Eventually Everything: The 2012 D-Crit Conference

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street New York City www.dcrit.sva.edu/conference2012 @dcritconference

The 2012 D-Crit Conference

Introduction “Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.” —Charles Eames “Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects,” said Charles Eames, the architect and designer in 1961. He was suggesting, in a Powers of Ten kind of way, that the philosophy of the ESU contract storage system’s connective engineering extended well beyond its dimpled plywood doors, perforated metal panels, and brushed aluminum X stretchers, and out into a society about to be further connected through McLuhan’s “global village.”

Having chosen the title “Eventually Everything” for its graduating conference, the SVA MFA Design Criticism Class of 2012 seems to be feeling similarly expansive. As newly minted design critics they have some to see the whole of the designed environment as subject matter to be explored, assessed, and speculated on. At D-Crit we’ve always been interested in extending the design canon to include more of the kinds of issues that matter. This year’s broad spectrum of thesis topics delivers on this ambition to bring design discourse closer in alignment with the social and political realities of everyday life. Among the targets of this year’s graduating students’ critical inquiries: the moral reformist imperative of fitness clubs; the lack of an integrated repair culture in product design; package designers’ complicity in the construction of myths about food production; the deployment of Main Street USA as a rhetorical trope in political campaigns; the absence of firearms from major design collections; and how contemporary architectural discourse is still haunted by its antiornimental Modernist ancestors. Eames may not have imagined connections between figurative typography, the HOPE VI policy, and Cubelets, but, were he still around he surely would have enjoyed the ways in which D-Crit graduating students are doing so.

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Finding and forging connections between the people, ideas, and objects that shape design culture is certainly one of design criticism’s key methods. But we’re also interested in the moments and spaces of disconnection and discontinuity—the misunderstandings between people, ideas, and objects. So we’re also looking at the cracks in apparently seamless veneers, the disjunctions between idealized packaging or promotional verbiage and the truths of actual content and production, and the temporal slippages between imagined pasts and lived realities.

And yet while the D-Crit students certainly want to write about everything, their choice of the word “Eventually” is considered. They know that even though they must deal with the relentless deluge of the new and make informed judgments on the fly, the process of becoming a critic is a life-long project. Two years at D-Crit imparts the tools, methods, formats, and models for embarking on that project, but only through a continued sharpening of voice and curiosity through accumulated experience and knowledge can one achieve the kind of authoritative insight and elegant means of conveying it to which we all aspire.

So, “Eventually Everything,” yes, but for now there’s quite enough to be getting on with.

—Alice Twemlow, Chair, SVA MFA Design Criticism

Schedule 12:30

Registration, Desserts and Coffee

1:00 Opening Remarks:

Alice Twemlow

1:15

Opening Remarks:

Julie Lasky

4:15

Keynote Panelist:

Michael Rock

4:30 Cheryl Yau Intrinsic Expressions: Uncovering the Performativity of Figurative Typography

1:45 Anna Kealey Unpacking the Pastoral Food Package: Myth-Making in Graphic Design

4:40 Julia van den Hout Patterns of Ornament: Technology and Theory in Contemporary Architectural Decoration

Stuart Ewen

Ann Weiser

Main Street USA and the Power of Myth

2:05 Katya Mezhibovskaya Collection/Recollection: On the Place and Meaning of Nostalgia in Home Merchandising and the Domestic Interior

4:50 Discussion 5:10 Break •••• Panel 4: Man, Machine, Morality 5:25 Keynote Panelist:

Jeffrey Schnapp

2:15 Discussion 2:35 Break

5:40 Amna Siddiqui Redefining Play: Exploring TechnologyEnhanced Toy Design

•• Panel 2: Working/Not Working 2:50 Keynote Panelist:

5:50 Tara Gupta Honed/Toned: A Critique of Fitness Culture

3:05 Derrick Mead Designing for Repair: Things Can Be Fixed

6:00 Barbara Eldredge Missing the Modern Gun: Object Ethics in Collections of Design

3:15 Erin M. Routson Towers to Town Homes: Public Housing Policy and Design in the US

6:10 Discussion 6:45 Closing Remarks 7:30 Reception

Daniel D’Oca

3:25 Discussion 3:45 Break

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Michael Bierut

Panel 1: Calculated Nostalgia Keynote Panelist:

• 1:30

1:55

••• Panel 3: Speaking Surfaces 4:00 Keynote Panelist:

Opening Remarks Alice Twemlow

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Julie Lasky

1:00

1:15

Alice Twemlow is chair and co-founder of the Design Criticism MFA program at the School of Visual Arts and also a PhD candidate in Design History at the Royal College of Art in London. Alice contributes to Design Observer, Eye, Design & Culture, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She is the author of What is Graphic Design For? and of essays for books such as The Barnbrook Bible and 60 Innovators: Shaping Our Creative Futures. She often serves on design and architecture juries and editorial boards, and moderates conferences such as the Tasmeem Doha Conference at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, and the Design Writing panel at the 2011 College Art Association Conference. Alice has recently spoken at the MoMA QT series, AIGA Chicago, AIGA National Conference, and the American Society of Journalists and Authors Conference.

Julie Lasky is co-editor of Change Observer, a Web site devoted to design for social impact, supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in association with the Winterhouse Foundation. Previously, she was editor-in-chief of I.D. Magazine, after positions as editor-in-chief at Interiors and managing editor at Print. A widely published writer and critic, she has contributed to The New York Times, Metropolis, Dwell, Architecture, Slate, Surface, The National Scholar, Graphis, Grid, Print, Eye and NPR. Her most recent book is Bespoke: The Handbuilt Bicycle (Lars Müller, 2010). Julie’s honors include a National Arts Journalism Fellowship at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, and the Richard J. Margolis award for writings on the cultural life of postwar Sarajevo. At D-Crit she teaches Reporting on Design and Social Change and will be a core faculty member of the SVA Design Writing and Research Intensive, June 18–29.

Panels Calculated Nostalgia

1:30

Nostalgia for times and places that one has not actually experienced exerts a powerful allure. So it’s not surprising that marketers and designers mine the warm associations of imagined pasts and fictional elsewheres. This panel explores the idea that what is remembered or imagined holds extraordinary sway on the decisions made by entire populations. From the promises of the pastoral food package, to Main Street USA as a recurring rhetorical trope, to the visual marketing of “home”—this panel examines the sites, meanings, and cultural effects of calculated nostalgia.

Stuart Ewen is distinguished professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College, and in the Ph.D. Programs in History, Sociology and American Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center. He helped define the field of Media Studies with books such as PR! A Social History of Spin (Basic Books, 1996), All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (Basic Books, 1987; 1999), and Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (McGraw-Hill, 1976). All Consuming Images provided the foundation for Bill Moyers’ four-part, Peabody, Emmy, and National Education Association Awards winning PBS series, “The Public Mind.” PR! provided the basis for the BBC Television Series, “Century of the Self.” In 2011, Stuart wrote the introduction for a new edition of Edward Bernays’s 1923 classic, Crystallizing Public Opinion (iG Publishing).

1:45 Anna Kealey Unpacking the Pastoral Food Package: Myth-Making in Graphic Design 1:55

Ann Weiser

Main Street USA and the Power of Myth

2:05 Katya Mezhibovskaya Collection/Recollection: On the Place and Meaning of Nostalgia in Home Merchandising and the Domestic Interior

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Keynote Panelist: Stuart Ewen

PANEL 1

PANELS

Working/ Not Working

2:50

The breakdown of architecture and design tends to be avoided as a topic, outside of the occasional catastrophe like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, in 1940, or the tragedy of the Kansas City Hyatt’s Skywalk, in 1981. Garden-variety, everyday failure, on the other hand—whether complex, as is the case when a public housing system doesn’t work, or simple, when a tool breaks into pieces—is less popular subject matter, and understandably so.

Designers don’t relish the prospect of failure and, outside of abiding by safety regulations, they rarely address the issue head-on. Design criticism affords an opportunity to investigate what doesn’t work by gathering evidence from commissioners, creators, and users, and gives voice to the experience of technicians and “maintainers” who deploy and work with the outcomes of design first-hand.

