Wednesday, May 4, 2011 Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street New York City
www.dcrit.sva.edu
Introduction Welcome to “Present Tense: The 2011 D-Crit Conference,” the second annual conference from the SVA MFA in Design Criticism. “Present Tense” is a celebration of the Class of 2011; an exercise in conference organization, since the students are charged with helping to choreograph the conference; and a forum for those of us interested in new perspectives on the designed environment. The conference promises provocation, insight, and inspiration at the farthest outposts of design, architecture, and visual culture. Rob Walker launches the afternoon by asserting the power of speculation, fiction, and imagination in critical practice. The grand finale panel brings Paola Antonelli, Bjarke Ingels, Olympia Kazi, John Seabrook, and Linda Tischler to the stage to debate the new locations, priorities, and resonances of design criticism in its multiple formats and textures. Between these bookends we’ll be treated to some tall tales about typewriters and some tough scrutiny of the shortcomings of social design; we’ll learn about emerging fields of practice such as sound design, hardware hacking, and interactive music videos and relearn how to read familiar archetypes like Afros, Disney’s Cinderella, Detroit, playgrounds, and celebrity designers. Though the title of this year’s conference alludes to design’s obsession with the new and the now, at D-Crit we take a longer and broader view of things. This afternoon we’ll chart the extended lifecycle of a designed object—be that a product, a person, a city, or an image—from its conception as a fiction, through its hacked modifications, to its accruement of patina and its ultimate decay, all considered within the systems that frame, brand, and preserve it. Thanks for being present. —Alice Twemlow, Chair, SVA MFA Design Criticism
Acknowledgments Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the success of the D-Crit program during its first three years, and to those who have helped to stage this conference. Emily Weiner, Assistant to the Chair Mary Foti, Senior Systems Administrator Steven Heller, D-Crit Program Co-founder David Rhodes, SVA President Anthony Rhodes, Executive Vice-President Andrea Codrington-Lippke, D-Crit Thesis Advisor Peter Hall, External Reader Stephen Nickson, Presentation Skills Coach Thesis Advisors: Akiko Busch John Cary Donna Daniels Russell Flinchum Julie Lasky Alan Rapp Tacey Rosolowski Guest Critics: Emilie Baltz Mark Lamster Sina Najafi Erick Sierra Design: Emmet Byrne, Matthew Rezac, Walker Art Center Printing: Modern Press
D-Crit Faculty: Kurt Andersen Paola Antonelli Akiko Busch Ralph Caplan Justin Davidson Russell Flinchum Steven Heller Karrie Jacobs Alexandra Lange Julie Lasky Adam Harrison Levy Andrea Codrington-Lippke Elaine Louie Leital Molad Dan Nadel Phil Patton Shax Riegler Daniella Ohad Smith Elizabeth Spiers Karen Stein First Year D-Crit Students: Barbara Eldredge Tara Gupta Anna Kealey Derrick Mead Katya Mezhibovskaya Erin Routson Amna Siddiqui Julia van den Hout Ann Weiser Cheryl Yau Visual Arts Theatre: Vidya Alexander, House Manager C. J. Gardella, Manager Michael Morrissey, Technical Director Jessica St. John, Director Coffee and snacks provided by
John Wyszniewski, SVA Communications Virginia Fioribello, Portrait Photography John Messinger, Event Photography Kevin Daniels, Videography Vincent Biurch, Technical Assistant Tweet Cloud Development: Tina Ye (@tinabeans), SVA MFA IxD
Reception hosted by
Media Partner
Schedule 1:00 Registration and Coffee
3:15
1:30 Opening Remarks by
The Detroiter: Resident Design Initiatives
5:15
3:30
Going Public: Creation and Dissemination of the Designer’s Identity
