pica design. to the point. february 2009
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The world according to Bruce Mau The rise and fall of the DESIGN STAR
design=heart? TOP 10
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features Design=Heart?
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Stefan Sagmeister asks design students: Can design touch someone’s heart? By Carolyn McCarron Sienicki
Radical Traditionalists
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The newest publishers from Los Angeles are transforming the art magazine—with paintbrushes. 3D glasses, and porn-star air fresheners. By Jami Attenberg
The World According to Bruce Mau
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No one has ever accused Bruce Mau, the Canadian Design Guru, of thinking small. His latest project, however, is big even for him. By Adele Weber
The Rise and Fall of the Design Star
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Achieving star status doesn’t happen by chance. Marty shares his views on design legends, past and present, and why stardom may not be what it used to be. An Interview with Marty Neumeier
departments Contributors
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Music
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Dialogue Reader’s letters
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Books
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Design industry news
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Observer
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Resources
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Mary Fichter
Michelle Taute
Douglas Walker
Caitlin Dover
Rick Poynor
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ACT AT ADC The idea sounds dubious: ad guys playing a significant role in addressing today’s crucial world issues. But AdForum’s nonprofit initiative, Advertising Community Together (ACT), is working hard to showcase “responsible communication” by organizing a worldwide traveling exhibition featuring politically correct practices. Sure, it makes the industry feel good about itself and its pro bono spots, but what about the general public? Has an ad ever convinced you to act more socially responsible? See if any of the 400 campaigns from 37 countries included in the exhibition Great Ads for a Better Future pull your heartstrings. Or open your wallet. Or change your mind. It will be on display at U.N. Headquarters during New York Advertising Week this September and at the Art Directors Club Gallery, Sept. 27– Oct. 30. www.adforum.com
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R E A DY F O R H I S C L O S E - U P Known for his large-format, tightly cropped portraits of celebrities like Jack Nicholson and Angelina Jolie, German photographer Martin Schoeller is making his U.S. exhibition debut at New York’s Hasted Hunt Gallery. Is it easier for a photographer to get a one-man show in Manhattan if his subjects are well-known figures? You bet, but American audiences just can’t get close enough to the human stars in our terrestrial firmament. Close Up, a collection of Schoeller’s highly exposed 50 x 40-inch prints, most originally published in The New Yorker where he has been a contract photographer since 1998, will be on view until Aug. 30. German publishing group, teNeues, has released Martin Schoeller—Close Up: Portraits 1998–2009, to accompany the exhibition. www.hastedhunt.com www.teneues-usa.com PEARLS AND A WHITE WIG From the collection of eccentric Toronto philanthropist Salah Bachir comes Wall to Wall Warhol, an exhibition featuring more than 50 works of Warhol’s photographs, venerated silkscreens, and prominent paintings from the “Death and Disaster” series. Here Warhol’s own legendary eccentricity might be surpassed by the popular and peculiar persona of the collector, Bachir. A flamboyant businessman, president of Famous Players Media (Canada’s largest theater chain), and publisher of the magazines Famous, Famous Québec, and Premiere, he’s rarely caught without his trademark strands of pearls. An enthusiastic and discerning collector of gay art, Bachir is providing the first public glimpse of this special collection, on view at Oakville Galleries, in Oakville, Ontario, until Aug. 27. www.oakvillegalleries.com
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GUERRILLO HEROICO The portrait of Ernesto “Che” Guevara photographed by Alberto Díaz Korda (a former fashion photographer who later became Fidel Castro’s personal photographer) on March 5, 1960, is considered to be the most reproduced image in the history of photography. That Korda’s iconic representation of Guevara, a guerrilla leader and Marxist anti-establishment hero, has been looted repeatedly for capitalist gains is yet another of life’s unrelenting ironies. Now, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London will display a collection of curios (photographs, posters, clothing) to examine how the ubiquitous image has inspired art, fashion, and culture for the past 45 years, particularly in the United States. Relevant artifacts, including Madonna’s album American Life and digital photographer Pedro Meyer’s “American Five Dollar Bill,” will be on display until Aug. 28. Che Guevara: Revolutionary and Icon was organized by UCR/ California Museum of Photography. www.vam.ac.uk
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THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE Noticed: a recent surge of designers rolling up their sleeves and hand-printing limited-edition posters for indie rock bands—Aesthetic Apparatus, Patent Pending Industries, and Asterik Studio, to name a few. And while the practice of printing psychedelic rock posters isn’t new (Stanley “Mouse” Miller’s memorable “Skull and Roses” for The Grateful Dead in 1971 is still a favorite, as is Warhol’s tongue for the Rolling Stones), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art believes a collection of 26 contemporary rock posters by two studios—Urban Inks and Bay Area designerturned-artist Rex Ray—deserves high praise. The work is eye-catching and certainly embodies the energy and motion of the music it promotes. But the exhibition lacks range. Plenty of talented studios across the country produce similar designs, leaning on the old laurels of Russian Constructivist imagery and Warhol- and Lichtenstein-inspired Pop Art. More here would be better. The Art of Design: The Architecture and Design Collection poster exhibit will be on view inside SFMOMA until Sept. 5, but perhaps the posters should have been left outside where they were meant to catch the eye. www.sfmoma.org
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Adbusters challenges designers to create a flag for the global citizen; a green-thumbed San Diego ad agency; the Pop!Tech conference addresses scarcity & abundance; and much more.
