickly became widely known and accepted throughout the U.S. By the 1950s, the cultural climate was changing in the U.S., including a growing discontent with traditional American education.

Among those seeking alternatives was a young, aspiring teacher from New York City, Nancy McCormick Rambusch.

Having “happened upon” the writings of Maria Montessori, Rambusch was struck by the freshness of her ideas. In 1953, she traveled to Paris to attend a Montessori Congress and learn more. There, she met Mario Montessori, Maria’s son, who encouraged her to bring Montessori back to the U.S. One thing led to another, and out of Rambusch’s subsequent Montessori schooling and vigorous efforts to promote the Method in the U.S., Montessori education once again took off. Parallel to this, in 1960, and also as a result of Rambusch’s efforts, the American Montessori Society was born. By the 1920s, Montessori education in the U.S. had almost completely faded away, except for the occasional school or practitioner. For more than a century now, the child-focused approach that Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician, developed for educating children has been transforming schools around the globe. As soon as you enter a classroom, you know that something different is afoot.

Montessori classrooms are immediately recognizable. You will see children working independently and in groups, often with specially designed learning materials; deeply engaged in their work; and respectful of themselves and their surroundings.

The Montessori Method fosters rigorous, self-motivated growth for children and adolescents in all areas of their development—cognitive, emotional, social, and physical. Montessori education is student-led and self-paced but guided, assessed, and enriched by knowledgeable and caring teachers, the leadership of their 78

peers, and a nurturing environment.

Within the community of a multi-age classroom—designed to create natural opportunities for independence, citizenship, and accountability—children embrace multi-sensory learning and passionate inquiry. Individual students follow their own curiosity at their own pace, taking the time they need to fully understand each concept and meet individualized learning goals.

Given the freedom and support to question, probe deeply, and make connections, Montessori students grow up to be confident, enthusiastic, and self-directed learners and citizens, accountable to both themselves and their community. They think critically, work collaboratively, and act boldly and with integrity. What better outcome could you wish for your children?

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The cultivation of an intrinsic motivation for students is a challenging task. The way Montessori thinks and designs curriculums allows students to learn and master their education by their own volition. This is rare to come across in our society today. So, how do we continue to cultivate this? Can we apply this mindset and intentionality towards how we design for and within our community? Here we see that they create limitations in order to emphasize on developing other parts of their sensory motor skills.

Can we create exercises that create limitations to focus on developing specific strengths in the design process? There seems to be a lot of independent learning that happens. Students are creating healthy disciplines to problem-solve and discover new principles by being hands on.

What if we created more ways to observe and make things as a design community? The way Behnisch & Partner created this school was successful because of how much they included the impact of light and nature. What if we create a physcial space for Liminal with unconventional methodologies that prioritize cultivating rich perspectives and insights?

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Rythmical and Musical Movement The first rhythmic exercises are for balance. Walking along a line encourages conscious coordination of movement. Children’s House, Vienna, 1935.

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Maria Montessori, Kurt Hutton Getty Images

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Estimating Weight The girl is assessing the weight of wooden blocks.

She can check whether she’s right by noting the color of the little blocks. Montessori Kindergarten, Berlin, 1950.

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Garden, Plants, Animals The children are looking after their bird and plants themselves, Children’s House Berlin, around 1920.

They are learning that plants and animals need thoughtful and responsible care.

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Development of Musical Sense The child is ordering the bells each time into the two with the same sound, later into whole and half tones according to the scale.

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Comprehensive Educational Horizons Cosmic education includes nature, culture and society. The boy studies the composition of a flower with tweezers and magnifying glass and arranges the individual parts on the labeled card. Montessori School, Aachen, around 1930.

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Development of Sense of Proportion Practice material with different kinds of cylinders to insert in a block, same-dimension cylinders and others with different diameters and decreasing heights.

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Sense of Color and Touch Paint pans in a wooden box. There are eight ground colors each with eight shades ranging from dark to light.

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Education Center: Ingolstadt Hollerstauden The girl is working with material dealing with parts of speech. Open shelves have learning materials and useful objects freely available for the children to use.

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School Complex: Ingolstadt Hollerstauden Open, light and transparent; Architecture by Behnisch & Partner, 1993-1997.

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School Blue Print: Ingolstadt Hollerstauden Open, light and transparent architecture by Behnisch & Partner, 1993-1997.

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School Complex: Ingolstadt Hollerstauden Open, light and transparent; Architecture by Behnisch & Partner, 1993-1997.