Alice Twemlow 1:45 Keynote:
Rob Walker Imaginary Objects and Fictional Critiques 2:20 Opening Remarks by
Adam Harrison Levy 2:30
Amelie Znidaric Listen to Your Chair: Design and the Art of Storytelling 2:45
Zachary Sachs Permanence as a Criterion 3:00 Coffee Break
Sarah F. Cox
Stephanie Jönsson Designing Sound: Aural Agency in the Twenty-First Century 3:45
Kimberlie Birks Recreate: New Grounds for New York’s Playgrounds 4:00 Coffee Break 4:15
Saundra Marcel Living Licensed: Consuming Characters in Girls’ Popular Culture 4:30
Michele Y. Washington Untangling the Naps: The Afro Talks Back 4:45
Aileen Kwun Mirror Image Maker: Looking at Music Videos of the Internet Age
5:00 Coffee Break
Molly Heintz
5:30
Vera Sacchetti Design Crusades: Considering the Shortcomings of Social Design 5:45
Avinash Rajagopal Tinkering With Design: The Convergence of Design and Hacking 6:30
Panel Discussion Speculatively Speaking: The Future of Design Criticism, featuring Paola Antonelli, Bjarke Ingels, Olympia Kazi, John Seabrook, Linda Tischler, and Rob Walker 7:30 Closing Remarks 8:00 Reception at GD Cucine, 227 West 17th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues
2:20 – 8:00
Adam Harrison Levy Conference Moderator
Adam Harrison Levy is a writer and freelance documentary film producer and director. He has worked on a wide range of historical and arts films, primarily for the BBC. He was the US producer for Selling the Sixties, a cultural history of the world of advertising in New York in the early 1960s, as well as for the BBC films Close Up, about the artist Chuck Close, and David Ogilvy: Original Mad Man. For the BBC and Channel 4 he has produced and directed countless interviews with a wide range of actors, writers, musicians and filmmakers.
GUEST SPEAKERS
Rob Walker
1:45
Keynote Speaker
Rob Walker is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, and the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House, 2008) and Letters From New Orleans (Garrett County Press, 2005). He is the co-founder, with Joshua Glenn, of Significant Objects; co-founder, with Ellen Susan and G.K. Darby, of The Hypothetical Development Organization; and founding collaborator of the Unconsumption project. Walker is often called on as an expert commentator on the subject of material culture and branding, notably in the documentary Objectified. He lives in Savannah, GA.
Imaginary Objects and Fictional Critiques Objects tell stories, and we all tell stories about our objects. But not all stories are equal, and not all stories are true. What role, then, might imagination, speculation, and outright fiction play in understanding, critiquing, and even influencing, our very real material culture? The answer is that these strategies are not merely useful, but vital. That is a strange assertion for a professional journalist to make, but perhaps only a journalist focused on design and marketing can truly appreciate how full of fiction the marketplace already is. The trick is in learning to distinguish among imaginary claims and their motivations. And perhaps, even appropriating the power of the speculative: Using fiction to reveal, using the hypothetical to provoke, using imagination to engage.
GUEST SPEAKERS
6:30
Speculatively Speaking:
The Future of Design Criticism A panel discussion about the priorities, possibilities, and impact of design criticism, featuring MoMA’s senior curator of Design and Architecture Paola Antonelli; BIG’s founder architect Bjarke Ingels, Van Alen Institute’s executive director Olympia Kazi, The New Yorker’s John Seabrook, Fast Company’s senior editor Linda Tischler, and The New York Times Magazine contributor Rob Walker, moderated by documentary film producer Adam Harrison Levy.