Daniel D’Oca is an urban planner, educator, and curator who specializes in the politics of the contemporary built environment in America. He is design critic in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Design School, Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and principal and co-founder of Interboro Partners, an architecture, planning, and research firm in New York City. Interboro has won many awards for its innovative projects, including the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices and Young Architects Awards, and the New Practices Award from the AIA New York Chapter. Daniel has been a guest critic at D-Crit in Karrie Jacobs’s Urban Curation class and, with the other principals of Interboro Partners, has lectured on “Advocacy and Pluralism in Architecture.” His forthcoming book, The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, will be published by Actar in 2012.

3:05 Derrick Mead Designing for Repair: Things Can Be Fixed 3:15 Erin M. Routson Towers to Town Homes: Public Housing Policy and Design in the US

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Keynote Panelist: Daniel D’Oca

PANEL 2

PANELS

PANEL 3

Speaking Surfaces

While serving as functional designs, built structures and typefaces are also visual expressions of creativity. Over the past century, the limits of creativity have been guided significantly by the radical statements of figures like Adolf Loos who, in the early twentieth century, announced a new age of the machine, advocated for an aesthetic that accommodated production, and railed against the use of ornament.

Advances in technology have both inspired human expression and restricted it. Examining examples of ornament in architecture and figurative typography, this panel looks beyond the surfaces of architectural planes and letterforms to explore the influence of aesthetic movements on the evolution of creative expression, and to reveal the ways in which Modernist theories still haunt the current discourse.

4:30 Cheryl Yau Intrinsic Expressions: Uncovering the Performativity of Figurative Typography 4:40 Julia van den Hout Patterns of Ornament: Technology and Theory in Contemporary Architectural Decoration

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Keynote Panelist: Michael Bierut

4:00

Michael Bierut is a partner in the international design consultancy Pentagram and a co-founder of the online design magazine Design Observer.

A selection of his pithy essays has been collected under the title Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). Michael has taught blogging at D-Crit and lectured on “Design, Writing, Teaching: Not my Real Job.” Michael is coeditor of Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, vols. 1 through 5, and a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s arts program “Studio 360.” He is also a senior critic in Graphic Design at Yale University School of Art. Among the many honors Michael has received is a Medal of Excellence by the AIGA, an organization for which he was the president from 1998 to 2001, and the 2008 CooperHewitt National Design Mind Award.

Keynote Panelist: Michael Rock

4:15

Michael Rock is a founding partner and creative director at the design studio 2x4, and director of the Graphic Architecture Project at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Michael, whose expertise spans graphic design and architecture, has lectured at D-Crit on “Superficiality: Dematerialization and Branded Surfaces.” At 2x4, he leads a wide range of projects, both cultural and commercial, for Nike, MTV, Prada, Kanye West, Vitra, Harvard Art Museum and CCTV. He has been a contributing editor and graphic design journalist at I.D. Magazine, his writing on design has appeared in publications worldwide and a new book of his writing, Multiple Signatures, is forthcoming.

Michael is the recipient of the 1999/2000 Rome Prize in Design from the American Academy in Rome and currently serves on the board of the Academy.

Man, Machine, Morality

5:25

Design is not a one-way street: objects make us as much as we make them. Machines of all types invariably shape human experience on a daily basis.

But do they make us better people? This panel questions technology’s capacity to inform, improve, or end human life and investigates the ways in which objects reflect the morality of the user while questioning the designer’s accountability. Powerful social interactions between man and machine can lead us to attribute agency and sometimes tyranny to our devices. The power struggle between man and machine—a critical question of who controls whom—provides a cyclical relationship informing design practices and the ways in which we navigate our lives. This panel will discuss the design of current toy technologies, fitness equipment, and firearms, along with the social interactions and moral rituals surrounding them.

Jeffrey Schnapp is the faculty director of metaLAB at Harvard, a research and teaching collaborative dedicated to exploring networked culture in the arts and humanities. He is also faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, professor of Romance Languages & Literature and on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Jeffrey’s most recent books are Speed Limits (Skira, 2009) and The Electric Information Age Book (Princeton Architectural Press). Also forthcoming in 2012 is Digital Humanities (MIT Press, 2012), a book co-written with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Todd Presner. His pioneering work in the domains of digital humanities and digitally augmented approaches to cultural programming includes curatorial collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

5:40 Amna Siddiqui Redefining Play: Exploring TechnologyEnhanced Toy Design 5:50 Tara Gupta Honed/Toned: A Critique of Fitness Culture 6:00 Barbara Eldredge Missing the Modern Gun: Object Ethics in Collections of Design

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Keynote Panelist: Jeffrey Schnapp

PANEL 4

PANELS

1:45

Anna Kealey

Bio Anna Kealey was born in Dublin, Ireland, and holds a BA in Visual Communications. She won the Design History Society Prize for her undergraduate thesis Innovation and Exploitation: a Critique of American Apparel. She works as a researcher and writer at the creative recruitment agency Wert & Co. and as a research assistant for Steven Heller.

In 2011 Anna worked as conference assistant at AIGA, helping to organize Pivot: AIGA National Design Conference. She is a recipient of the SVA Alumni Scholarship Award and will present her thesis research at the International Conference for Designing Food and Designing For Food (ICDFDFF) at London’s Metropolitan University in June. Anna hopes to become an educator, while maintaining a career in design and writing. annakealeydesign@gmail.com @annakealey

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Conference Presentation The expanding market of consumers concerned with health and the environment has intensified processed food companies’ focus on visuals and verbiage that equate their products to fresh, healthy, unprocessed foods. Designers working with food clients are expected to maintain myths about food production and the healthy attributes of processed foods. Packaging design attempts to add a level of emotional resonance to products, ideally connecting consumers to a natural environment and tradition through agrarian imagery far removed from the reality of a boxed, processed package taken from the supermarket shelf. An enormous range of packaging designs overwhelms and confuses the consumer.

Together they create a landscape of fictitious imagery that is disconnected from the realities of food production today and perpetuates a lack of understanding about food. This presentation dissects the visual and verbal cues on food packaging—from the seemingly obvious to the far more abstract—and illustrates how they are used to create myths about food.

Unpacking the Pastoral Food Package: Myth-Making in Graphic Design Thesis Extract I entered the ultimate consumer paradise—the modern American supermarket—through a veritable garden of tempting fresh apples, pomegranates, and limes piled up like rolling hills sparkling with artificial dew. These mountainous shapes found an echo in the imagery adorning the packages of the Kraft cheese, Organic Valley milk and Yoplait yogurts that sat in the neighboring fridges. Logistically, it would make more sense for consumers to pick up the vegetables last, but consumer enticement has dictated this layout in almost every supermarket. The cornucopia of fresh food gives shoppers a feeling of perceived healthiness as they add these first items to their baskets. A fridge nearby offered juice drinks stacked up in neat, vertical towers. Their cardboard cartons were decorated with copious amounts of fruit, fluorescent two-dimensional representations of their neighbors.

I strolled down the cereal aisle surrounded by the verdant fields of the Cascadian Farm logos, the decadent bowls of fruit on the Kellogg’s Special K boxes and the wheat sheaf motifs on Corn Flakes, Cheerios and Kix packages. The farmhouses and picket fences illustrated on their cardboard coverings evoked a bucolic existence. The supermarket lights added a shine to everything, like the sun that featured so prominently on almost all the cereal packages.

As I moved further into the supermarket, the boxed items become increasingly disconnected from the hills of fruit and vegetables at the entrance—but the images of nature and the landscape grew more insistent. In the freezer section, the shopping experience can become emotional if one is conflicted by health concerns and the desire for the speed and comfort that frozen ready meals provide. Food packaging helps alleviate some of these tensions, equating the product with fresh produce through images of nature on the front of the microwavable box.

An unsettling sensation came over me when I was reminded of a conversation with food brand strategist Tess Wicksteed, who believes “the job of food packaging is to make the food look real and fresh.” 1 But the essential dilemma is that a food product even having a package is at odds with the idea of freshness. There were more images of farms and ranches in 9

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the supermarket than I ever recall seeing at a farmer’s market. I began to suspect that I was surrounded by murky cardboard illusions that were spinning a pastoral fantasy.