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CONDITIONAL DESIGN

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Through the influence of the media and technology on our world, our lives are increasingly characterized by speed and constant change. We live in a dynamic, data-driven society that is continually sparking new forms of human interaction and social contexts. Instead of romanticizing the past, we want to adapt our way of working to coincide with these developments, and we want our work to reflect the here and now. We want to embrace the complexity of this landscape, deliver insight into it and show both its beauty and its shortcomings.

Input The input is our material. Input engages logic and activates and influences the process.Input should come from our external and complex environment: nature, society and its human interactions.

Our work focuses on processes rather than products: things that adapt to their environment, emphasize change and show difference.Instead of operating under the terms of Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Media Art or Sound Design, we want to introduce Conditional Design as a term that refers to our approach rather than our chosen media. We conduct our activities using the methods of philosophers, engineers, inventors and mystics.

Process The process is the product.The most important aspects of a process are time, relationship and change.The process produces formations rather than forms.

We search for unexpected but correlative, emergent patterns.Even though a process has the appearance of objectivity, we realize the fact that it stems from subjective intentions.

Logic Logic is our tool. Logic is our method for accentuating the ungraspable. A clear and logical setting emphasizes that which does not seem to fit within it. We use logic to design the conditions through which the process can take place. Design conditions using intelligible rules. Avoid arbitrary randomness. Difference should have a reason. Use rules as constraints .

Constraints sharpen the perspective on the process and stimulate play within the limitations.

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Contributors Edo Paulus, Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey & Roel Wouters Essays Andrew Blauvelt, Koert van Mensvoort Design Julia Born Publisher Valiz Specifications Printed in red, green, blue and black.

Dimensions: 30 x 20.8 x 2.8 cm

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This program is designed to lead to unpredictable outcomes. Often times, we are afraid of uncertainty, yet what it demonstrate is that there are beneficial aspects by embracing it. Documents of how conditional design is implemented across various group settings. It invites us to participate in these activities with our own design teams as well. It is straightforward and direct. There is no need to read between the lines and reinterpret.

The materials we utilize will create a variation of outcomes. How we think and execute are quite different. One may draw a longer line than another. These decisions all determine how the shape will be unique to its own.

Through this activity, new patterns, textures, and forms emerge, thus informing and expanding our visual vocabulary. It allows us to break out of thinking linearly, which will inform the next project we work on.

This activity not only activates the space around us in a new way, but also our senses. We are training our brain to think and act in unexpected ways. This is a great opportunity and environment to cultivate organic and new insights. What if more designers collaborated on practices 102

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outside of their normal routines? What if we worked with materials are not familiar with?

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TAKING A LINE FOR A WALK

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Assignments can give instructions, describe an exercise, present a problem, set out rules, propose a game, stimulate a process, or simply throw out questions. Taking a Line for a Walk brings attention to something that is often neglected: the assignment as a pedagogical element and verbal artefact of design education. This book is a compendium of 224 assignments, edited by Nina Paim and coedited

by Emilia Bergmark.

A reference book for educators, researchers, and students alike, it includes both contemporary and historical examples and offers a space for different lines of design pedagogy to converge and converse. An accompanying essay by Corinne Gisel takes a closer look at the various forms assignments can take and the educational contexts they exist within. Taking a Line for a Walk derived from an exhibition of the same name at the International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno 2014.

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Without doing so, we may give consent to factors unknowingly.

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This assignment speaks to the things unseen. How can we visualize the individual as a form?

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Even as I have been deconstructing words like 'originality' and 'inspiration,' it has taken on new meanings as I begin to analyze them more.

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REEXAMINATION

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Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Designer, Instructor in Design at the Cali­fornia Institute of the Arts and co-founder of the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building, Los Angeles.

The process by which forms are made, and the forms themselves, embody values and standards of behavior which affect large numbers of people and every aspect of our lives. It is this integral relationship between individual creativity and social responsibility that draws me to the design arts. Feminism has caused me to become more self-conscious about being a woman and this awareness has become a necessary part of my creation and criticism of work in the design arts. Reading the messages of design, I have been trying to locate, create and use positive modes which reject the repressive elements of dominant culture. I am looking for forms and processes which project and reassert those aspects of society which-though of essential value,­have been devalued and restricted to women and the home. As I become more sensitive to those aspects of design which reinforce repressive atti­tudes and behavior, I increasingly question the desirability of simplicity and clarity. The thrust to control almost inevitably operates through simplification. Control is undermined by ambiguity, choice and com­plexity because subjective factors in the user become more effective and the user is invited to participate. Participation under­ mines control. The oversimplified, the unremittingly serious, the emphatically ‘’rational’’ are the consistent attitudes associated with work adopted by our major institutions and the men and few women who inhabit them. In the circle of cause and effect, these attitudes are reinforced and reproduced as they are visually and physically extended into our environment.