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S C R I P T- TA S T I C N E W F O N T S The beauty of hand lettering lies in inconsistencies, but how to capture those variations within the confines of type? House Industries appears to have mastered the art of imperfection with the new Studio Lettering collection, which includes three script typefaces and a set of illustrated shapes. The typeface Swing, for example, contextually chooses from three letter alternatives to achieve the best look. Sable, on the other hand, varies the size of consecutively repeating let ters in homage to brush lettering in advertising. www.houseind.com
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ART: THE BEST MEDICINE There are nearly 50 artists credited in the back of Magnificent Marvelous Me!, but this book’s real stars are the kids who complete the activities in it. These young people have siblings with a serious illness or disability, and the book provides them an important creative outlet. “Their lives will be changed, because they’ll have a place to express themselves,” says Steffanie Lorig, founder of Art with Heart, the Seattle nonprofit behind the book. “If they don’t have a place to express themselves, they swallow it.” All the content is based in therapy, but the compelling pro-bono artwork helps make healing fun. A clown by Seymour Chwast, for instance, ups the giggle factor for a page of knock-knock jokes. www.artwithheart.org
GREEN THUMBS San Diego advertising agency NYCA has something akin to a theme word: grow. The creatives there nurture clients’ businesses, each other and the environment around them. And the latter literally involves getting their hands dirty: There’s a grove behind the firm’s office with a tree for every client, and in the past year the company planted The Learning Grove, a garden at San Diego’s Horton Elementary School, where kids dig in the dirt and even eat the fruits of their labor—tomatoes, carrots, strawberries and more. “They learn about responsibility and what it takes to nurture a life,” says Michael Mark, creative director and CEO at NYCA. The agency’s staff spent days clearing out trash from a small plot at the school, then turned it into a working garden that’s about 60 x 60 ft. NYCA hopes to take the concept to additional schools. www.nyca.com
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NEW DIGS, WRONGER IDEAS Sometimes one change leads to another. When design and strategy company C2 started working on a new building three years ago, it was clear the firm’s address would even tually read Half Moon Bay instead of San Francisco … but C2 didn’t realize another radical transformation lay in store. Now studio principals are in the midst of morphing the busi ness into a new venture called MavLab, which will focus on generating big ideas for clients, then sending many of them to outside partners for “rapid prototyping.” “I’m always looking for, not so much the new thing, but the next big idea,” says partner John Bielenberg. And for MavLab, that philosophy means assembling panels of experts from different fields (ranging from behavorial psychology to design) for collaborative brainstorming. The teams will come up with ideas that wouldn’t be possible without such a diverse group, and since the studio doesn’t plan to execute all the ideas itself, solutions won’t be restricted by an internal skill set. (Look for more on MavLab’s launch in the November/ December issue of PICA.)