Even a simple egg carton raises a lot of questions: do I want natural or farm fresh? What does farm fresh even mean? Cage free or free-range? Is cage free not the same as free-range? (Not quite, as it turns out: cage-free does not necessarily indicate that the egg-laying hens have been given outdoor access.)

Meanwhile, the images of hens running around in the open air suggested that the eggs were free-range, but they were not. Designer Andrew Strauss told me that “years ago, food companies could just say natural but now consumers are looking for organic, even though they don’t know what it means, but they know it must be healthier.” 2 Such haziness plays straight into the hands of unscrupulous food companies, that rely on the ignorance of consumers coupled with confusing verbiage to make their products seem organic or healthy, even when they are neither.

Wheat sheaf by wheat sheaf, sunrise by sunrise, the packages on grocery store shelves have been designed to look more like nature than they really are.

For years, I had equated the design quality of a package with the quality of the food inside. I had bought into this pastoral fantasy for the sake of a more pleasant shopping and eating experience. Once I began to notice these recurring, exaggerated images, I became concerned about the role that graphic design plays in perpetuating this comforting, but ultimately precarious, pastoral myth.

1 T ess Wicksteed, in conversation with Anna Kealey, November 9, 2011.

2 A ndrew Strauss, in conversation with Anna Kealey, November 28, 2011.

1:55

Ann Weiser

Bio Ann Weiser, a former senior creative director at Showtime Networks and vice president/creative director at Lifetime Television, is now a design writer and critic. Ann is currently working on a documentary that examines the differences between the “real” Main Streets of the United States and the mythical street that is used as a symbol in political rhetoric.

She is also at work on a book about the design history of kitchen utensils, from the mundane to the fantastic. She has written online for Metropolis and participated in an off-Broadway talkback panel following A.R. Gurney’s play Children, where she discussed the cultural messaging of clothing styles, in particular the phenomenon of the “preppy” style.

Ann enjoys writing about the impact of architectural choices on New York City neighborhoods. aweiser10003@mac.com @damnann http://style-elements.blogspot.com

Conference Presentation Main Street USA is a complex projection of the physical, conceptual, and rhetorical. First, it is a place— Main Streets are real streets in real towns. There are over 10,466 streets named “Main” in this country. 1 Second, it is a myth created by embellished memories abetted with idealized images. It reaches into the core of the American psyche, and conjures associations of honesty, simplicity, and goodness. Finally, as a dominant image of the American way of life, it has proven useful politically. The pervasive strength of Main Street as a symbol combined with its potency as a myth has been used with great success by twentieth and twenty-first century politicians to motivate voters to behave contrary to their best interests. This presentation explores the disconnect between the reality and idealized fantasy of Main Street, from the financially privileged communities of old New England towns and New Urbanist Greenfield developments, to the cracked asphalt streets and crumbling sidewalks of the scores of Main Streets that have been ravaged by the methamphetamine epidemic.

1 M apping Main Street, http://www.mappingmainstreet.org

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Main Street, USA and the Power of Myth Thesis Extract Since the 1990s, there has been an uptick in revitalizing many American small town downtowns in an attempt to regain their former prominence as centers for social and economic transactions. Architect and writer James Sanders observes, “The elite are the ones embracing the revitalized downtowns. What they end up with is not a true old downtown.” While physically, the buildings resemble their former selves from a period between 1890 and 1950, the interior uses have changed to suit the times. Says Sanders, “They are basically open air shopping malls.” 1 Now storefronts house real estate offices, specialty food shops, and art galleries.

The theater is intact, as is the church, the post office, and the hardware store. All have a fresh coat of paint or have had the dirt sandblasted from the brick. While revitalization is preferable to Greenfield building or disused Main Streets, it must be remembered that these sites are replications. Says Peter Halley, the hyperreal artist and cultural critic, these “cities are doubles of themselves, cities that only exist as nostalgic references to the idea of city and to the ideas on communication and social intercourse…They no longer fulfill the function of the old cities. They are no longer centers; they only serve to simulate the phenomenon of the center.” 2 Revitalization is mimicry, simulacra in the second layer of falsity. According to film archivist Rick Prelinger, “Small town rural America doesn’t have many competitive tools in its tool box but you notice that any town that can afford it has prettied up its Main Street.

But most of these towns are just either total retirement communities or they have vanished, and are now just ghost towns. It’s working, poor people making crafts or selling antiques that don’t really have much value. And so Main Street is almost an anachronistic thing.” 3 What appears to be little known is the degree to which so very many of our Main Streets across the country have been irreparably damaged by the methamphetamine epidemic. In his book, Methland, Nick Reding describes how, in thirty years, the American small town and methamphetamine have become synonymous. As a reporter, Reding ran across the drug in 1999 when he was in Gooding, Idaho, writing a story

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on ranching. On his frequent trips to the Midwest, he continued to observe methamphetamine’s growing presence. In 2005, he began the book and settled on telling the story through the experiences of Oelwein, a small town in Iowa.

Like many small towns that relied on farming and small businesses to sustain it, Oelwein lost out to the K-marts and multinational farming corporations. On Main Street, “the sidewalks were cracked, half the buildings…stood vacant, and foot traffic was practically nonexistent.” 4 Behind the main drag, in the Third Ward, one can “look down at the collapsing sidewalk or across the vacant lot at a burned out home… [as] a young man in a trench coat picks through the Dumpster, shaking despite the heat. Here, amid the double-wides of the Third Ward, among the packs of teenage boys riding, gang-like on their Huffy bicycles, the economy and culture of Oelwine are more securely tied to the drug than [to any other industry].” 5

1 J ames Sanders, interview by Ann Weiser, phone call, October 20, 2011, New York, NY.

2 E dward Soja, “Inside Exopolis,” Variations on a Theme Park, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 113.

3 R ick Prelinger interview by Ann Weiser, taped, Dec. 2, 2012, New York, NY.

4 N ick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 12.

5 Ibid, 5.

2:05

Katya Mezhibovskaya

Bio Katya Mezhibovskaya is a designer and critic hailing from Moscow and Brooklyn. After studying Painting, Art History, and Gender Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Katya then transferred to the School of Visual Arts to complete her BFA in Graphic Design, with a focus on print design and semiotics. She is fascinated by cultural and linguistic etymologies, both as a book cover designer at Vintage EspaĂąol and Vintage/Anchor Books, and as a researcher and writer on memory and its historical artifacts. Katya is writing a book on the cultural history of nail polish, designing a book cover series for Jorge Luis Borges, planning her honeymoon in Italy, and looking for ligature opportunities in texts. kmezhibovskaya@gmail.com @katiphon www.katyamezhibovskaya.com

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Conference Presentation How do objects help us remember? Why do we covet, collect, and move them from apartment to apartment, and how have merchandisers insinuated nostalgic marketing into these private practices?

This presentation will explore how young professionals create their homes and house their memories in New York apartments and on the web. It will examine the design methods of pervasive home decorating blogs and homewares stores such as Anthropologie, and untangle intertwined and co-dependent relationships that exist between late-market capitalism, memory-making, and the subjectivities we develop through our domestic possessions.

Thesis Extract I had been flirting with that white crackle-glazed spice jar with the chalkboard painted label at Anthropologie for two weeks.

I would walk past the tidy rows of rounded jars with different colored lids pretending not to covet their cuteness. Instead of picking one up and sliding my thumb down the four horizontal ceramic ridges (rendered useless for actually measuring any of the contents in this opaque container), I would look at other areas of the vintage-inspired women’s clothing and housewares store. Like the jar, manufactured with new materials but molded from the designs of

Collection/Recollection: On the Place and Meaning of Nostalgia in Home Merchandising and the Domestic Interior yesteryear, most of the wares at Anthropologie and many other contemporary home merchandisers are footnoted with visual allusions to pasts just out of living memory’s reach. Victorian, European Peasant, Naval Imperial, Jazz Age, and French Rococo are some of the resurrected and reconfigured pasts marketed to dewy-eyed, urban thirty-somethings such as myself.