One means of simplification is to assign attributes to various groups and thereby reinforce divisions. The restriction of certain behavior to the home and the designa­tion of women as the sole custo-

dians of a range of human characteristics create a destructive imbalance. The design arts reinforce this imbalance by projecting the “male’’ tone only in the public world of our large institutions: business, science, the military and even education, valuing their anonymous, authoritarian aspects and sep­arating themselves further and further from the private world, thus continuing to isolate women, female experience and ‘’female’’ values. Designers are most often taught to reduce ideas to their essence, but in fact that process too often results in the reduction of the ideas to only one of their parts. ‘’Designed’’ has almost come to mean exclusive, universal, clear and simple, rather than inclusive, personal, ambiguous and complex. As a result visual design generally means imagery with a single, large image, one major headline, and any explanatory information in a block of small type. A more organizational style and more visual material would insure enough com­plexity to entice readers, who normally dart away with someone else’s encapsulated vision, to remain long enough and openly enough with the information to create ideas of their own.

Mass media communications: a diagram of simplified separations. The mass media have a tradition of visual sages to attract attention. Such simplifica­tion denies the complexity of life’s experi­ence, for while simple statements, familiar and repeated imagery sell the product and the idea most efficiently, they also reinforce restricting separations. In advertising, women are described as, or permitted to be, laughing, crying, doubting, making mistakes, hesitating: women alone are seen as nurturing or as providing emo­ tional support for children and men.

When, for example, a company presents itself in a service capacity or as particularly accom­modating, it uses a female figure and rein­forces traditional attitudes by this symbolic imagery. The iconography for men is equally rigid. Men in work 111

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situations are shown as serious, decisive, professional, assured. No emotions, no fantasy; the few moments of relaxation or emotion permitted to men are relegated to leisure and the home. Likewise, the home becomes deval­ued as a place where no serious work can be done. As the woman is virtually seen only in the home, she too is devalued. By depicting woman as exclusively emotional, doubting, cooperating and helping others, by only showing these activities in private, in the home, the polarities not only of what men and women are thought to be, but where it is appropriate to be that way, are reinforced and legitimized. In fact, the very characteristics which are allowed women in the home prevent ‘’success’’ in the competi­tive public sector. If the idea and the design are simple, complete and set, there is no opportunity to bring one’s own values to the forms, let alone challenge one’s attitudes and assumptions about men, women, work, and home. If there is no ambiguity the eye is attracted once, the message understood and accepted quickly. When visual material is ambiguous the different nuances often encourage mul­tiple and alternative reactions to the same communication, and the viewer is encour­aged to make an effort to extrapolate, to participate. But the client seldom includes this as part of the problem and designers themselves most often limit the problems to be solved in an effort to arrive at a potent image. For most clients and designers, the problem does not include the encourage­ment of a thinking audience.

The Modern movement encouraged sim­plicity and clarity of form, a mode which was embraced by some of the most creative and intelligent designers. It became fashion­able to simplify for the clarity and power of the image, but as design becomes fashion, simplification becomes pernicious. This simplification in form and process leads too often to restriction and limiting separations and boundaries. By allowing for more com­ plexity and participation, designers could 112

avoid visual authoritarianism.

Publications: some alternative modes.

The movements of the sixties questioned the structure and institutions that engender unquestioning conformity. The youth, hippie, counter-culture movements helped validate some repressed ‘’female’’ values, and encouraged the growth of the women’s movement. Alternative modes which pointed out the limitations of one-directional channels of communication began to be developed and modern offset printing began to be used as a model for participatory politics. The Whole Earth Catalog, by compiling reviews of goods and services recommended by a large number of contributors across the country, helped reestablish the value of individual subjectivity. In a special issue of the Aspen Times devoted to the Interna­ tional Design Conference in Aspen, I dis­tributed cards on which the participants themselves could express their diverse atti­tudes toward the conference. An increasing number of periodicals have guest editors, guest designers-Radical Software, Design Quarterly, Arts in Society and others. As in the structure of the Whole Earth Catalog and the IDCA issue of the Aspen Times, special issues of ongoing publications provide alter­ natives to the creative input of the estab­lished designers and editors and expand the number of sources of information.