GUEST SPEAKERS
6:30
Paola Antonelli is senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Since 1994, Antonelli has curated the following landmark exhibitions: “Design and the Elastic Mind;” “Achille Castiglioni: Design!;” “Humble Masterpieces;” “Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design; “SAFE: Design Takes on Risk;” “Thresholds: Contemporary Design from the Netherlands;” “Projects 66: Campana/Ingo Maurer;” and “Workspheres.” For these accomplishments she received the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Design Mind Award. Prior to joining the staff at MoMA, Antonelli was the editor of Abitare and a contributing editor to Domus. She writes for publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Harvard Design, Metropolis, and Paper. Bjarke Ingels is a Danish architect and creator of BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, with a newly opened New York office. Ingels’ portfolio includes the Danish Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, 8 House in Copenhagen, the new Danish National Maritime museum in Elsinore, hotel projects in Norway, and a museum overlooking Mexico City. An outspoken architect, who addresses issues of sustainability and social responsibility, Ingels has lectured at TED and appeared on CNN, and his manifesto “Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution” is available as a book, a 130-metre-long comic strip exhibit, and an iPad application. Olympia Kazi, a critic and curator of architecture, is the executive director of the Van Alen Institute in New York. Previously, Kazi has served as junior curator at the Milan Triennale, fellow of architecture and urban studies at the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and director of the Institute for Urban Design, New York. “Urban Design Week,” her last project at the Institute for Urban Design, was a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2009 Cultural Innovation Fund. Kazi writes regularly on contemporary architecture and urbanism in publications such as Wound, The Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Design, and the Skira Yearbook. John Seabrook is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His articles have addressed a range of issues, including technology, genealogy, design, and natural history. He is the author of Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing the Marketing of Culture (Knopf, 2000), and Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention (St. Martin’s, 2008). His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, and The Village Voice. He has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Princeton University and lives in New York City. Linda Tischler is a senior editor at Fast Company, where she writes about the intersection of business and design. She is responsible for the magazine’s “Masters of Design” issue, which celebrates the people in the forefront of design thinking. She also oversees design coverage and blogs on FastCompany.com, where she launched the site’s team of expert design bloggers and currently writes the “Big Bang Design” column. In 2006, Tischler won the Society of Professional Journalists’ top award for feature writing. She has also held editing and writing jobs at Boston Magazine, Boston Herald and Microsoft’s sidewalk.com.
GUEST SPEAKERS
2:30
Amelie Znidaric Listen to Your Chair: Design and the Art of Storytelling
Amelie Znidaric is a design writer at the Austrian daily Die Presse and the German design platform Stylepark. Before moving to New York and enrolling at D-Crit, she worked as a design and creative industries editor at Die Presse and as the deputy editor-in-chief of its weekly supplement Schaufenster for five years. Znidaric has also worked for other print media in her hometown Vienna, for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, the Austrian office of the humanitarian organization Care, and several public relations agencies. She has a master’s degree in business administration and a strong dislike for financial charts. amelie.znidaric@gmail.com
STUDENTS
Whether in a traditional Berber market or in the world of design—storytelling follows the same basic rules. It is an interactive process following an impermanent script that is constantly rewritten. As the narrative evolves, the storyteller and the listeners change roles, adding different voices and layers to the story, weaving in feedback, and refocusing. Whether the story is actually true, whether it really happened, doesn’t matter. Storytelling follows the laws of fiction—it is sincere only about being imaginary. What matters instead of truth is the coherence of a story—how persuasively it is told. The tools that help critics, curators, and amateurs assess whether a story is coherent or not are simple. They are the same basic questions that all tales rest upon. Do we find a stunning plot, for example? A compelling character to identify with? Convincing dialogues? What is the tone of the story and does it suit the general theme? Does the setting fit the rest of the narrative and from what point of view do we actually hear the story? The answers to these and other similar questions will tell us everything about the quality of a narrative—and of the object itself. An incoherent narrative will ultimately reflect an incoherent design. Ettore Sottsass’s Valentine typewriter, for instance, is a design classic, but was a commercial failure at the time it was launched. Listen to the typewriter and you will know why.
