Design Writing  X inyi Li MFA Communications Design Pratt Institute
Calvino
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contents Lightness
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Keyword, Aphorism, Text
Days, Years, Centuries, Ages and Eons
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Exhibition Review
Design Thinking
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Screed
Callous
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Fifty Things
Crying Baby Phobia
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Fifty Things
Trader Joe’s in Chelsea place
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Keyword, Aphorism, Text
Lightness
Six Memos for the Millennium is a collection of five lectures by Italo Calvino, the Italian novelist and short story writer, was about to deliver before his death in 1985. The book is a defense of literature and a legacy for our current millennium. The first Chapter is devoted to Lightness, one of the five indispensable qualities Calvino valued.
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But if literature is not enough to assure me that I am not just chasing dreams, I look to science to nourish my visions in which all heaviness disappears. Today every branch of science seems intent on demonstrating that the world is supported by the most minute entities, such as the messages of DNA, the impulses of neurons, and quarks, and neutrinos wandering through space since the beginning of time……
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Italo Calvino Six Memos for the Millennium
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Through abundant quotations of literature works covering different aspects, Calvino demonstrated his ideal of lightness in literature. This piece makes me think about similarities between literature and design . Firstly, literature uses allusion to reference something beyond the text. Designers also do this. Semiotics, symbols and signifiers are shared concepts in literature and design. Second, is the idea of authorship. This book is not only about the weaved words itself, but also a critical reflection of other authors. Calvino cited from other literatures to support his argument. If the idea is the skeleton which form the basis of an article, then arguments are the flesh. Together they stand for a statement. Typeface, color, and composition are all the basic syntactic elements of design . Adding semantic elements, designers complete the communication. Designers also act as authors, providing the content through the form of communication. Compared to design , literature is even lighter. Without illustrating all the details to the eyes, words leave more space for people to
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imagine and think. This is also why I think this piece is effective writing. It touches plenty of ideas and gives us so much to think about. The idea of lightness also reminds me of an ancient poet Li Bai — just like Calvino, whose works provide us a new perspective to look at things.
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Days, Years, Centuries, Ages and Eons
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exhibition review
Days, Years, Centuries, Ages and Eons
On Kawara — Silence is Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara’s first comprehensive retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition was installed in 12 sections according to a plan devised by the artist himself. When planning the exhibition two years ago, Kawara offered the exhibition’s curator Jeffrey Weiss a list
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of titles for the exhibition’s 12 sections, including Everyday Meditation, 48 Years and Self-Observation. Kawara passed away last year June while the exhibition was in preparation. Overall, I feel a lack of his own voice and a critical position in his work. He was influenced by conceptual art and Minimalism, which attempted to avoid metaphor and symbolism. The sizes are constrained; the contents are uniform. My personal response to his form is limited. The form is too wintry to affect me. I don’t know if the artist devise the title of the exhibition Silence by himself too. It could be a suggestion that his voice remains silent throughout his works. The spiral structure of the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda adds a hint of dizzy feeling to the exhibition. Walking up along the ramps did make me lost in time and space, and I felt the density of days and years. This exhibition successfully visualized time. More precisely, it made time perceptible and created an experiential environment. I would say it is the right venue for this exhibition. The experience of visiting is a
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revealing narrative. Beginning with simple and direct date paintings, the exhibition gradually tells the audience that the artist was recording more than just dates. After seeing heavy volumes of data, I wonder how many projects he was doing simultaneously. The Guggenheim thoughtfully provided an Exhibition Checklist upon admission. Although it is easy to find out with some simple note-taking and calculation, I still expected more hints. What if it was curated in cyclical timelines? Starting from 1966, Kawara created Today series, nearly three thousand acrylic paintings with a single date in white sans-serif typeface on a monochrome background. The paintings are stored in separate cases made of cardboard with a piece of that day’s newspaper as the lining. These date paintings are his largest body of work. Apart from the seemingly dry Today series, Kawara also recorded details of his life between the late 1960s and 1979, resulting in several series of work: I Got Up, I am still alive, I Met, I Went, and I Read. I Got Up is a collection of scenery postcards he sent to
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friends from his location, stamped with the time he got up on that morning. I Met, I Went and I Read are presented in multiple volumes of three-ring folders containing typed names of people he has met, drawn routes he has passed on a copy of map, and press clippings of personal readings. Kawara devised his own calendar system One Hundred Years to keep track of his days. A day marked with a green dot meant that he created a painting; a red dot meant more than one; a yellow dot meant none. He kept the same standardized format of work for closely to fifty years. There is a privation of human touch in his work. The dates on monochromatic canvas were drawn in a mechanical way. Although all the paints are hand-mixed, the change of tone is too subtle to notice. It is hard to tell that they are hand-drawn paintings rather than printed works. Other major series are either typed by typewriter or stamped. The only piece where we could see his handwritings is Paris-New York Drawings. The exhibition begins with drawings produced in Paris in 1964, which