Volume 7 number 3 of Arts in Society, devoted to the formation of the California Institute of the Arts, was composed of several types of visual and textual material organ­ized in waves of information. As the Cali­fornia Institute of the Arts was yet to open and not completely defined, I created attentative, fragmented organization in an effort to encourage the reader to participate in the ultimate conceptualization of this new community of the arts. My intention was to supply a multiplicity of information which would create a struggle for the readers mak­ing their perception more meaningful. As we become more

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used to ambiguity and complexity in design and content and are encouraged to participate, the more we will be able to support the formation and expres­sion of individual, subjective conclusions to advocate the sharing of authority. If the design material is organized in frag­ments, multiple peaks rather than a single climatic moment, it has a quality and rhythm which may parallel women’s ontological experience, particularly her experience of time. Although I used this fragmented organization in an effort to reflect a community of the arts in formation and to encourage the reader to participate, I realized simultaneously that this form of visual organization corresponds to what is considered by our society to be women’s way of working. There are several genres of women’s work, quilts and blankets for example, which are an assemblage of fragments pieced together whenever there is time, which are in both their method of creation as well as in their aesthetic form, visually organized into many centers. The quilting bee, as well as the quilt itself, is an example of an essentially non-hierarchical organization. Certainly the quality of time in a woman’s life, particularly if she is not involved in the career thrust toward fame and fortune, is distinct from the quality of time experienced by men and women who are caught up in the ‘’progress’’ of a career.

The linearity of time is foreign to the actual structure of a day as well as to the rhythm of women’s monthly biological time.

Thought processes released from the distor­tions of mechanical progress are complex, repetitive and permeated with the multiple needs of others as well as oneself. Unbounded relationships cause most women to think not only about work, but about the groceries needed for dinner, a child’s dental problems, etc., in between thoughts about work. Women’s tasks in the home are equally varied and openended-child­rearing is the classic example while a man’s work in the home has a beginning and an end, it has specific projects, like the fixing of windows,

appliances or plumbing. The assemblage of fragments, the organiza­tion of forms in a complex matrix, suggests depth and intensity as an alternative to progress.

When the design arts are called upon to project aspects of the women’s movement it is a particularly appropriate time to challenge existent assumptions about form and process. When I was asked by a group of women artists to design a special issue of Every woman, a feminist newspaper, I tried to incorporate the visual projection of the egalitarian, collective form of small group process. In weekly meetings women throughout the country meet in small groups, and talk in turn so that those easily dissuaded from speaking by more vibrant, dominant personalities, are assured of being heard. In this Everywoman design I avoided the associations of space and length of article with quality, and gave each woman a large photo of herself and a two page spread. I tried to link the spreads visually and to make no spread dominant. Looking alike, the articles did not visually compete with each other for the reader’s attention: it was left to the reader to discern differences which might be subjec­tively more meaningful.

Futures: some alternative modes.

One way for the design arts to alter the public world is to develop images of the future which embody alternative values.

To do this we must know what forms most com­municate ‘’female’’ values and which devalue the female experience and cannot incorporate such modes as emotionality, complexity and supportive cooperation. The difficulty of infusing positive aspects of woman’s experience in the private home into the public work world is exemplified by our inability to imagine a perfect or radically different society. The inevitability of repro­ducing ourselves rather than a new society could be avoided as we think of the values we wish to project into the new world.

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The Tradition of Utopia in the Renaissance appears ‘’female’’ in tone-supportive, coop­erative and gentle.

Sir Thomas More was unable openly to criticize his contemporary society and consequently used satire in juxtaposition to his vision, thus softening what would have been a more obvious and harsher evaluation. This element of satire allowed the people of his time to aspire toward the values which More was articu­lating by comparing their own society with his invention of Utopia. While early utopian visions were pastoral, later ones were more mechanical, develop­ing as they did in conjunction with man’s ability to control nature. By the twentieth century, control first of nature, then of man himself, is not only a possibility but to a large extent an actuality, and utopias became transformed from aspirations to predictions and warnings. Fourier was per­haps the only nineteenth century utopian thinker who tried to envision social and physical structures which encouraged a variety of human response rather than build­ing social forms which either eliminated certain behavior patterns or controlled them. Most modern visions of the future reflect and project the rigid separations of male and female, work and leisure, public and private, that the design profession has so often reinforced in its mass communications. To warn society of what could become the inevitable outgrowths of contemporary pat­terns, Wells, Orwell, and Huxley described negative visions of the future. The total restriction and control of people’s behavior in these anti-utopias represents a critique of existing society. The unique characters who oppose the social and political order are rendered absolutely impotent and are even­tually edited out of these fictional societies. Systems that achieve reliability·-as virtually all dystopian systems do-through condition­ing cause people to be simplified and con­trolled. What dismays me most is that the kinds of behavior most frequently eliminated in these visions are the ‘’imperfect’’ charac­ teristics which have been defined as 114