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As for the new building: It’s designed to facilitate “thinking wrong”—the firm’s process for coming up with innovative ideas. Next to a surf shop rather than more laced-up businesses, the building’s interior retains an unfinished feel, with plywood walls and exposed wiring instead of a slick aesthetic. Thick translucent plastic on the outside of the building (designed by architect Nilus De Matran) gives the structure a futuristic vibe. “It’s not just a new studio for us,” Bielenberg says. “We call it a catalytic mechanism.” Seems like it’s working already. www.c2llc.com
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WINNING HAND When P22 type foundry released a card deck in 2004, copies went almost as fast as chips at the blackjack table. The Buffalo, N.Y., type shop recently completed a new specimen deck, designed by in-house and guest designers, with a differentP22 font on each card … and an Easter egg-style surprise for those who take a closer look at the king, queen and jack of spades. P22 alum James Grieshaber, now of Typeco fame, modeled these face cards after P22’s principals. But did he do them justice? “I don’t really have much hair,” notes Richard Kegler, director of P22, on whom the king of spades is modeled. “The hair is fanciful on James’ part.” And fanciful just might be the perfect descriptor for the entire deck, with card designs compelling enough that you may have a hard time focusing on your hand. A deck is $10 or free with a $100 purchase. www.p22.com
FA S T F O RWA R D Much like the famous TED conference, Pop!Tech hinges on big ideas; this year the event tackles a particularly timely theme: Scarcity and Abundance. The conference’s 600 participants, who typically hail from such diverse fields as design, art, government and science, will take a look at the planet’s resources and what today’s shifting realities mean for the future. Speakers include writer Malcom Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point), PostSecret founder Frank Warren, antiviolence innovator Gary Slutkin and MIT roboticist Kelly Dobson. The conference takes place Oct. 22–25 in Camden, Maine … alas, it costs an eye-popping $3500. For those strapped for cash or time, there’s also a free simulcast online. http://poptech.com
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IN MEMORIAM: TALMADGE DICKSON 1915–2008 Talmadge Dickson embodied sophistication blended with equal parts courtesy and Southern charm. For more than half a century, he unerringly steered the illustrious Atlanta printing company that bears his name. When “T.D.” and his son Gary propelled the company into the electronic age, the company’s repertoire of specialty printing
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and finishing techniques became accessible to designers everywhere. The Dicksons’ enthusiasm for experimentation inspired innovative projects, from corporate identity to event collateral to packaging—and some of the most memorable paper promotions ever. Talmadge Dickson’s passion for printing was omnivorous. He was a self-taught typographer, an eloquent advocate for fine papers, an intuitively strategic thinker. He would sketch out a multicolor engraved logo
with the enthusiasm of a chef trying out a new recipe. Talmadge Dickson’s passing is in one sense the end of an era, but his dedication to quality and his admiration of creativity endure. His standards and spirit imbue the firm’s self-promotions and printed samples cherished by designers and paper-lovers across the country. www.dicksons.com
BLOGGING BY MAIL The web may be instantaneous, but Rob Giampietro decided to shutdown his design blog for a week in favor of snail mail. “Design is some thing between a gift and a good,” says the principal at New York design firm Giampietro+Smith. “I talk about this a lot on [my blog] Lined & Unlined, and I wanted to find a way to give my readers a gift.” So he launched Posts by Post, offering to send out free postcards to anyone who gave him an address. About 200 people took him up on the offer, and they received six different postcards over a week. Giampietro based each card’s design on a previous blog post, with imagery ranging from a Paul Rand’s UPS logo to an illustration of the hedge maze from The Shining. www.linedandunlined.com
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EYES WIDE OPEN In her new book, How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum (Perigee, $14.95), Keri Smith brings to fruition some deceptively simple advice: Pay attention. She’s stuffed her book with beguiling ideas for observing the world in the service of creativity. It’s a bit like a scavenger hunt crossed with a philosophy textbook and a charmingly illustrated handwritten ’zine. The exercises range from archeological dig—where you recreate things from your childhood with found objects—to blind observation, which involves exploring a dark room by touch. As Smith, an artist and illustrator, writes, “Creativity arises from our ability to see things from many different angles.” www.kerismith.com
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& NOW FOR SOMETHING… ADDITIONAL Ah, the mighty ampersand. It’s hard not to love such an elegant, shapely replacement for the letters a, n & d … & now you can rejoice with other die hard ampersand lovers at a blog aptly titled The Ampersand, devoted entirely to the symbol. You’ll find leads on fan gear, including an ampersand pin, T-shirt and bookends, & you can keep up with the mark’s appearances in advertising, design & real life. And for the perfect interior object on which to ponder while absorbing the blog, consider one of House Industries’ exquisite new ampersand objects &/or T-shirts. http://ampersand.gosedesign.net, www.houseind.com
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ADDED DIMENSION It’s called taking a page from Hollywood. Building on a marketing campaign encouraging designers to think big, then think bigger, Jupiterimages took on a whole other dimension in a recent 3D mailer. Capitalizing on a revival of interest in 3D movies turned out to be a good idea for driving visitors to the stock image company’s site, where they could view special 3D imagery, according to VP Kendall Higbee. “The goal of this type of marketing is to be more experiential in introducing ourselves to prospects,” he says, point ing out that 3D online is a relatively new realm. Jupiterimages doesn’t sell 3D images, but it won’t be casting this selling technique aside: In true Tinseltown fashion, there will be a sequel. Request a set: sales@jupiterimages.com
WAV E T H A T F L A G If this isn’t a throw-down, we don’t know what is: “We invite you to prove that design has a real role to play in the fate of our world.” It’s from those rabble-rousers over at Adbusters, who have launched the One Flag design competition. This activist project challenges designers to create flags that symbolize global citizenship. You have until Dec. 1 to throw our hat—um, make that flag—into the ring. But no words or clichés, please. An allstar cast of judges, including Michael Beirut, Rick Poynor and Steven Heller, will decide which entry deserves to rest atop the world’s flag poles. www.adbusters.org/campaigns/oneflag
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the world according to►►
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by adele weder
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Solder On. The “Vision 2002� concept suit, developed by Natick Soldier Systems, is named for the proposed year of its implementation. It should be able to heal the soldier wearing it, should he or2009 she be wounded february in action.