2:45
Zachary Sachs Permanence as a Criterion
Zachary Sachs is the coordinator of the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives at the School of Visual Arts. Here he maintains the blog Container List, develops archival software, and designs finding aids. Sachs is also organizing the Index imprint to explore alternative avenues in independent publishing. Among its productions are the magazine Ply which collects personal and historical perspectives on popular music; Fellow Traveler, a series of political pamphlets focused on travel and border issues; and a line of artist’s books on shelter, including his lithograph-poems Twenty-Six Houses I Have Lived In, 1984–2010. zsachs@visualartsfoundation.org plyzine.com containerlist.glaserarchives.org
STUDENTS
The decay, patina, and ultimate impermanence of designed objects is a recurring source of internal conflict in the culture of designed objects. Beginning with the legacy of preservation and curation in material artifacts and its effect on the design object in museum collections, the historical contingencies that imbued “patina” aesthetic and social significance resulted in a conflicted opposition between design for permanence and the perception of a natural order, between class perceptions and habits of consumption. This cultural atmosphere was only further complicated by the midcentury production of limited-use products in apparently indestructible plastic. The development of attitudes in the United States and Europe relative to this aspect of materiality (as revealed through museum bulletins, literature, curatorial statements, and design criticism) outlines the nested body of contradictory attitudes about decay and attendant evocations in contemporary culture. By looking closer at the West’s conflicted valuation of the permanence in objects, it may be possible to find a new perspective for designers and architects to take relative to their work. A perspective in which the mutability of all things is a central consideration of the design process, rather than an afterthought. Such a perspective may help to answer the ever-more-pressing question: how can the lifespan of the object be conceived, not merely as the distance between the a start and an end of its life, but as a tangible, evolving process—a process that is in fact an intrinsic feature of the object’s form?
3:15
Sarah F. Cox The Detroiter: Resident Design Initiatives
Sarah F. Cox is a freelance writer who has spent the last six years in New York covering everything from dog shows to the design plans at the World Trade Center. In between she has also worked in PR for Perkins Eastman Architects, Katz Architecture, and Local Projects, among others. After spending six weeks of the last year in Detroit for thesis research, Cox decided to relocate to the city this spring. She plans to continue freelance writing, focusing on Detroit’s art scene, community development, and urban planning issues. sarah.f.cox@gmail.com @xoxocox
STUDENTS
Reporting on urban design presents the challenge of encapsulating myriad proposals at various scales, while accounting for the perspectives of residents, recent transplants, commercial interests, and theorists. I spent six weeks in Detroit, MI, attempting to understand if top-down initiatives from the Mayor’s office or bottomup initiatives from grassroots organizers were making a bigger impact in terms of urban health. What I found was that a lot depends on how you frame the concept of urbanism to begin with, and that expectations of population growth and construction can doom any city in a downturn. Detroit found itself in the headlines for dismal census figures; the population loss in the last decade was counted as a sign of decay. My intention is to reframe the conversation by focusing on the work of local artists, activists, and neighborhood initiatives. Reporters must be more attuned to the problems that Detroit faces without painting a picture of despair. In the next year, the City of Detroit will identify neighborhoods to develop (for example, with incentive programs for homeowners), and also identify those neighborhoods that require too many city resources for too few residents. Detroit is often referenced as a test lab for urban ideas and the results are likely to be translated into a new form of post-recession urban theory. The implications are serious, as the discourse of urban design has been greatly limited by measuring success only in terms of growth; Detroit could emerge as a case study in other areas that are key to urban vitality.