‘’female,” partially because they are not simple, limited or predictable. They imply choice, inclusiveness and complexity, which, as I have pointed out before, undermine con­trol. These dystopian visions warn of futures in which men and women are indis­tinguishable-they are all made in that nar­rowest definition of ‘’male’’. We find a future projected from modes of behavior designated for the public realm of work while the characteristics of home and women are deleted. It is the absence of other ‘’female’’ futures that renders the utopian vision negative.

Without a concerted effort to imagine alter­native futures, we will have a future in which individual choice is eliminated along with emotions, ambiguity and fantasy. For if we continue to eliminate female values in an effort to: warn society of impending futures and make such visions real by their artful vividness, then, in this editing, it is human­ism which is finally, totally eradicated.

I would not reiterate such dire visions of the future if I did not feel that there are some realistic alternatives and that these alterna­tives are somehow involved with the redis­covery and projection of female experience. There seems to be an intrinsic relationship between the communitarian aspects of the women’s movements and fanciful human utopian visions. Why are there so few posi­tive visions of the future reflecting female experience despite the fact that there have been communitarian efforts (Mother Ann of the Shakers, for example) in which women have played a major role? It appears that it is even more difficult for women to fantasize about a future when their effectiveness on the present is limited to daily life in the home. And perhaps, women’s more visible contribution to unique, prototypical utopian communities is a reflection of this experi­ence of time in the home. It seems to me that the integration of design and feminism has implications for the future and it is the opportunity and respon­sibility of women

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to use this area to infuse “female’’ values into our culture. As there are virtually no blueprints for the future by woman based on female experience, we must project a future responsive to our needs if we are to have a future at all.

In a women’s studies class I initiated at the California Institute of the Arts, the women have begun to read utopian literature, to look at the theory and design of communitiatrian environments and to create images of the future from their own individual, personal perspective. Not surprisingly, the first images that are being made exhibit fears identical to those of the dystopian writers. We look forward to the creation of images which will disseminate female values presently minimized and even threatened with eradication. Projects like this blur the role distinctions between designer and user, expert and amateur.

They increase the number of participants in the life of society and provide a successful model for non-hierarchical organization. You the audience can now look at the few images which have been created, evaluate them and make choices creating your own personal alternative views of the future. You can reject the contem­porary status quo and reach out for new forms through which to shape wished-for worlds.

Together we can salvage values which have been eliminated from contem­porary life as well as project new values and ideas which come from our own bodies and experiences. Women have learned that it is impossible to live without real commu­ nication either with others or with them­ selves. To some extent the very process by which we take responsibility, not only for our own choices, our own lives, but for society as well, is a new form which brings a humane future closer.

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In order to simplify and clarify our design solutions, often times a reduction of those ideas need to occur.

Could we create an opportunity for individuals to express and explore their ideas freely without the expectation of perfection? Although Bretteville shares about how there is no opportunity to bring one’s own values to the forms during a different time period, we can apply this to today's corporate practice of design. We need to create a liminal, reflective space to allow the audience to form their own stance. Although Bretteville is sharing this in the context of the audience and message, it is important to remember that this can valuable in the designer’s process.

We, as a design community, need to be aware and intentional about shaping the future of design, rather than letting it shape us. Factors such as advancing technology, as well as social, political, and economic climates impact how we design, just as the principles of Ontological Design highlights.

We must continue to be proactive, not reactive, in designing for our community. In order to do so, we need to make it a priority to cultivate our own individual and personal perspective, and to understand them deeply.

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IDCA NINETEEN SEVENTY ONE

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Evidence or tautology than to combine design and environment. Indeed, it is by thinking in terms of the environment that design finds its legitimacy and development throughout its history. According to its etymology and its radical vir, the termenvironment covers both the tower, the contour and the surroundings. It is therefore apprehended as a container (the shape of a turn or ring) resulting from a movement (turning around) to the point of dealing with content (what is around, the surroundings). As such, the environment refers to the living environment, the atmosphere, the neighborhood, finally in short everything related to a construction of the world and its habitability. What design deals with in its most committed foundations and which will be embodied in different forms according to the times and their specific problems.