N o o ne has ever accused B ruce M au , the C anadian D esig n G uru , o f t h in ki ng s mall . H is l atest p ro j e c t , however , is b ig eve n for hi m . M au ’ s M assive C ha nge ( exhi bitio n / s ymp o s ium / book / web site ) regards the w h o l e wide world as the ultimate d e s i gn brief .
The project known as Massive Change begins a confident assertion, in the form of a rhetorical question: Now that we can do anything, what will we do? Anything? asks the skeptic . Anything, answers Bruce Mau, its mastermind. “We can do practically anything, with the resources we now have,” avers Mau. “Let’s say America decided tomorrow it was going to cure cancer, it could do it by mobilizing the resources. It’s really a question of what gets decided and what gets prioritized.” And whatever ends up the priority, designers – of medical tools, of sustainable hospital design, of economic systems that create the wealth that cures the cancer – will be behind it all. There you have the crux of Massive Change, the mother of all design projects that aspires to regard the whole world as the ultimate design brief.
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Launched last fall at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Massive Change is – at this point in its development – a magnificent four-legged beast: sprawling exhibition, pundit-stuffed symposium, 240-page manifesto and interactive Web site (www.massive change.com); a product line and feature film are in the works. Subtitled “The Future of Global Design,” it’s a very big deal for Bruce Mau Design and also for its graduate school, the Institute Without Boundaries – a one-year interdisciplinary program
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within the Bruce Mau Design studio, in conjunction with George Brown College, whose students contributed the bulk of its content. Massive Change positions designers as the 21st century’s high priests, whose acumen will resolve everything from world hunger to global warming. In the words of the exhibition/book/ Web site: “What if life itself became a design project?” Such a tall order, of course, requires expanding the definition of “designer” to include economists, biologists, politicians and, well, pretty much any creative mind. More pertinently, it entails reconsidering everything from the perspective of a designer. “When we began the work, we decided against the visual as an organizing idea,” says Mau. Still, the visual dominates the chambers of Massive Change. Reams of text information about technical breakthroughs are clearly set out, but it’s their aesthetics that engage us, from the computer-generated chart of the global Internet on the brochure to the museum installations themselves. Just walk by the roomful of junk-food containers manipulated into beautiful stalactites of metal, cardboard and Styrofoam. Or behold the expressionistic canvas of the world’s global airline routes. “I think he’s been misinterpreted, or perhaps wasn’t clear enough,” says Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels of Mau’s comment. “For the gallery, the visual experience is very important. Aesthetics were taken off the table at the beginning. They came back.”
Create Anew. Scientific Developments have rendered materials—traditionally things to which design is applied—as objects of design developments. An exhibit in the materials gallery features electro-luminescent film, which is activated by electricity.
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Travel Light.
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In the Movement Gallery, green modes of transportation include the Gizmo neighbourhood electric vehicle ( at centre), designed for commuters travelling over 72 kilometres per hour.
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M assive C hange bega n gestati ng as s oon as Bartels arrived at the VAG three and a half years ago, with the idea of incorporating more architecture and design into gallery programming. As a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, she’d been amazed at the strong public response to architectural exhibitions. After meeting Mau in Toronto, she wanted to do something big with him. “I wasn’t sure what this would be, and it didn’t matter,” says Bartels, since she figured that whatever Mau came up with would be intelligent and engaging. And big: Massive Change is the most ambitious exhibition the VAG has ever mounted. It’s also the most ambitious project that Bruce Mau has undertaken in the vertiginous trajectory of his career. He made his international reputation at Zone Books, a subsidiary of the MIT Press, with brilliant designs for such books as Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share, a philosphical critique of civilization’s waste and spending patterns. From there, Mau garnered the choicest graphic-design commissions while evolving his studio into a multidisciplinary consultancy for architects like Frank Gehry and enterprises like Indigo Books. And publishing: the apogee was his collaboration with Rem Koolhaas to create S,M,L,XL.