3:30
Stephanie Jönsson Designing Sound: Aural Agency in the Twenty-First Century
Stephanie Jönsson graduated with honors from Pratt Institute’s Theory, History, and Criticism of Art, Design and Architecture program in 2008. Upon graduating, she interned with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Design and Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 she contributed the essay “Ricky’s Perennial Pop-Up” to the “Culture” issue of the New Museum’s New City Reader, part of “The Last Newspaper” exhibit. Currently, she holds an internship with Susan Grant Lewin Associates, an architecture, art and design public relations firm. She also contributes restaurant listings to The New York Magazine website. stephaniepilarjonsson@gmail.com @_stephaniepilar
STUDENTS
In his book Silence, experimental composer John Cage postulates that absolute silence is a flawed conceit, for even in a soundproof, anechoic chamber, we can still hear the rush of blood cells coursing through the capillaries in our ears. There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. Just as there is always something to see, there is always something to hear. We all live bathed in non-stop sound. Our ability to constantly systematize aural stimuli is innate and incredibly powerful but it is often either taken for granted or disregarded completely, especially in industrial design. Within modern societies, sound’s power—albeit strongly “felt”—is difficult to specify empirically, as its status has shifted from active ingredient or animating agent to inanimate product. The failure to recognize the power of sound is due to an inappropriate model of conceptualization—sound is thought of as an independent stimulus, completely divorced from its circumstances of production, distribution, and consumption. It is impossible to discuss the agency of aural stimuli when abstracted from their context of use. Art forms such as theater, film, and video games consider the emotional implications of select composed sounds carefully before implementing them into their respective formats. Why then, should the sounds that orchestrate our quotidian lives be considered any less? At a time when networked, ordered forms are increasingly prominent, and as designers are increasingly concerned with producing agents as well as products, sound should be relocated at the heart of this paradigm.
3:45
Kimberlie Birks Recreate: New Grounds for New York’s Playgrounds
Kim Birks is a Silas H. Rhodes scholar who comes to design by way of art history. Since graduating from Brown University, Birks has enjoyed a stint in the curatorial department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Montreal design gallery Les Commissaires. Her writing has appeared in the New City Reader; Canadian Art; and enRoute, Canada’s premier travel and lifestyle publication. Positing that New York is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in playground design, Birks has thoroughly enjoyed putting her critical tools to use in the local sandbox. kimberlie.birks@gmail.com
STUDENTS
Martha Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, contends that just as museums were the commissions of choice for architects at the end of the twentieth century, the coveted assignment of the future could well be the urban playground. While New York gave the country its first permanent playground in 1903, over the last century the city went from playground pioneer to philistine. Now, with architects like Michael Van Valkenburgh, David Rockwell and Frank Gehry turning their attention to Manhattan’s swing set, New York may be poised to prove Thorne right. The timing couldn’t be better. American culture in the early 21st century has constricted children’s play as never before, with a combination of technology, educational shifts, increased competition and parental fears. There is simply no time for the chaotic, unstructured fun of the playground anymore. And yet increasingly scientists are revealing that it is precisely this type of child’s play that provides the social and intellectual abilities needed to succeed in life. As Psychology Today’s editor-at-large, Hara Estroff Marano, quips: “Play is the future with sneakers on.” While young New Yorkers’ footwear may be of the moment, the playgrounds they tread are almost entirely retro. Play is inextricably linked with creativity and innovation—both skills that Newsweek recently revealed to be declining within American youth for the first time in fifty years. It is time we rethink how we are preparing our children to meet the challenges of tomorrow. It is time for New York to put its sneakers on.
4:15
Saundra Marcel Living Licensed: Consuming Characters in Girls’ Popular Culture
Saundra Marcel is passionate about design as a critic, a creator, and a teacher. Her work is published in Voice: AIGA Journal of Design and Design Bureau. Marcel co-edited At Water’s Edge, the first in a series of D-Crit chapbooks. She has taught at the University of Dayton in Ohio, and from 2003 through 2008 she served as director of the AIGA Cincinnati Mentoring Program. Marcel’s goal is to be a persuasive voice that is interesting and accessible for any kind of creative individual, and the topics she writes about are at the intersection of design, popular culture, and consumer culture. me@saundramarcel.com www.saundramarcel.com
STUDENTS
With the many ways that adults live and engage with design, we sometimes forget that children are also subject to its influence. For children, design is in the clothing they wear, the decorations in their rooms, the books they read, the television they watch, and the toys they play with. These rather unremarkable toys and things in a child’s life become important teachers and tools, and the images of children’s popular culture—not at all fleeting or benign—become lasting legacies. The lessons learned young are not easily forgotten. What are the messages imparted to a little girl who plays “pretty princess?” They are stereotypical and singular. Achievement of the status of “wife” seems the aim, and while someday a prince will come, it will be for the fairest, richest, and most accessorized first. The antiquated ideals that are represented in many girls’ idol characters simply come from an out-of-date model of character creation—recycle, redesign, and re-release the hits that have the longest reign with the most commercial success. Therefore, characters like the quintessential Cinderella—who has changed little since the rigid 1950s—only grow more culturally prevalent. Today, children influence over $600 billion a year in spending, and it is overwhelmingly on licensed products with corporate creators. The stories imparted to children are controlled and mass-manufactured. As a child’s life becomes increasingly defined by popular licensed characters, it becomes increasingly important for the critic to examine the implications of these plastic personalities, and broker change.