Modern Art in New York, announced his ambition to make the museum an active protagonist in the debate on the processes that build the contemporary environment, whether it is the natural world or the one manufactured by humans. In this capacity, in January 1972, he inaugurated the Universitas project, Solutions for a Post Technological Society where architects, urban planners and theorists, including Jean Baudrillard, will meet for two days. In France, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs founded the Institut de l’Environnement (association loi 1901) in 1968, which was a training and research center for a new teaching of urban planning, architecture, design and communication to meet the challenges of a “sensitive environment” in the words of André Malraux. In the same movement, the Jacques Chaban Delmas government (in 1969-1970) sought to define environmenIt is not our intention to go back on the tal issues by involving several ministries entire history of design on this issue. whose issues related to nature and spatial However, we cannot ignore the steps of a planning. Thus, around the 1970s, in shaker proto design or Catherine France and internationally, in all industrial Beecher’s comments and her economic countries, the environment became a and political reflections on domestic life primary issue. Debates aimed at defining its and the development of American principles of approach become places of houses against a background of feminist theoretical and conceptual tension. They and abolitionist demands. In their time, crystallize economic and political issues the arts and crafts movement, led by shaped by the articulation between moderRuskin and William Morris, or Henri Cole, nity and nature. promoter of industrial manufacturing “combining great art and mechanical As such, the statement, written by Jean skill”, worried about the consequences Baudrillard, of the French delegation led of industrialization on working condiby designer Roger Tallon at the Aspen tions, pollution and the unsanitary meetings in 1970, makes sense. “Aspen nature of housing. Founded after the is the Disneyland of the environment and Second World War, the Ulm school, in design. The problem is far from Aspen. the suite of the Bauhaus, will make the It is the whole theory of design and the environment its program. In 1969, the environment itself that constitutes a English historian Reyner Banham pubgeneralized Utopia, a Utopia produced by lished The Architecture of the Wellthe capitalist system that gives itself the tempered environment, while the Aspen appearance of a second nature in order to International Design Meetings (IDCA) survive and perpetuate itself under the were prepared under his expertise, pretext of nature. This statement, comwhich in 1970 went through heated bined with the reactions and demonstradebates. The same year, in the spring of tions of students and environmental 1970, Emilio Ambasz, newly appointed activists present in 1970, marks a turning curator of design at the Museum of point for the Aspen meetings. The Special 119

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Edition of Aspen Times produced by CalArts students in Los Angeles under the leadership of Sheila Levrant of Breteville in 1971, and published in this issue of Rosa B, reveal new forms and themes.In 2008, at Gasworks in London, on September 19 or November 9, artist Martin Beck drew from this same intervention the title of his Panel 2 exhibition: “Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes...” By reusing elements specific to Aspen 1970 and replaying the reading of the French delegation’s text in the Aspen forest, Martin Beck’s installation made it possible forty years later to recover from historical references and put them into play. Martin Beck’s interest in questions of historicity and their visual representation makes it possible to bring debates on the environment closer to their context of appearance, at the same time as through a resumption of modernist elements, the outcome of modernism and the new confrontations resulting from the post-modern movement are being actualized. At the center of this concern for the built environment is the revolution of object and sign, which Jean Baudrillard advocated in some of his main texts, that is at stake. This semiotic adventure (as a theme dear to poststructuralist currents) concerned all areas of activity as well as the function of the image even in the so-called “performing society”. It is in this context that postmodernism is significant, to describe the cultural turning point as well as the changes in the sign and image that were beginning to transform the relationship with the environment, starting from an awareness of productive modes (Emilio Ambasz’s “man-made environment”).

Added to this was a new type of materialism rooted in the criticism of authoritarian and universalist values received from the modernist heritage. This adventure of the sign and the environment was the subject of a chapter in Baudrillard’s book Pour une critique de l’économie politique du sign published two years after the IDCA conference in Aspen and in the 120

intensity and excitement of the theoretical-practical development of the Institut de l’Environnement in Paris. In this chapter entitled “Design and environment or the Climbing of political economy”, based on the functionality defined by the Bauhaus as a double movement of analysis and rationalization of forms (not only industrial, but also environmental and social), Baudrillard reconfigures the revolution of the object in an even more precise synthesis, that of the sign.