Mau’s brilliant graphic design was not just an illustration but also an extension - the visual equivalent, really - of the jarring, enigmatic and spare writings by Koolhaas. A few years later came Life Style, an awkward combination of monograph and manifesto. Stuffed with platitudes and self-congratulations, it rang hollow and had the shelf-life of the Spice Girls and other pop icons of-the-moment that featured so prominently within it. Mau’s newest book, Massive Change - which doubles as the exhibition catalogue - is largely a compilation of the exhibition concepts and discussions. More accessible than S,M,L,XL and more substantial than Life Style, it looks and reads much like an expanded edition of Wired magazine. Not much in this project is radically new or original: Wired itself, as well as such other magazines as Adbusters and even Time, have been bringing many of these ideas to a wider audience for a while now. But Massive Change is trying to take the most salient of these developments and unify them within a state-of-the-union account for the masses.
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I n e ac h ven ue – book , exhi bition , symposium and Web site – Mau is careful to list his many collaborators, while asserting that the “ruthless” media star-system compels him to step forward as the front man. This role has become such a second nature that in conversation he will say, with total offhandedness, “I’m working on a project to cure malaria.” He’s often called an unabashed showman. But this is what Mau does best: he shows.
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The gallery installations themselves span what the Institute Without Boundaries sees as the spectrum of civilization, which they have broken up into various systems, or “economies” - of Urban, Movement, Information, Image, Energy, Markets, Materials, Military, Manufacturing, Living and Wealth & Politics, all in galleries bejewelled with visual and textual data. The Movement and Information economies pretty much rely on the cliche museum displays of, respectively, odd-looking vehicles and backlit images of mother earth in space. But the exhibition excels at depicting of the abstract. Along with VAG curator Bruce Grenville and a crop of Institute Without Boundaries students, Mau has created installations that marvelously illustrate intangible concepts and treatises, such as property ownership (a giant barcode envelopes a house)
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and the Kyoto Protocol (an easy-tofollow graph of its pollution-bartering premise). Mau’s Wealth & Politics gallery acknowledges the dilemma of how to measure and enhance the world’s riches. Conventional economists don’t measure the depletion of natural resources in our GNP, for instance, even through they count the clean-up bill of a disaster. The gallery calls us to embrace the new, enlightened economics espoused by Hazel Henderson and others. What’s not clear is how we can make the transition to these enlightened economic systems from our current mode, wherein corporations are compelled to grow and conquer, or die. Mau says he has faith that the most powerful conglomerates and most powerful nations, which have created much of the world’s wealth of society in the first place, will make the transition toward the new economy. Says Mau: “Now, should we maintain a critical vigilance? Of course. Will there be bad companies? Yeah. Will there be assholes who make the worst kind of decisions imaginable? Yeah, sure. But if you look on the whole, what you see is that the numbers – housing, longevity, literacy, wealth and so on – are all going up.”
Waste Not. The Manufacturing Gallery imagines a world of zero waste. Pristine white takeout containers made from biodegradable plastic derived from potatoes and constarch— contrast sharply with a “Garbage Wall” of styrofoam containers threaded together.
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Picture This. The scale of subject matter in Massive Changes’s Saturated image gallery ranges from the macro (the entire known universe) to the subatomic.
Make Visible.
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The burned-out control room or Reactor 4, Chernoble, June 2001.
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A s t h ose numb ers go up , though , so does energy use and resource depletion. Hence the Movement economies gallery, which is crammed with rows of energyefficient vehicles or prototypes and highlighted by inventor Dean Kamen’s Segway. If you’re a cynic, the Segway is a rather expensive ($5,000 plus) motorized scooter with handlebars. But if you regard it as low-energy transport for short distances, it could significantly reduce car use - if only more people would take it up. At the Visionaries symposium, Kamen seemed happy, open and optimistic - until moderator Charlie Rose delicately asked why it hasn’t caught on in the marketplace. It might have been an excellent occasion for the inventor to solicit insights into some of its obvious design drawbacks, such as its lack of rain protection. But this was not the place to start talking about rain. In fact, the entire exhibition is lean on critical detachment and long on giddy anticipation of the future. “It is an extremely optimistic show,” allows Bartels. “But what we’ve found in our research is that people feel overly pessimistic. They feel there’s no hope. We’d like to show that there are a lot of advances being made.” For Mau, the advances outweigh the setbacks. “It’s amazing to me how controversial that is, the idea that it would be optimistic,” he laughs. “
For me, it’s like: ‘Really? Is that controversial? I didn’t realize!”’ Right from the conception of Massive Change, he says, “we saw a pattern that ran counter to the mood of the day. And the mood of the day is largely produced by a media that feeds on crisis.” Positive developments - including the work of designers - are largely ignored, he argues. It’s as though Massive Change is redressing the balance.
Play Chicken. Israel Researcher Avigdor Cahaner has crossbred normal chickens with naturally balding birds; the result is a featherless fowl that stays cool in tropical climates. Bonus: no plucking necessary.