4:30
Michele Y. Washington Untangling the Naps: The Afro Talks Back
Michele Y. Washington is a writer, graphic designer and educator. After running a multi-disciplinary studio Washington Design, and having worked as an art director for magazines and newspapers, she switched gears to pursue her interest in writing, research, and curation. Her essays have appeared in the America I Am Passin it Down cookbook, and she also writes on design issues for The International Review of African American Art and BlackDesignNews.com. Washington is currently working as an archivist and researcher on a three-volume book documenting the photography of Gordon Parks with the Meserve-Kundhardt Foundation. She is also the co-chair and moderator for the GLIDE’12 symposium. michele@washingtondesign.com http://culturalboundaries.com/wordpress
STUDENTS
While struggles over the “politics of style” still loom large, the image of the Afro hairstyle is still used to define blackness, racial pride, and the black design aesthetic. This presentation examines the cultural significance of the Afro and illustrates the ways in which it has been used as a significant graphic element in the black vernacular narrative. The Afro maintains as much power today as it did during the height of the 1960s Black Power Movement. Through constant reinvention in each era it has been able to keep the discourse of black hair politics alive. Today, as black Americans have gained success, television and other forms of technology and social networking have contributed to the branding of the Afro. Blogs such as afrolicious.com, nappturality.com, and kissmyblackads serve as manifestations of Afro pride, in much the same way that natural hair-care products such as Afro Sheen, and Ultra Sheen supported the movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The classic halo-shaped Afro lost popularity in the 1980s, when relaxed hair seemed more acceptable to black American women seeking to gain acceptance in corporate America. It made a strong comeback in the 1990s as a shorter, more refined style. Today, the natural/’fro/afro has become reconstructed, a free-flowing, wild mane of hair sometimes worn in twist or knots, and with an attitude that expresses freedom and power and, at times, anger and frustration.
4:45
Aileen Kwun Mirror Image Maker: Looking at Music Videos of the Internet Age
Following a two-year stint as publicist for Princeton Architectural Press, Aileen Kwun arrived at D-Crit to pursue her love of design, cultural studies and the written word. She received the 2010 Winterhouse Award for Design Writing & Criticism in the Education category. Kwun has interned at the Museum of the City of New York and is a freelance design critic and researcher at Wert & Company. Her writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, Metropolis Magazine’s POV blog, and the New Museum’s New City Reader and she has co-edited the second installment of the D-Crit chapbook series, Dress, a collection of essays dissecting the sartorial makeup of various public figures. hello@aileenkwun.com www.aileenkwun.com @aileenkwun
STUDENTS
From record sleeves to logos, clothing and graphics, the commercial packaging of music has long translated sound into an array of crafted visual experiences to hook consumers. In today’s increasingly screen-driven digital age, as cover art gets reduced to thumbnails and jpegs, records to mp3s—the music video is one medium that continues to see growth. “Mirror Image Maker: Looking at Music Videos of the Internet Age” examines the recent emergence of interactive music videos designed with Internet-specific tools and technologies that include social media platforms, real-time data, customized APIs, and crowdsourced imagery. The videos of two directors, Chris Milk and Masashi Kawamura, best exemplify the audiovisual potential of the vast Web-based medium. Lying at the intersections of filmmaking, motion graphics, and computer programming, Milk and Kawamura’s works both question and carve out new directions for music video production. Through selfreflexive framing devices that turn the gaze onto the viewers and have them participate as collaborators in creating their own product of viewership within a set of controlled parameters, music videos such as “The Wilderness Downtown” and “Mirror” resist the boundaries of genre and redefine the role of the designer. Bringing the video out of the machine that was fine-tuned during the last decades of the 20th century, designers like Milk and Kawamura are changing the way we look at music—and each other.