Despite this, the volatilization of the sign begins to manifest itself through symptoms that question this same idea of modern functionalism. Faced with the new challenges of technological acceleration and cybernetics, as well as subject to the whims of consumer society and entertainment, the sign is slowly starting to get rid of its referents. He acquires his own life, foreshadowing a flowering postmodernism. According to Baudrillard, from that moment on, design immersed itself in fashion or mass media. Everything that was considered marginal in the previous period, irrational, anti-art, anti-design, from pop to psychedelic, obeys, like it or not, the same economy of the sign. In this sense, nothing escapes design anymore.

This is the supreme victory of postmodernism that manifests itself through a whole series of resources, almost tics, from complexity, irony, ambiguity, play, temporal multiplicity, and more specifically, aesthetic and utopian monumentality. The sign separates itself from its referent, the social and historical world, to develop in an increased and floating, self-referential autonomy. In this sense, and according to Jean Baudrillard, the question of the environment does not only emerge from the awareness of nature and ecology, but from within social practices whose ultimate recipients are the image and production of forms. Semiotics (but also sociology) is the field where a sign ecology and a form ecology can be thought of without losing sight of media-environmental awareness.

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This historical debate applied to creativity in design, currently questions us about the limits of postmodernism, which as a cultural style is often given as a lapse. At the same time, it challenges us on emerging options and opportunities. On the one hand, any return to modernism seems practically impossible, while postmodernism itself (stylistically speaking, with its attachment to beautiful but useless form) has proved ineffective in capturing the potential of objects and forms in our contemporary world. Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif lemon press that Paolo Deganello considers the pinnacle of unnecessary is one of the most cited examples as a demonstration of the ironic emptiness of postmodernism. After the fact, (history always gives the measure of aesthetic trends and remains the place of surprising iconic finds), Baudrillard’s own position after Aspen is itself associated with a standard positioning of a post-modern type rather than a radical type of design of the 1970s, such as that of Deganello or Archizoom or a particular progressive and critical current. In the present time, we hypothesize that the semiotics of the built environment brings us back to an ecology of form. Designed from maximum functionality and practicality, the shapes are the result of the search for an effective material and technical combinatorics. This ecology emphasizes the potential for the use of forms. When looking for solutions, it promotes the recycling of ideas to the point where, occasionally, it is more appropriate to acquire a standard product on the market, than to design a product expressly. What the ecology of form promotes, in art and design, is a war economy in order to make the most of the creativity already existing around us. In this sense, environment and ecology, as well as nature and culture, are no longer an identifiable separation. What is there and available belongs to “one and the same production of nature’s companies, collectives” in the terms used by Bruno Latour in his development of a third way {7}. Neither modern nor postmodern, the

non-modern emerges in our current events. It is in this capacity that Rosa B intends to challenge the issue of the environment and design. In the wake of Martin Beck and the reactivation of Aspen’s documents that he operates through his exhibition, and following the publication of his book The Aspen Complex Edited by Martin Beck {8} and with her participation in this issue, Rosa B takes the form of an archive, as a re-update of historical documents that put into perspective the ongoing debates on the manufacture.

The special edition of the Aspen Times newspaper witnesses the 1971 Paradox meetings. The special edition of the Aspen Times was designed as a participatory account of the 1971 session of the international design meetings in Aspen. The files distributed to the audience contained a form where everyone could record their reactions. Contributions collected and printed on the Aspen Times offset press were available at the end of the week. The slanted text columns on the printed page correspond to the mock-up of the forms.

The whole is divided into days (from Sunday to Thursday) divided into design games, cinema and various sections. This quick description ignores the more chaotic starting principle and tries to structure operating procedures without constraint or hierarchy. Texts placed in different positions sometimes require you to bend your neck or rotate the page to read them in the right direction. Most are handwritten (and reproduced as is on the offset press), which can make them really difficult to decipher at times. In addition, the content and tone of the contributions vary as much as their handwritten printing. The daily reality of the Aspen meetings in 1971 is reflected in this accumulation of voices on the verge of discordance.

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IDCA 1971

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The imagery and unfiltered handwriting allows for a different experience. There is something refreshing about having multiple perspectives shown in an unconventional way.

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The composition pushes the viewer to see that thinking is never linear as well as removing the subjective point of heirarchy. This allows for the reader to decide what deems as a highlight or takeaway.

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There are some designers who draw models or forms that help further depict their observations, analyses, and conclusions.