I finally did succumb. But before I even set my carefully chosen jar down on the counter, the cashier exclaimed, “I am obsessed with these! My grandmother had one just like it when I was little girl and she would write ‘money for Atlantic City’ on the front. Whenever I see them on the shelf, they remind me of her.”

*** The cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote, “to live means to leave traces, when articulating the reciprocal impressions that possessions and inhabitants leave on one another” 1 This thesis argues that the objects found within domestic interiors are the semiotic surfaces upon which these traces of individual and cultural memory can be detected and read.

The home is a site of the re-presentation of memory through the collection, arrangement, and display of personal objects. 2 My thesis looks at material culture metaphorically and then attempts to make the metaphors material.

What does the parade of historical visual references in the domestic setting reveal and what does it contribute to personal histories and to collective memory? *** In the beginning there was the cave. Then came the yurt, the log cabin, the brownstone, and the chateau.

The pre-fab split-level, co-op, and timeshare soon followed. Each human dwelling type was the embodiment of the societal philosophies and conventions at the time of its design and use. The objects lining the walls and floors within these architectures also offered a significant and illuminating set of histories. But in order to learn how to listen to and read these human keepsakes and talismans, we must come indoors, out of the weather, out of Nature, and into Culture. 3 13

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The “home” is not primarily about external architecture, as the “house” may be, but rather it is about internal inhabitants and the objects that bear witness to and inspire their interior lives. The following first chapter is an intensely condensed history of the “domestic interior” and contends that it is a rare and special place as it allows and encourages the unburdening of external pressures to make room for internal thoughts. *** Almost two years ago now, I set out to learn why my generation was growing increasingly attracted to objects, design practices, and craft traditions of yesteryear.

Certainly there was respect and enthusiasm for time honored skill sets that seemed to be disappearing with every additional megabyte loaded onto the internet, but why were we interested in times before our own memory’s reach? Was this recycling of past styles an attempt to chivalrously place a coat over the puddle of the new century’s unknowns and uncertainties? Or were we growing alarmingly aware that the generation that had lived through WWII and survived to tell some of those most harrowing tales, was dying out? Our primary sources for memory and history, namely our grandparents, were fading. The last decade’s aesthetically nostalgic zeitgeist was defined by the twenty- to thirty-somethings, whether they were apartment renters or store merchandisers, scurrying to record their grandparents’ tales and traces.

The less desirable alternative was to craft facsimiles or substitutes out of whatever contemporary material was at hand, before it was too late.

1 W alter Benjamin. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Reflections, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 155–156.

2 I intend the term “re-presentation” to have the double meaning of representation in the anthropological sense, but also to speak about the practice of presenting once again.

3 I use the capitalized form to signify the conventional and normative alpha concept as discussed in Michel Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage, 1972) and The Order of Things: The Archeology of the Human Sciences, (New York: Vintage, 1970).

3:05

Derrick Mead

Bio Derrick Mead has dealt with implements and machines in every conceivable state of disrepair, from farms to kitchens to crawlspaces, and remains fascinated with how stuff gets fixed. He’s worked in the past for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Phillips de Pury and Company, and written for Metropolis, Architect’s Newspaper, and Eric Fischl’s America: Now and Here Foundation, among others.

He is a recipient of the SVA MFA Design Criticism Henry Wolf Scholarship, and received a Barnabas McHenry Grant from the Open Space Institute.

Derrick’s research has definitively settled on the best toaster ever produced—the Sunbeam model T-20, 1949–1954. derrick.mead@gmail.com surfacehot.com

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Conference Presentation Critical design is a contested territory, an oftennebulous arena of thought experiments fraught with equal parts moralizing and optimism. Some designers have co-opted the mantle of critical design for self-promotional or marketing purposes, muddying the waters further. In other cases, like at The Agency of Design in London, ambitious, idealistic young designers are tackling real problems in materials, energy, and waste with fully functional prototypes. This talk will analyze the Agency of Design’s three toasters—the Realist, the Pragmatist, and the Optimist—and compare and contrast them with the work of other bold-face names in product design like Yves Behar’s Aesir cell phone and Oscar Narud’s Keel tables. Themes in critical design such as designing for repair, designing for failure, and designing for “cradle-to-cradle” type life cycles will be considered with a special emphasis on explaining why these issues are frequently taken up by unique critical designs, prototypes, and small-run bespoke objects but only rarely dealt with in real-world, mass produced products.

Designing for Repair: Things Can Be Fixed Thesis Extract The Optimist toaster, by The Agency of Design, features a heavy, cast-aluminum shell fitted with a manually operated industrial-quality odometer, and cleverly uses side-mounted trap doors to allow the toaster to function without moving parts, aside from the timer. These doors recall a historical cul-de-sac of the toaster’s formal evolution, which was prevalent from the late nineteenth century and only abandoned in the 1970s: the “tipper” style, which functioned in a similar way.

Each Optimist casting incorporates the specific date of the toaster’s manufacture. Should a heating element or anything else inside break down at some point, the machine is designed so as to be easily—but not too easily, as it requires hex keys—disassembled, and be as simple as possible to repair. Everything necessary would be available at your local hardware store, with a little luck.

This is a toaster designed to last a lifetime, or possibly even longer—it’s timelessly styled and attractive enough to become an heirloom, assuming one’s progeny retain something of today’s fondness for industrial chic.

The odometer goes to five places, so assuming a vigorous English family runs three toast cycles per day, seven days a week, it will keep stolid track for about one hundred years. Should the grandkids decide they’re sick of the thing, aluminum is fully recyclable, with no downgrading problem. 1 That our present system of recycling has deep issues of its own, dependent as it is on huge amounts of cheap electricity that comes largely from combusting fossil fuels, is another story. The Optimist would also be very expensive, at least initially, but cheaper to own overall than the five (or ten, or twenty, if all goes right), fifty-dollar toasters it stands to outlast over the course of its life.

Adam Paterson told me that he and his partners at The Agency of Design hope to undertake small-scale production of the Optimist privately—an artisanal toaster, if you will.

Most things can be designed so as to be fixable, albeit some more easily or sensibly than others. The fact that they’re not is another harbinger of a socioeconomic paradigm that is obviously beginning to fray at the edges. Good fixers think like designers, and it’s clear that designers need to think more like fixers, too. As for the rest of us—consumers, users, people, 15

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whatever—choosing to fix our toasters, along with many of the rest of our things, is different than buying recycled-content toilet paper or choosing a Prius over a Tahoe (hybrid or conventional). Overcoming the “optionalness” of repair that contemporary mass-consumer culture presents us with is not effortless, but it is achievable. Even though we might not all be equipped, either with the skills or the tools, to take on fixing our own belongings, choosing to have them fixed for us instead of throwing them away can have powerful implications: repair can represent an easy “lifestyle” choice to make.

1 A esthetic obsolescence is inescapably real, but it takes a courageous product designer to publicly admit this, in the arena of high-end and luxury goods.

3:15

Erin M. Routson

Bio Erin M. Routson is an unabashed native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning in Graphic Design. She has worked as an art director and graphic designer for Goody Products and Abercrombie & Fitch, among others.

After a brief dalliance with the idea of attending law school, she discovered that Design Criticism gave her the opportunity to discuss social justice, politics, and the intersection of gender, race, and class through architecture, urban planning, and design.

Erin writes about sports, music, and pop culture and is a regular contributor at music blog b3sci, the policyxdesign blog at Public Policy Lab, and has been published by CLOG and Unbest. acleanbreak@gmail.com @dietcokeforever emrgency.tumblr.com

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Conference Presentation Public housing in the United States, for most people, means groupings of high-rise towers stricken with crime and poverty. As we get further into the twentyfirst century, these towers are being demolished at a rapid rate. They are being replaced with generic townhomes (a reactionary move against towers), or nothing at all, leaving residents to Section 8 housing, the private market, or permanent supportive housing—a new model that incorporates in-house social services with housing for low-income residents. It is the latter that most successfully does what towers failed to do—house many residents while maintaining a safe, affordable, well-maintained structure.