5:15
Molly Heintz Going Public: Creation and Dissemination of the Designer’s Identity
Molly Heintz is managing editor of The Architect’s Newspaper. She has worked in communications and publishing, leading communications departments at the architecture firms Gensler and Rockwell Group, and co-editing the book Spectacle by David Rockwell and Bruce Mau (Phaidon, 2006). In 2010 she was a fellow at the Philip Johnson Glass House, where she helped launch the Glass House Conversations site. Recipient of a Silas H. Rhodes scholarship from D-Crit, she received degrees in classics and art history from Duke University and holds a master’s in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University. Today Heintz enjoys finding opportunities to apply an archaeological approach to popular culture. heintz.mm@gmail.com www.mollyheintz.org
STUDENTS
From immigrant illustrator to spokesperson for Rolex, advertising alone reveals Raymond Loewy’s head-spinning trajectory to fame in the mid-20th century. His rags-to-riches tale appealed to clients, the media, and consumers themselves. Loewy’s status in fact had less to do with the products he designed and more to do with the appealing aura that he created around them—and around himself—in a period when mass consumption and mass communication became co-dependent. Today these same kind of designer “myths”—stories and images that are repeated and exponentially amplified, particularly through social media—generate a form of celebrity that often clouds a critique of the designer’s work. In addition, designers who have achieved recognition beyond their profession have a disproportionate platform, not only becoming de facto representatives of the industry but also gaining unparalleled access to power. Publicists, clients, and the media may all play a role in the creation and dissemination of a designer’s public identity. For example, the in-house publicist for Raymond Loewy, Betty Reese, helped him secure features in Life magazine, Reader’s Digest, and the cover of Time all in the course of six months in 1949. Umbra, a Canadian household accessories company, allowed designer Karim Rashid to add his signature and image to what became a best-selling product, launching the designer’s own trademark. And it’s not just the camera that loves designer Yves Behar—the media does too, affording the designer and his work massive exposure. These players, all foreign-born males working in America, are considered, along with the issue of gender in self-promotion.
5:30
Vera Sacchetti Design Crusades: Considering the Shortcomings of Social Design
Vera Sacchetti hails from Lisbon, Portugal, where she studied communication design, contemporary culture, and post-colonialism. She worked as an exhibition and wayfinding designer prior to joining D-Crit as a Fulbright scholar. Sacchetti has written for Change Observer, Metropolis POV, The New City Reader, Arte Capital, and Proximo Futuro/Next Future, and co-edited At Water’s Edge, the first D-Crit chapbook. Following graduation, she wants to continue research in the field of social design, and contribute to the betterment of the discourse around it. As a Portuguese stranded in New York, Sacchetti is, like the swallows back home, very much in favor of impermanence. vera@verasacchetti.net http://verasacchetti.net @verasacchetti
STUDENTS
In the last few years, part of the design field has geared efforts towards the social sector, aiming to improve the lives of people in extreme need—the underprivileged, the needy, the poor—by producing meaningful, lasting change through systems and objects. Like humanitarian aid, social design hinges, and effectively depends, on the notion of the “other” as its benefactor, implying that the West can save the rest of the world. Inherently flawed, this idea of Western superiority fails to consider the “other’s” perspective, consistently stereotyping a user belonging to a different socio-economic context, with different values and culture. Failing to understand his user, the social designer will incorrectly apply his skills, rendering all outcomes problematic. This talk will present current social design projects abroad, as well as their reflection in the American design media, which informs students and professionals back home. While there are many kindhearted, intelligent designers passionately devoted to helping others and “changing the world,” this talk will demonstrate that good intentions are not enough, neither abroad nor back home, and design alone cannot change the world. Social design is the most interesting direction the design field has taken in the last generation, but it has yet to become a better practice. To do so, and thus empower others, we must disempower ourselves. It is time to deconstruct the figure of the designer-as-savior, to bring nuance and depth to the simplistic debate around social design, and to allow for this field to live up to its true potential.