The end result is that the exhibition is so jolly that you could turn it into a Broadway musical, but it largely ignores the dark and inexplicable aspects of human nature. The brilliance of Massive Change is its perception of the earth as a network of design systems; the flaw is its acceptance of humans as rational beings within that network. “We will eradicate poverty,” shouts the oversize wall text, and much of the rest of the exhibition implies that with poverty eradicated and the eco-system in balance, man’s inhumanity to man will vaporize as well. Because, as Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand comments in Massive Change - referring to Constant Battles, a book by Harvard archaeologist Steven Leblanc - “Whenever we exceed carrying capacity, we fight over scraps.”
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A ctually , eve n with full b ellies , we fight over scraps, and that’s the twisted truth that Massive Change seems to deny. Its premise treats human beings as rational creatures but we aren’t. Some rogue gene within us craves social rank, military superiority, historic legacy or just plain notoriety. Even if the world’s plenty could blanket all regions, with a custom house and trash vaporizer for all, our own greedy souls crave ever more. More money, more stuff, more status, more than our neighbours, more than last week and last year, more of our “accursed share.” What Massive Change needs for completion, perhaps, is an annex gallery to deal with the darker corners of the human psyche and social order. Call it Sin economies, maybe, or economies of Evil. But if you want to quantify happiness, this project offers a lucid and engaging summary of the improving human condition. And we’ll keep on improving it, but we’ll never be satisfied with our lot. Which will keep designers in business for all the ages. “One of the things about design is that we don’t have the luxury of cynicism,” says Mau, “because we don’t have the luxury of not doing something. We are obliged to act.” Meanwhile, our collective lust for luxury – not just luxury of cynicism, but the more tangible kind: for big houses and jet-fuelled vacations and anything on eBay - shows little sign of waning. Georges Bataille put it succinctly in The Accursed Share: “It is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems.” Now, there’s a thought to ponder.
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Massive Change opens at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario this March, and then travels onward to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006
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Make Design Visible. Powerlines downed by freezing rain in Boucherville, Quebec, January 1998.
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DESIGN = HEART BY CAROLYN MCCARRON SIENICKI
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Stefan Sagmeister, headshot.
I’ve always considered Stefan Sagmeister a professional provocateur. I still remember, as a young designer fresh out of school over ten years ago, receiving posters in the mail that he designed for the AIGA: the headless chickens, the wagging cow tongues, and the X-Actoed typography (into his own flesh, no less). I thought, who is this guy? Now I know: He’s Stefan Sagmeister, a superhero to many in the design world (even though he prefers not to be seen this way). He can convince clients to take creative risks that leave the rest of us awestruck. He employs guts in his work and gets endless publicity for his most shocking and provocative designs. Young designers everywhere revere him. But with great power comes great responsibility, and he is attempting to bring a sense of humanity back to design and remind us of our individual
power as designers—all by asking us one simple question: Can design touch someone’s heart? To get things rolling, he has turned the question into a course he is teaching at design schools in New York City and Berlin, including the School of Visual Arts (SVA), the Cooper Union and the Universität der Küenste. Understanding the question Stefan first raised this question in his book Made You Look, published six years ago. Today, an Internet search brings up countless postings as designers everywhere attempt to answer it— including students. American designers (as opposed to European designers) take the “heart” aspect of the question quite literally. The word “heart” in English implies love, caring or affection. Therefore, it makes sense to many designers to answer the question by taking on pro-bono projects for various causes, as side projects to everyday
client work. While these designers’ efforts are commendable, Stefan is asking us to delve much deeper than some may understand. What he is really asking us is: Can design do more than sell products for our clients? Can design move someone enough to change the course of events? Can design play a bigger role in solving societal problems? “You could also say, do something that matters,” he explains. “It’s a pity that the majority of what we do is promote or sell products for clients. I have nothing against selling. I do it, too. But I also think design can do so much more. It can inform, delight, provoke, support and simplify someone’s life.” The answer must come from your own heart. This takes an innate understanding of where your particular passions and design skills can make a difference to someone else. It takes soulsearching.
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... “But I also think design can do so much more. It can inform, delight, provoke, support and simplify someone’s life.”