This presentation identifies permanent supportive housing, with its incorporation of social services, maintenance, and management, as a model for new public housing. Further, it examines the role of the critic when it comes to the development of housing as a system and a service, rather than just a structure. The critic’s role as an historian and advocate for residents becomes increasingly important as new models for housing are created. Public housing proves that we aren’t just talking about buildings, we are using buildings to talk about everything else.

Towers to Town Homes: Public Housing Policy and Design in the US Thesis Extract The Wynona Lipman Gardens development replaced the former Columbus Homes on its own grounds north of I-280 in Newark. In place of the 1,500 apartments that made up the eight high-rises there are now only 300 units contained in the forty-five townhome buildings that comprise the development. While the former towers had their own aesthetic issues, the new townhouses reflect a desire to duplicate suburbia in an urban environment, based on the assumption that if low-income residents are exposed to the habits of the middle class, those same characteristics will somehow manifest themselves and turn low-income residents into the middle class. Rows of these townhouses now make up almost all of the Newark Housing Authority properties in the city, creating strange pockets of bland architecture that reflect nothing of their neighborhood. “You can walk twenty blocks and see nothing but townhouse after townhouse. There isn’t even a grocery store nearby,” says Newark’s urban designer Damon Rich. 1 The emphasis on privacy in the architecture of individual units and the planning of the communities themselves was implemented to solve problems of gang violence and drug trafficking that existed in the high-rise projects.

Using housing design as the lone solution to social problems ignores a host of other factors, and fails to contextualize the structures in terms of where they are located and who dwells within them. Giving residents a front porch and a garage, or somehow emulating the housing of those with moderate levels of income doesn’t change the circumstances surrounding lowincome families: those of employment, transportation, and other social needs. According to urban studies professor Joseph Heathcott, “The idea that behaviors of the wealthy rub off on the behaviors of the poor, it’s very paternalistic, and a very elitist view” and “reminiscent of nineteenth century Victorian attitudes about wealth and poverty.” 2 The shift to public-private partnerships fundamentally changes how government housing is built in the United States, putting responsibility on developers and architects to provide safe and well designed housing and leading to new problems beyond those of crime and poverty. Millennium Way, a total of fifty-six 17

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units across three sites in the South Ward, should have fulfilled the last of the one-to-one replacement requirement mandated by the 1989 lawsuit. The project was slated to be completed in 2006, but when the developer handed the keys over to the Newark Housing Authority, they found myriad problems, leading to a seven-year slog to bring the units up to the standards that should have originally been met. The project was designed by Heritage Architects of Paramus, New Jersey, and in its post-2006 work used “green design strategies” as well as “sustainable siding and roofing,” though the structures still closely fit the townhome typeform. 3 In April 2011, the ribbon was finally cut and according to Heritage Architects the structures are now fully occupied. These units fulfilled the lawsuit that was considered closed in 2008 even though there were 186 units still due to be completed. Because the Newark Housing Authority was so close to fulfillment, the US District Court ended its enforcement of the verdict concluding that, in the context of 1,777 units, the remaining 186 were negligible. 4 Rapidly tearing down housing with nothing in place to accommodate residents not only creates problems for the residents themselves, but the rush to build new housing leads to a cycle of generic, reactionary matchbox design and poor construction. The construction of townhomes may eliminate some of the problems of high-rise complexes in terms of violence and gang activity, but it also creates a new set of problems related to the social relations of residents. Streets of townhomes without groceries or other retail nearby become their own form of ghetto, isolating and disconnecting residents from true community.

1 D amon Rich, interview by Erin M. Routson, digital recording, November 30, 2011, Newark City Hall, Newark, NJ.

2 J oseph Heathcott, interview by Erin M. Routson, digital recording, November 21, 2011, The New School, New York, NY.

3 H eritage Architects, “Millenium Way.” http://www.heritagearch.com/housing-2

4 J effery C. Mays, “Public Housing: Case Closed,” The Star-Ledger, January 16, 2008.

4:30

Cheryl Yau

Bio Cheryl Yau is a graphic designer and critic who comes to New York from an even more densely built and populated cosmopolitan city: Hong Kong.

Her writing has been published online by Design Observer, Print, Metropolis, Motionographer, among others. Together with SVA faculty member Steven Heller, she is co-editing the forthcoming D-Crit chapbook, Object Lessons, which is a compilation of new narratives about old objects. Cheryl enjoys immersing herself in a fast-paced influx of social media but also finds the same pleasure in handcrafting leather accessories stitch by stitch. She looks forward to applying her skills as a critic to new design work as well as extending her voice into documentary filmmaking and teaching. hello@cherylyau.com @cherylyau www.cherylyau.com

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Conference Presentation The appearances of letterforms have often been more shaped by the characteristics of the tools used to make them than by the expressions of their creators. Typography over the last century exemplified this—letters became rigid in aesthetic as a result of our increased dependency on mechanical production. Although typography today is still heavily grounded in the aesthetic principles of Modernism, there is immense potential for contemporary typography to become an extension of our bodies through the use of interactive technologies. This presentation will examine the opportunities enabled by technology to reengage textual communication with our bodily expressions.

Thesis Extract In a small passport photo booth, a woman tilts her chin down and allows her side-swept bangs to fall in front of her nose, covering her face almost entirely.

With a quick flash, her photo is taken. Captured in this faceless photo, the wave in her hair reveals a vague letter S. This photo contributes to a poster designed by Paul Elliman for Fuse 5: Virtual Fuse in 1992. He asked twenty-six of his friends to visit a passport photo booth and each act out letters of the alphabet with their bodies, from the shoulders up. Sitting still in a confined space, participants were limited in their props and positions. Using long hair hanging over the right shoulder to represent the descender of a P, a loosened tie to form the diagonal stems of a Y or a mouth opened wide to imitate an O, each designer had to think carefully about how his or her body could resemble and express a character in the alphabet.

Each photograph captured in Elliman’s alphabet is a performance—a bodily reenactment of a letter that contributes to a larger meaning. These meanings are understood through interpretation and experienced by the audience. Each performance is also considered a performative act. Performativity differs from performance in the way that it is an expressive action that reflects an individual’s position and therefore constructs their identity. By performing the letters, the participants disclose characteristics about themselves.

Intrinsic Expressions: Uncovering the Performativity of Figurative Typography When we consider the expression of typography as a performance and a performative act, it reconciles writing with oral tradition, as the viewer’s interpretation of the work becomes more like dialogue between the performer and audience, and less like dictation.

Performances anticipate that different audience members will have different interpretations. A woman with tightly pulled-back hair and a tobacco pipe extending from her mouth can be understood in simply her own terms; but with further consideration, the circumference of her face along with the protruding length of the pipe, can form a very legible Q. Despite varied interpretations, performances bring people together in collective experiences by operating on agreed subjects. Elliman’s “Photo-booth Alphabet” facilitates a conversation between the performers of the letters and the audience through typography.

Unfortunately, our interpretation of typography is generally unanimous and unchallenged due to mass production, Modernism, and the machine aesthetic.

Our familiarity with mechanically printed letters leaves little room for us to contemplate or question the medium. The marriage of typography and the body in Elliman’s alphabet creates a deviation from the formulaic way we are used to reading. It therefore requires us to interpret openly again what this means.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida would describe Elliman’s method of deviation with the term différance.

Derrida exploits the etymological roots of the French word différer, which means “to defer” and “to differ,” suggesting that words and signs are inherently understood with variation and a single true signification can never be attained. 1 By deliberately misspelling the homophonous word difference with an A, Derrida illustrates his point graphically. Elliman’s alphabet not only differs from the letters we use everyday, but his use of the human body in an unconventional system also defers interpretation. Although the use of the body in the context of typography disrupts the reader to a certain extent, the body is a familiar enough motif that the letters are not too difficult to comprehend. Engaging the body as type is like phatic communication, soliciting conversation with a shared image that everyone involved understands. 2 “Photo-booth Alphabet” intrigues the audience based on the advantage that we all share the same anatomy.