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We must be aware of how our design environment is built around us.

Do we want to continue to promote the recycling of ideas? When Bretteville decided for this newspaper to be solely on a volunteer basis, it allowed for an organic sharing of ideas and thoughts as a community.

Committing to this requires a level of trust and embracing the unknown, letting go of the desire to shape the outcome to one’s liking. Bretteville was intentional to allow the form and content to be displayed in multiple facets rather than one perspective until the very end.

There are unforeseen consequences to teaching new designers to repeat the conceptions of the past. Our curriculums and training don’t allow for new ways of thinking. This can contribute to reinforcing monoculture within the design community.

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INsPIRATIoNs AND REFERENCE REFERENCEs

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PRINT MARKS

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These print marks informed the form-making process of the modular typeface, furniture, and workbook. Center marks, trim lines, and bleeds are all devices that give guidance and structure in the print-making process. Without registration, images lose their clarity, and 'ghosting' can occur.

The design process needs devices just like these to help us find direction and clarity, especially when the process looks different every time.

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INTERLOCK

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I spent some time studying the work of MuirMcNeil. The simple, yet intricate typeface system named 'Interlock' has parallel horizontal and vertical lines, binary contrasts of form and counterform, and tonal pattern densities.

The larger the scale, there newer the impact and perception of a letterform. The variety of the weights create a consistent structure and flow.

All of these aspects informed and inspired the development of Liminal's modular system.

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FLEXIBLE VISUAL SYSTEMS

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Flexible Visual Systems sums up 10 years of research at the University of Barcelona, 20 years of developing systems at TwoPoints.Net and 18 years of teaching systems at over 10 design universities throughout Europe on 320 pages.

Flexible Visual Systems is the design manual for contemporary visual identities. It teaches you a variety of approaches on how to design flexible systems, adjustable to any aesthetic or project in need of an identifiable visual language.

To learn how to design flexible systems is not just learning another craft, it is going to change the way you think and work entirely. It is an approach, how to design. If you would place system design into a curriculum it would be the foundation course, putting you in the right mindset. You can apply the systemic approach to any discipline you will later specialise in, from corporate design, communication design, user experience design to textile design.

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IBM PLEX SANS

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"IBM Plex™ is an international typeface family designed by Mike Abbink, IBM BX&D, in collaboration with Bold Monday, an independent Dutch type foundry. Plex was designed to capture IBM’s spirit and history, and to illustrate the unique relationship between mankind and machine—a principal theme for IBM since the turn of the century.

The result is a neutral, yet friendly Grotesque style typeface that includes a Sans, Sans Condensed, Mono, Serif, and several other styles for several languages, and has excellent legibility in print, web and mobile interfaces.

Plex’s three designs work well independently, and even better together. Use the Sans as a contemporary compadre, the Serif for editorial storytelling, or the Mono to show code snippets. The unexpectedly expressive nature of the italics give you even more options for your designs."

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SCHROFER SKETCHES

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"A book of sketches by a graphic designer is unique. Jurriaan Schrofer did not discard his drawings and he even kept production drawings and other pre-press material. His sketches and illustrations from the period 1950-1990 have a special visual and poetic strength. For this publication a large selection of them has been made, introduced by an essay. The book also contains an extensive presentation in word and image of the design and printing process in the pre-digital era.

Frederike Huygen is an art and design historian and has written many publications about design."

After being introduced to Schrofer Sketches, I had realized that the process of our work is our heritage, and it is invaluable.

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IBM PAVILLION

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WORLD S FAIR

Model of the Ovoid Theater in the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames.

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The ‘problem’ our society faces is not so much a lack of scientific, or technical, or even sociological knowledge—it's a lack of ways of transmitting existing knowledge to people as they need it, in forms they can readily grasp.

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IBM Pavilion NY World’s Fair (1964)

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Think playing in the Information Machine theater at the IBM Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1964; Photo: © Eames Office

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ANDREA ZITTEL

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What intrigued my interest in Zittel’s work was her approach—she explores the surroundings in one’s day-to-day living. People often assume that her work is quite controlled, but on the contrary, she explores the freedom that a particular space provides. This juxtaposition was a catalyst for initiating my beginning concepts of the spatial design for Liminal. I began to explore what modularity in a living space could look like in my first round of prototypes.

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Planar Pavillion (2014)

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Planar Pavilions at A-Z West Andrea Zittel (2018)

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Linear Sequence (2016)

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Aggregated Stacks (2015)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bibliography

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