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What prompted Stefan to pose this question to our profession in the first place? When he arrived at the AIGA Design Conference in New Orleans ten years ago, he was handed a bag of promotional goodies, all well designed, of course. (Yes, this is the conference for which Stefan designed the promotional poster featuring bloody, headless chickens.) But what did these designers accomplish? “So much of what designers do is technically very good,” he says, “but it leaves people cold and has little meaning in their lives. The question came out of a frustration of drowning in professionally designed things that nobody gives a **** about, neither the maker nor the receiver. The main reason for all this stuff is that most designers don’t believe in anything. When your conscience is so flexible, how can you do strong design?” This is quite a provocative and challenging
statement, but then, that is Stefan’s style. While I don’t agree that designers don’t believe in anything, I do believe this is Stefan’s way of throwing down the gauntlet to designers to get back in touch with their beliefs and act on them. In our day-to-day work, it’s all too easy to set aside our personal beliefs and convictions for the sake of getting an assignment out the door and getting paid for it. I agree that we can create more opportunities to incorporate the ideas we feel most strongly about into our work, thus making our visual communications more meaningful and personally rewarding—not only for ourselves, but also for others. Furthermore, what Stefan is advocating is not the first time these types of thoughts have been voiced in our profession. They have been floating around for decades, heating up again with the release of the First Things
First manifesto and the international debates it sparked. I feel that Stefan, however, has been able to put it to us in a more thoughtful way (as opposed to the manifesto authors’ approach that put many designers on the defensive). Considering most designers are artists at heart, the opportunity to explore a poetically phrased question is one they are open to, especially as Stefan does so with them. He is smart to scrutinize his own work with this question: Have any of his designs touched anyone’s heart? (Because he has done this, people perceive him as sincere and not hypocritical.) He confirms the project that came closest to touching someone’s heart was not a professional one, but personal: “Of all the hundreds of pieces I designed in the last twenty years, there is only one project where I can say for sure that I touched somebody’s heart with design.
“Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far”, book cover.
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My friend Reini came to visit New York City. He was afraid that none of the sophisticated women would talk to him. So before his arrival, I ran a poster campaign on the Lower East Side that read ‘Girls, Be Nice to Reini.’ At a small party we gave for him, this campaign turned out to be the conversation piece that started him talking to a beautiful woman. They actually wound up together. Not only am I fairly positive that I touched their hearts, but it is also one of the very few pieces of successful advertising I have ever been associated with.” Turning the questions over to students To help get designers thinking in this direction, Stefan has posed the question “Can design touch someone’s heart?” to design students in America and Europe. This is not the first time Stefan has taught; his course used to be a CD design class titled “Design for Music.”
This is the type of design that brought Stefan his fame. He changed the course because designing CD graphics to sell music for rock bands didn’t seem relevant to what is needed in today’s world. “While I still enjoy designing CD covers and visualizing music for different bands, it just isn’t a practical problem anymore because there is so little need for it. We needed a more interesting, relevant question.” The timing for this new question could not be better; the days of giving students design briefs and faux content, and asking them to produce a layout, are quickly fading. A number of design schools are now encouraging students to first identify their passions, then look outside the school to identify unmet problems—from small-scale to large, from day-to-day to longterm—and create solutions that combine their passions with their design skills.
By getting to know their audience intimately, design students are being encouraged to observe problems, address them with design and present a creative solution to companies that can help make it a reality. Both the designer and the company should be able to profit from it and better the world at the same time. Why change the dynamics? It is a way for designers to work proactively, to contribute more of their creative thinking, and to get more satisfaction out of how they make their living. When students (and professionals) identify something they care about, they are more passionate about it. When one’s personal interest, strength and passion come into play, the design solution is stronger because the designer has more conviction. Both the conviction and the design come from the heart. A good example of this is design student
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3 photos: 7200 Bananas displayed at the “Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far”, interactive exhibition.
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Deborah Adler at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. After watching her grandmother struggle silently with her prescription bottles day after day, Deborah sketched up a better design for a prescription bottle that made more sense and met her grandmother’s needs. With work and perseverance, she sold her idea to Target, who paired her up with an industrial designer to make it happen. Some of the most successful products in the market have been born this way, such as the OXO Good Grips potato peeler (designed by Sam Farber for his arthritic wife). OXO now sells over 100 different products in the Good Grips line that are more meaningful and useful not just to arthritis sufferers, but to everyone. Know your audience The course is broken down into three assignments: 1. Touch the heart of an individual, 2.Touch the heart of
a community, 3. Touch the heart of humanity. With an audience, the wider you reach, the harder it is to answer the question. That’s why Stefan starts small and expands, illustrating how the language of communication changes and becomes less personal and therefore less genuine. “I talk to my girlfriend Anni differently than I talk to Rolling Stones fans,” he says. “The wider the audience, the more difficult it is to design for them. If your audience is everybody—from 6-yearolds to 60-year-olds, from iron workers to university professors—it becomes very difficult.” To keep communications genuine, knowing your audience inside out and homing in on a specific group with whom you empathize is key. “Know your audience” may sound like Marketing 101, but most students (and even some professionals) are unaware of this concept or have lost sight of it. Furthermore, students can easily get
too caught up in how their portfolios look. Stefan reminds us of one of his hard-earned life lessons in his recent typographic billboard, “Trying to look good limits my life.” To prevent students from focusing on appearances, they are not allowed to stop with the concept and a comp. They must find a way to produce and distribute their solution in the real world. Students are required to build a feedback mechanism into the project so they are able to see if people were touched by their designs. A project is successful when the audience is touched, and that determines a student’s grade .Stefan once told me that the best ideas sketched in his notebook over the years are worth nothing in comparison with the ideas he has executed and that still exist today.