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This shared understanding of anatomy also served as the basis for typographic terminology. At the advent of modern typography, early punch-cutters reconciled letters with the body by using anthropomorphic terminology. The easiest way to understand typography and its haphazard system was to assign its components with terms most familiar to us. Borrowing the vocabulary of human anatomy, punch-cutters referred to certain typographic parts as the eye, ear, neck, shoulder, arm, leg, spine, and even crotch of a character. To cast type, a lead matrix had to be made by either pressing a punch of the letter (also known as a patrix) into the softer metal or pouring molten lead over the patrix to make an impression. 3 This German Abklatsch 4 idea that each lead letter had a paternal mold that punched into a maternal mold, which then held the final product, made biological and sexual references each punch-cutter could understand. Exploiting this common knowledge not only strengthened the communication among the practicing typographers at the time, but also emphasized the undeniable connection people felt towards the letters that represented them.

1 L awrence E. Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology Expanded, 2nd Edition (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 225.

2 P eter Jones, “The Language/Action Model of Conversation: Can conversation perform acts of design?” Interactions Magazine (2010), http://www.dubberly.com/articles/languageaction-model.html (accessed January 11, 2012).

3 J oseph A. Dane, Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 43.

4 To imitate or reproduce.

4:40

Julia van den Hout

Bio Julia van den Hout is the press and exhibitions manager at Steven Holl Architects, where she has led the communications department since graduating from NYU in 2008 with a BA in Art History and Urban Design & Architecture. In 2011, Julia co-founded CLOG, a quarterly architecture publication that aims to slow down the rapid pace of architectural discourse and provide a platform for the discussion of one topic at a time. Alongside the three issues published thus far, CLOG has organized events and lectures in New York and Boston.

Julia’s writing has been published in C3, CLOG, and Domus, and she is currently on the curatorial team for the US Pavilion at the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale. juliavdhout@gmail.com julia@clog-online.com www.clog-online.com @jtlvdhout

Conference Presentation “Decoration… is suited to simple races, peasants and savages,” argued Le Corbusier in his 1923 publication, Vers Une Architecture. He continued, “Harmony and proportion incite the intellectual faculties and arrest the man of culture.” Le Corbusier was not the first to believe that ornament hindered societal development. With his statement, Le Corbusier announced his allegiance with earlier advocates of strict functionalism like Adolf Loos, author of “Ornament and Crime” from 1908, who had aggressively argued against the dominance of the popular decorative styles of Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession.

While Modernist arguments against ornament emphasized that decoration had previously been used as a distraction from the inevitable flaws of handcraftsmanship, today’s technological innovations have allowed architects to turn this functionalist argument back on itself. This presentation explores examples of contemporary experimentation with material and structure, and the creation of elaborate forms that are ornate, yet retain their essential function. Made possible by new design and fabrication techniques, is the use of ornament in today’s architecture a testament to our technological progress?

Thesis Extract Renovating the existing 1950s and 1960s school buildings of the Sint Lucas Art Academy in the Dutch town of Boxtel in 2006, the British architectural firm FAT looked to traditional decorative symbols to create a new identity. As a façade, they added a series of concrete screens, which hide the disparate exterior of the preexisting structures to create a new cohesive front.

The architects incorporated a wealth of references— “a nearby castle, the gabled buildings of the town, the architecture of collegiate buildings, and the history of the academy as a monastic painting school, as well as alluding to ruins” 1 in a series of five “Pop Gothic” gables, rich with cookie-cutter tracery.

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Patterns of Ornament: Technology and Theory in Contemporary Architectural Decoration The traditional fleur-de-lis designs that puncture the thick concrete screens are also used on the interior.

The stylized lilies are repeated to form geometrically patterned wallpaper that covers the surfaces of the school’s foyer and hallways. The flatness of both the interior and exterior of the Sint Lucas Art Academy is an example of what FAT calls the figural section, “a flattened architectural element taking the form of a slice, extrusion, fragment or surface for information, offering a rich but non-expressive, deadpan, or objective form of communication.” 2 Like the billboards of Las Vegas, the figural section both rejects the Modernist concept of space and is charged with a communicative value. Embracing flat surfaces as vehicles for architectural communication, FAT intentionally challenges the fundamental principles of the Modernist movement.

Works by FAT illustrate the recently surfacing assertion that the Post-Modernist style may be finding new outlets. Post-Modernism’s legacy and possible survival has been a popular topic of discussion recently, with a retrospective at London’s V&A Museum on view from September 2011 through January 2012, and conferences organized in London and New York. In May 2011, a dedicated issue of AD, entitled “Radical Post Modernism,” was guest-edited by the three principals of FAT—Charles Holland, Sean Griffiths and Sam Jacob—and Charles Jencks with the aim of looking at contemporary appearances of the PostModern agenda. Jencks’s own new book, The Story of Post-Modernism, revisits the movement in its entirety and even labels Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp from 1954 as Post-Modernism avant la lettre. But some of the projects put forth as examples of contemporary PoMo display some disarmingly familiar Modernist traits. For example, the exterior of Herzog & de Meuron’s three-story Eberswalde Technical School Library from 1999 is sheathed in flush horizontal courses of glazing and cast-concrete panels. On each band, a single repeated image encircles the building like filmstrips. Collaborating with artist Thomas Ruff, the photographs were silkscreened on the glass, and printed on the concrete panels. Jencks uses the term “semantic ornament” to describe the Warhol-like repetition of images on the façade, 3 but he simultaneously quotes Jacques Herzog as saying, 21

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A building is a building. It cannot be read like a book. It doesn’t have any credits, subtitles or labels like a picture in a gallery. In that sense, we are absolutely anti-representational.

The strength of our building is the immediate, visceral impact they have on a visitor. 4 The architects’ experimentation with imagery as ornament is decidedly un-Modernist. However, the rejection of symbolic meaning and complexity, as well as the contradiction between the architects’ statement and the evidence of decoration visible in the library, also makes this building antithetical to Post-Modernism. Ideas espoused by both the Modernist and Post-Modern movement are still bounced around as part of current architecture discourse, and contemporary ornament is increasingly used as evidence of the surviving strength of Post-Modernism. But with today’s technological advances and the possibility of merging ornament and form, simply assigning current architecture to one of these two camps is to misunderstand them. There has emerged a new contemporary ornamental typology, the parameters of which are worth further investigating.

1 F AT, “FAT Projects: Manifesting Radical Post-Modernism,” AD Radical Post-Modernism (September/October 2011), 84.

2 S ean Griffiths, “Virtual Corpses, Figural Sections and Resonant Fields,” AD Radical PostModernism (September/October 2011), 70.

3 C harles Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 193.

4 A s quoted in Jencks, The Story of PostModernism, 193.

5:40

Amna Siddiqui

Bio Amna Siddiqui firmly believes that everyone has the right to access, understand, and appreciate the objects they are looking at, living in, or sitting on.

Her long-term goals include making art and design appealing to a wider audience. Amna’s background is in Art History, English, and Technology. She served as a fellow at the non-profit, America: Now and Here, and has worked for organizations like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Surface magazine. Before coming to D-Crit, Amna worked as a producer for an interactive agency and as a social media consultant. Her writing has appeared in Surface, Curbed NY, and Flavorwire. In her spare time, Amna enjoys visiting museums, attempting to cook, and cruising through New York City as an ambitious pedestrian. itsamnasiddiqui@gmail.com @itsamnasiddiqui

Conference Presentation Now, more than ever, technology is providing novel ways for young children to interact with inanimate objects. Designed to come to “life” with the use of our hands and bodies, technology-enhanced toys like social robots, touch screens, and enhanced objects are transforming children’s expectations of touch. Sensory-dependent and curious creatures by nature, developing children require hands-on play and open-ended exploration. It is essential, then, that we begin considering—and ultimately questioning—the actual play values of “kid-friendly” technologies. For example, how might a device like the iPad behave if it was designed according to a child’s physical and cognitive needs? Would it look any different?

This presentation explores the current shift in preschool and kindergarten-aged children’s play values, while also investigating which current toy technologies best facilitate hands-on learning. New definitions of hands-on play and attempts to articulate the field’s design requirements in the twenty-first century will be considered.