5:45
Avinash Rajagopal Tinkering With Design: The Convergence of Design and Hacking
Avinash Rajagopal graduated in industrial design from the National Institute of Design (NID), India, and then designed sanitaryware, solar lanterns, and jewelry packaging before realizing that his true calling was in research and criticism. He is a 2009 Henry Wolf scholar and a 2010 Silas H. Rhodes scholar. Rajagopal interned at Metropolis magazine, and was a research assistant on Pantone: The Twentieth Century in Color (Chronicle Books, 2011). He writes regularly for the Metropolis POV blog, and his writing has appeared in Change Observer and Metropolis. He also co-founded and edits Little Design Book, a design criticism blog with an Indian voice. avi.rajagopal@gmail.com http://avinashrajagopal.com @avirajagopal
STUDENTS
What if you could press a button, and have a machine build you any product you wanted? What if the knowledge that has long been the domain of engineers and industrial designers were freely available? What if anyone had the means and the know-how to modify their physical environment, to tweak and subvert the objects produced for them by designers and manufacturers? A new generation of hardware hackers, more concerned with manipulating physical materials than cracking codes, is interested in precisely these questions. With tools like the Makerbot, a low-cost, desktop 3D printer, they are seeking to change the very basis of industrial design—the systems of mass-production and consumption. And they are building vibrant communities, both online and offline, where information is shared freely, and dreams of a second industrial revolution are being hatched. The ideas of open source and crowdsourcing seem all set to transform not just the digital realm, but also the physical world we live in. Designers have not remained indifferent to this phenomenon. While many persist in casting these new developments into the old molds of crafts and DIY, there are also several cases of creative cross-pollination. Some, such as the Fab Lab House, have brought depth and relevance to the hacker’s vision of the future, with ideas of usability and sustainability. As the two 21st century modes of creation—the controlled shaping by designers and the subversive manipulation by hackers—inevitably converge, the vision of an open ecotopia, straight out of Buckminster Fuller’s theories and Bruce Sterling’s fiction, might well be our new reality.
1:00 – 7:30
Notes
The SVA MFA in Design Criticism trains students to research, analyze and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications. The program seeks to cultivate design criticism as a discipline and contribute to public discourse with new writing and thinking that is imaginative and historically informed. The course of study couples a theoretical framework with significant opportunities for practical experience. In addition to written assignments, students produce tangible documents of their critical practice, such as radio podcasts, books, blogs, documentaries, course syllabi, conferences and exhibitions. For more information, please visit www.dcrit.sva.edu.
Present Tense: The 2011 D-Crit Conference Media Partner: Core77 Design Awards Recognizing excellence in all areas of design enterprise, the Core77 Design Awards celebrates the richness of the design profession and its practitioners. Dedicated jury teams around the world will judge 15 categories of design endeavor with the top professional and student entries winning the inaugural trophy. By giving both entrants and jurors the opportunity to tell their story with video testimonials and live results, the Awards program embraces Core77’s ongoing mission to uncover the intent and process behind great design and creative practice. All Winners, Runners Up, and Notable entries will be published in the Core77 Design Awards Gallery and across the Core77 online network. www.awards.core77.com
School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City is an established leader and innovator in the education of artists. From its inception in 1947, the faculty has been comprised of professionals working in the arts and art-related fields. SVA provides an environment that nurtures creativity, inventiveness and experimentation, enabling students to develop a strong sense of identity and a clear direction of purpose.
www.dcrit.sva.edu