Headless Chicken, AIGA biennial conference, 1997
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What’s your intention? Composing the right content is as important as choosing the right audience. Stefan quotes Katherine McCoy that design can never rise above its content. He adds, “If I have nothing to say, the best design won’t help me.” In choosing their audience and creating content to reach them, students’ designs have varied from country to country. In Berlin, student projects have been more technologically advanced and broached controversial topics. In the United States, however, many students at SVA and the Cooper Union have chosen a project that addresses social issues such as homelessness. Stefan confirms that most graduate students in New York City chose to do something “uplifting.” Perhaps this is because they rarely get the opportunity to work with this type of content in their professional lives, where the focus is corporate: the client and their bottom line. “From my
point of view, it’s open,” says Stefan. “You could absolutely do something aggressive or shocking or off-putting, which of course, still touches somebody. I don’t encourage it, but I don’t discourage it either. This isn’t a do-good class. I want my students to pick their own projects, their own audience and be in control of their own content. I want them to become aware of what they are putting out in the world and how it affects people. I want them to think through their intention.” In our interviews, I saw that some students struggled to get the right balance of design and intention. In some projects, the design speaks louder than the intention and the meaning falls flat. In others, the intention speaks louder than the design, to the point where design is not even needed. But then, I asked Stefan, does it answer the question? Without the intention, Stefan emphasizes that there is no worthwhile
form to design. For students, the intention is just a place to start thinking in a different direction in their work. He says, “I always ask, ‘Does it really matter which typeface this important message is set in?’ And I think the answer differs from project to project. Good form and the appropriate use of style can enhance any message, just as the wrong form can unbelievably hurt your message, as we have seen with the ballots in Florida, where bad form basically ruined a proper document.” Is this the future of design? Stefan’s question made me stop and think about what has touched my own heart. In the days following 9/11 in New York City, it was literally Milton Glaser’s scorched heart in the “I [heart] New York More Than Ever” logo.
“If I have nothing to say, the best design won’t help me.”
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Milton Glaser’s “I [hear t] New York More Than Ever” logo.
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“What touches my heart may not touch yours. Think about what has touched your own heart and why.”
Lou reed ‘set the twilight reeling’ poster, 1996.
This mark had good timing and strategic placement. The design demonstrated a sincere kind of empathy that made me feel that I was not alone, that I was in sync with the creator; his scorched heart touched mine. But it’s all subjective. What touches my heart may not touch yours. Think about what has touched your own heart and why. What will it take to capture those emotions in our day-to-day work? How can we guide clients to approach visual communications with the same kind of sincerity and regard for their audience? In ten years’ time, Stefan believes that design from the heart is the only kind of design that is going to be created by professional designers. Non-designers in corporations are going to feel comfortable enough with iMacs and software to lay out their own annual reports and Web sites, and put together their own advertising campaigns independent of design and advertising
agencies. He feels we are already starting to see this happen, and he advocates the pursuit of our own projects in which we can create the content. But I believe that we can still explore the dynamic in our client relationships that holds us back from touching others. While it’s true that many companies today have the technology to make anything they desire, they are still missing innovative and creative thinking; they are not in touch with the empathy and insight to understand what people really need and want these days. Focus testing provides limited feedback on what we already know, and not what can be. Designers can fill this gap. There are some clients out there that wish to make a difference in the world too. We can find the right clients. We can explore our own passions and, as a result, make a difference to someone else.Even though it has taken a superhero of design to make the question heard, it doesn’t take one to
answer it. Whether it’s a personal or a client project, it’s understandably easy to feel that we don’t have the same resources as famous designers like Stefan to pursue this kind of work. But we each have unique powers to answer the question in our own way, with our own voice. Stefan’s voice is a provocative one, a nudge-on-the-shoulder. What is yours? It doesn’t have to take a lot of time and money either. The simplest, best thought-out projects are sometimes the most powerful and far-reaching. Your answer just has to be true and sincere; it has to come from your own heart. If you have resourcefulness, guts and passion, your message will get through. Who knows? Maybe you will touch somebody’s heart with your design.
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