Thesis Extract Advertising children’s toys as “educational tools” has been a cynical and lucrative business for American toy companies since the turn of the twentieth century.

As early as 1903, the American Toy Manufacturers’ Association began capitalizing on the childhood smart market, advertising the use of their products for educational purposes. To this day countless toys have been “designed,” doctor-approved, and marketed to help children’s brains grow. As a result, American parents and educators have put considerably more stock into learning tools over open-ended play forms.

Their decisions are based more so out of societal tendencies than a conscious assessment of why or how these toys are able to make children smarter people earlier. According to Howard Chudacoff, adults select toys that they believe will promote their own version of children’s creativity and knowledge. 1 What is not being considered here are children’s legitimate developmental needs: the freedom to explore, experiment, and feel.

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Redefining Play: Exploring Technology-Enhanced Toy Design The exploitation of the child’s play is cause for concern, as most technology-enhanced toy designs sold today fail to consider the critical symbiosis between learning and play among developing children.

The disregard for tactility in play—the exclusion of critical toy attributes like moving parts and diverse textures—not only reduces a child’s learning potential, it also makes a mockery out of his or her learning capabilities. At a time when test scores matter most, play has been reduced to its own entity, hastily divorced from its educational counterpart. Rather than facilitating open-ended imagination and exploration, a number of technology-enhanced toys work to help children memorize instead. The popularization of such products are due in-part to the legacies of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which focuses primarily on students’ Reading and Math abilities. As a result, a mere decade later, experts have witnessed significantly decreased time for other subjects like recess, creative arts, and physical education. 2 Feeding into this academic plight, parents readily welcome early educational toys into their homes.

The bulk of these brain-building playthings, however, are misleading. In an attempt to debunk the early learning fad, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University, et al. note, “Parents are being told that the development of their children’s brains, which, in fact, is programmed by millions of years of evolution, can be altered in just one generation by specific lessons they provide. It is as if the brain were more like some lump of clay than an organ with a master plan authored by nature and the divine.” 3 It is up to adults to see through the phony and unscientific assertions created by the edutainment and commercial toy industries, who have made it their trade designing toys aimed to meet children’s entertainment needs and parents’ prepared desires.

Although it is a powerful image seeing a child engaging so naturally with technology, more attention must be given to what good technology-enhanced toys are actually doing for the child. Just because some forms of play—learning games on touch screens, for example—seem to be inherent, doesn’t mean they are necessarily beneficial to children’s development.

Although these devices are intuitive and satisfying for 23

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children, they’re too easy; it is far more complex for toddlers to perform tangible tasks, like putting shapes through a shape sorter, than it is for them to pinch or slide their fingers across a screen.

Today, pre-schoolers are engaging with screenbased media—like televisions, computers, and touch screens—on average for four hours per day. 4 And despite the American Association of Pediatrics discouraging its overuse, the glass medium remains the dominant after-school activity for children. As the leisure leader among children, one would assume screen-based media would be a fun and engaging source of entertainment. However, experts reveal that when playing on computers, children are prone to boredom, frustration, and disengagement. 5 As it is a one-dimensional form of learning and play, though, it comes as no surprise that screen-based media can oftentimes end up feeling like work. Physically doing, as opposed to passively watching (as one does in most cases with screen media), is significant to healthy development. Children are apt to learn best when actively engaged in their work, using their hands and bodies for play or to fulfill a classroom lesson.

1 H oward Chudacoff, Children At Play: An American History (New York: NYU Press, 2007).

2 K enneth R. Ginsburg, “The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds,” Pediatrics 119 (2007): 182-191.

3 D iane Eyer, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn—And Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less.

(Pennsylvania: Rodale Books, 2003).

4 C ynthia Chiong and Carly Shuler, “Learning: Is There an App for That?” The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, 2010. http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/upload_ kits/learningapps_final_110410.pdf.

5 P eta Wyeth, “Ethnography in the Kindergarten: Examining Children’s Play Experiences,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2006), 1225-1228.

5:50

Tara Gupta

Bio Tara Gupta, a graphic designer and critic, aims to inspire design discourse and is partial to puns and good typography. She earned her BFA degree from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Graphic Design program. Her D-Crit studies have ranged from Dolly Parton to the contemporary health club. Tara has worked with Susan Grant Lewin Associates, learning the ropes of public relations for artists, architects, and designers; Steven Heller, as a research assistant on his forthcoming book about graphic design magazines; and most recently at Print. She looks forward to a career in design research and strategy, as well as diving back into her love of print and exhibition design. tara.e.gupta@gmail.com www.eastmeetszest.com

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Conference Presentation Modernity offered the machine as an answer to our physical shortcomings and limitations. In contemporary health clubs, physical sensation has given way to the virtual reality of machines—mediated body awareness. A belief in the machine’s ability to morally reform users permeates today’s fitness culture.

This presentation explores themes like performance, machine mediation, and surveillance, all of which influence the design of fitness equipment and health club environments. Through this lens we can examine the design influence on our experience of the health club and beliefs about the body.

Honed/Toned: A Critique of Fitness Culture Thesis Extract “You’re so good.” “I haven’t been to the gym in ages!”

“I can’t feel my legs; my workout yesterday was INSANE.” With a towel and sports bottle in hand, I have dutifully walked into this cloud of conversation at a health club, time and again over the past five years. Vigorously peddling, running and rowing, I have watched the minutes and calories accumulate, wishing for this tally to signify a better version of myself. Years later, heading to the locker room in a new club, and clasping a black matte “LookBetterNaked” promotional pamphlet, 1 I realized the connection to the notion of “looking better naked” and my actual body lies in the designed promise of the health club space.

The designed conventions that define the health club disappear into our culture’s collective unconscious. Culturally we have consensus on what a health club should include, such as locker rooms, fitness equipment crammed in rooms, racks of bleached white towels. Like 45.6 million other American health club members, 2 I found the health club to be a moral powerhouse. Through design, health clubs lure us in with the promises of “harder better faster stronger,” 3 a nod to physical and moral subjugation. By invoking discipline, we’ve intertwined physical strength and restraint with moral awareness. Theorist Michel Foucault writes, “Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in terms of obedience).” 4 By increasing our strength we also decrease the aptitude for disobedience. We’re stronger but more controlled.

We pursue the health club and the machines within them to reform our bodies. The very vehicles with which we navigate our lives are entrusted to intricately designed machines. We now design machines programmed to re-design us. Our machines reflect little of the natural world but demonstrate the cultural preoccupation with technology as the symbol of advancement. Within the confines of the health club we have an opportunity to transform our bodies, a production process “manufacturing” the body as a product within mirrored walls. Our reliance on designed environments and machinery to expand and control our physical capabilities steadily increases.

Are we addicted to machines? These fitness machines 25

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propel and strengthen us much faster than we could on our own. Perhaps we now expect our bodies to feel like the machines that we power and that we choose to power us—ever efficient and unbreakable.

Fitness culture accepts the health club as the conventional norm. We accept the market research, new technologies, sensors and a litany of arrows pointing in many directions to provide information on what our bodies need. However, as Dr. Carolyn de La Pena writes, “Until we combine the theories of experts with the physical experience of laypersons, we will not create a complete picture of how modern energies reshaped modern bodies.” 5 Honed/Toned: A Critique of Fitness Culture seeks to illuminate the themes that permeate the design of the machinery and health club. The conversation encompassing performance, our machine-mediated relationships and the design decisions influencing our experience of the body within this man-made environment must begin. I hope we can develop a conscious awareness of how our bodies are designed to move in the environments they occupy.

1 D avidBartonGym, “DavidBartonGym.” Last modified November 2, 2011.

2 I nternational Health, Racquet, and Sportsclub Association, “Top 10 Global Markets: Numbers of Members in Millions,” 2011 IHRSA Global Report: The State of Health Club Industry (2011), 7.

3 H arder Better Faster Stronger,” Discovery, performed by Daft Punk, compact disc.

4 M ichel Foucault, Discipline (New York: Vintage, 1995), 26.

5 C arolyn De La Pena, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 13.

6:00

Barbara Eldredge

Bio Barbara Eldredge grew up in museums all over the country, developing a deep love of art, culture, and the stories objects tell. Before moving to New York in 2008, Barbara graduated summa cum laude from Ohio Wesleyan University with majors in Philosophy and Theater. A knowledge synthesizer, Barbara is most interested in generating multi-perspectival and interdisciplinary examinations of culture. She highlights New York exhibitions and museum news at museummonger.com. In her spare time, Barbara is writing a non-fiction play, Yoricks, about the human skulls used as props in Hamlet over the past four hundred years. She has conducted interviews for Metropolis and her writing has been published

by Core77, CLOG, Flavorwire, and others. b.r.eldredge@gmail.com @barbaraeldredge

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STUDENTS

Conference Presentation Firearms are absent from all American collections of contemporary design, in spite of their importance to design history and their enduring significance in the culture at large. Even when they are discussed in a design-historical context, it is all too easy to ignore the moral implications that color our perception of guns. Why can firearms be displayed in art, history, and military museums, but not in design museums?

What does moral good have to do with the Museum of Modern Art? Many design collections effectively serve as object-based ethical codes revealing how to live a “good” life. Nonetheless, exhibition of a firearm within a design museum has the potential to open a new branch of discussion about guns, design, and morality.

Missing the Modern Gun: Object Ethics in Collections of Design Thesis Extract “That wouldn’t have happened if someone else on that island had had a gun,” said Jim Horvath as he checked the empty magazine of a Ruger .22. It was two weeks after a man dressed as a police officer opened fire on a youth camp north of Oslo, Norway, killing 60 people and wounding another 70 before he was apprehended.

Oslo is a long way from the dusty plains and concealed carry of northwestern Wyoming, where I’d enlisted Horvath to teach me how to shoot. He pushed the magazine back into the Ruger’s handle with a satisfying metallic “click” and explained the three cardinal rules of gun use: “Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Always keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot. And always keep the gun unloaded until you are ready to use it.”

Horvath is a gruff middle-aged gentleman with heavy, thick hands, and thinning sandy-colored hair. I’d been warned about his conservative politics and was prepared for the hour-long speech about my Second Amendment rights, but not the abundance of bonsai trees on his back deck. Cultivating the trees is one of Horvath’s non-gun-related hobbies and his speech is an improbable mixture of right wing ideology and eastern philosophy. He provided me with a handout to accompany our lesson; following statements on the necessity of the 2nd Amendment as a “doomsday provision” is a section labeled “The ZEN of Pistol Shooting.”

By the time we headed for the shooting range, I was starting to think that he made some good points.

“If your car breaks down between Cody and Gillette, you might as well be on the moon,” Horvath said. “Don’t let yourself be a victim.” This is a common theme of the National Rifle Association that I heard over and over again: Don’t be a victim. Be prepared. If everyone has a gun, all are protected. Guns can mean the difference between being murdered, raped, or walking away unharmed. It feels like a rather pessimistic and grim picture of humanity.

Holding the loaded .22, I better understood. I felt strong, competent, and powerful. I felt like I was demonstrating my own responsibility to be safe and good, performing my morality. It seems strange to admit now, but firing at a paper plate stapled to a support on the range felt great.

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STUDENTS

Because a gun is also a symbol, it affects people in more ways than one. The context in which the gun appears—how it is held and how it is used—plays off of the violent potential it contains without necessarily actualizing that violence. Just seeing a gun changes power dynamics: it can induce fear in one’s opponent.

Paul Virilio wrote that for all the technological innovation and science afforded by military forces, “War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle: to fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to ‘captivate’ him, to instill the fear of death before he actually dies.” 1 The gun can be more about inducing feelings of threat, the perception that one has the capacity to kill rather than the act of killing itself. Because of what a gun does—propel a projectile at high speed in a desired direction, often with the intent to pierce or inflict harm—and the associations that attend it, it is necessarily an object of power. The way that a handgun fits into the palm of one’s hand like an extension of the body and the directionality implied by the point of the barrel combine to imply intentionality and dominance. The gun’s force is directed, controlled, seemingly integrated into the body itself. When someone holds a firearm, there is immediately a spatial change in power: those behind the gun are more powerful than those in front of it (unless, of course, the person standing in front of the gun is holding a bigger, more powerful gun).

The Colt revolver may have been called a great equalizer, 2 but there is really nothing equalizing about it. The gun produces a psychological effect in both the user and the people around them. Hold a gun in your hand and, like a magic talisman, it grants you superiority rather than equality.

1 P aul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Patrick Camiller (London & New York: Verso, 1989).

2 T here is a popular apocryphal saying that goes something like: “God made man, but Mr. Colt made men equal.”

Acknowledgements Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the success of the D-Crit program during its first four years, and to those who have helped to stage this conference.

Emily Weiner, Program Coordinator Victor de la Cruz, Systems Administrator Steven Heller, D-Crit Program Co-founder David Rhodes, SVA President Anthony Rhodes, SVA Executive Vice-President Jeff Nesin, SVA Provost Andrea Codrington Lippke, D-Crit Thesis Advisor Peter Hall, External Reader Stephen Nickson, Presentation Skills Coach Thesis Advisors: Akiko Busch Andrew Byrom Stuart Ewen Adam Harrison Levy Alan Rapp Meredith TenHoor Guest Critics: Tod Lippy Meredith TenHoor Nicola Twilley Khoi Vinh Design: Matthew Rezac, Conference Identity and Design Eric Price, Web Design Modern Press, Printing Communications: Gayle Snible, SVA Communications Pamela Williams, Williams & House Photography: Jeff Weiser, Portrait Photography John Messinger, Event Photography Teaser Videos: Neil Krupnick, Videography and Editing Felix Lau, Title Animation Tony Chu (@tonyhschu), Tweet Cloud Development

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D-Crit Faculty: Kurt Andersen Paola Antonelli Akiko Busch Ralph Caplan Russell Flinchum Steven Heller Karrie Jacobs Alexandra Lange Julie Lasky Adam Harrison Levy Andrea Codrington Lippke Leital Molad Daniella Ohad Smith Phil Patton Shax Riegler Elizabeth Spiers Karen Stein Meredith TenHoor Alice Twemlow First Year D-Crit Students: Brigette Brown Cecilia Fagel Tiffany Lambert Matthew Shaw Bryn Smith Amanda Vallance Visual Arts Theatre: Vidya Alexander, Operations Manager Vincent Burich, Technical Manager Jessica Jackson, Administrative Manager Jessica St. John, Director Coffee and snacks partner

Furniture and reception partner

Reception catering

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The SVA MFA in Design Criticism is a pioneering two-year graduate program that trains students to research, analyze, and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications. Study with some of the best design writers and thinkers of our time, including MoMA’s senior curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli, former editor of I.D. Magazine Ralph Caplan, Metropolis contributing editor Karrie Jacobs, and The New York Times automobile critic Phil Patton. Learn how to curate an exhibition, produce a radio segment, launch a blog, edit a publication, host a lecture series, and stage a major conference. Understand the forces shaping contemporary design and immerse yourself in the controversies that challenge it; find your personal voice, hone your writing skills, and develop your critical stance. Join D-Crit alumni working as editors, curators, researchers, managers, educators, and bloggers. Apply today and make a stand. D-Crit is accepting applications for Fall 2012 on a rolling basis, as space allows. For more information please visit www.dcrit.sva.edu.

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.sva.edu

Core77’s Design Awards recognize excellence across a wide range of enterprise: commercial, cultural, social, environmental, and intellectual. This year’s program features 17 categories, providing designers, researchers, and writers alike with a unique opportunity to communicate the passion, intent, and rigor behind their efforts. The second year of the Core77 Design Awards sees two new categories, including Writing & Commentary, a nod to Design Criticism as a distinct genre of discourse, and we are pleased to have D-Crit Chair Alice Twemlow as the inaugural Jury Captain for this category in 2012. Both the professional and student winners of each category will receive the C77DA trophy, and all honorees will be published in the Awards Gallery, across the Core77 online network, and in the awards publication. www.Core77DesignAwards.com

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street New York City www.dcrit.sva.edu/conference2012 @dcritconference

The 2012 D-Crit Conference