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are fascinating proposals for unrealized installations and objects. Compared to his other work, the early Paris-New York Drawings are more revealing. Handwritings, sketches and notations in different languages bring us closer to the artist. Kawara presents a large amount of raw data with very little context. He provides audience with details of when he woke up, where he was, who he met, where he visited and what he read, but the quality of his day and circumstances remain unknown. He also presents journals, but they are coded in numbers and colored slashes which are supposed to be read and understood only by himself. Some Today paintings have a hidden lawyer of information which relies on the power of language. Kawara adapted his orthography of the dates to that of the country in which he was located when he created that particular painting. Elements as small as a comma and a period can reveal a story. The artist merely relies on the audience’s background knowledge to interpret the work. As
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a person who hasn’t use telegrams, I will no be able to decode the connotations of each different format and company in I am still alive. There are no clues given the audience. The quantity of his grand survey about space, time and existence is impressive. Human beings will always seek the meaning of existence, trying to connect personal meaning to a larger context. Nicholas Felton’s Felton Report is a contemporary example of presenting dry personal data. With our smartphones and movement-tracking Apps, we’re producing data as well, whether consciously or unconsciously. Because we only live once, daily mundane moments seems insignificant and light. Our existence is nearly negligible in the cosmic span of time. Kawara kept a very low profile, rather mysterious life. There is rarely an interview or a photograph of him. He even skipped his own exhibitions in his late career. The exact date of his birth and death are not clear, and his family has continued to protect this information. From his calendar One
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Hundred Years, it’s conceivable that the artist lived through the 29,771st day, but did not complete the 29,772nd. He lived his life like executing an algorithm. I wonder what he did besides recording and making his art? He turned his own present into a part of his art. Maybe that is his critical position.
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Design thinking is not design
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SCREED
Design thinking is not design
The term design thinking has gained attention over the past decades and has been applied in businesses and university programs. I can’t help being skeptical about design thinking. The term emerged in the 1980s with the rise of human-centered design. Later on, design thinking was adapted for business purposes by David Kelley, founder of IDEO and head of the d.school at Stanford. Design thinking began with good intentions and actually could be helpful, but more recently it has been misused and become a term some people hate.
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Design thinking has a definition for sure, but it is still vague and fuzzy. Even Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, confesses in an interview that he has not “ended with any definition” of design thinking. Tim Brown has
Design thinking is not design . Design thinking as a rigid and reusable process contradicts the nature of innovation. The process of creating tends to be cyclical, often uncomfortable and even painful. Merely following Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation stages of designing could become a limitation. Design thinking focuses too much on the form of process alone. Making Post-it notes does not mean that you are systematic and organized.
published a book on the topic of design thinking : Change By Design . He thinks that people need a secure space to be playful and creative. Once he had the audience fire finger blasters towards him on stage in a TED talk. This is the playfulness that he believes could help people get to better creative solutions?
Now when people talk about design thinking , the concept I come up with is the behavior of packaging the design process for the corporate world. Design thinking is a seemingly fancy tool for business,
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which they use to frame their process and help to pitch to clients and sell to get quick profits. It is misused by companies wanting more scientific frameworks and data to back up their projects. By framing the process into a method, they make the projects seem like more research.
Design thinking  is a simplified version of research methods for nonresearchers. It could be shallow and represent only parts of the original research method. In  design thinking , the first step is to develop empathy. It
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was taken from a qualitative research method — ethnography research. The advocate of rapid prototyping and learn by doing is research by design , one of the three kinds of design research .
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Sometime I feel people are being arrogant talking about design thinking . Applying design thinking to trigger creativity sounds like that other people are not creative. What is creativity after all? Walking around and talking about design thinking doesn’t make you more or less privileged.
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Practitioners tend to over-promise what design thinking can deliver. Design thinking does not always end up with successful outcomes. It does not guarantee an ultimate solution for any problem. Design thinking as a method must have
The term empathy also suggests that designers are better than the users. Designers are playing God who can create something to solve the problems.
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One of Design Thinking’s biggest advocates Bruce Nussbaum, said that we should move on from design thinking and bing up a new concept as Creative Intelligence, or CQ. He believed that behaviors could be taught to raise people’s CQ. To me design thinking and CQ are the same. The latter one is just a repackaging of the name. Stop bragging about creative. Design thinking is a way of seeing, but not the only and very best way. We do need multi-disciplinary thinking and systematic approaches, as there are complex issues in every part of culture and society that need to be taken care of.
a success rate and have faced failures, however, we seldom see any report about cases that failed.
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Fifty Things That Make Me Anxious
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For the first ti that my callo Ironically, I just now I’m typi in the New Y with my smart the intimate me with my the lost of m Fifty things
Callous
When I was about to take a nap the other day, I snuggled down in bed with my right hand in front of my eyes. Then the lines on my fingers caught my attention. The middle finger seems to have more visible lines than
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ime I noticed ous was gone. ust realized that ing this draft York subway tphone. I lose e moment of words, like my callous. the index finger. From bottom to top, relatively long parallel lines transit to an area of a weblike appearance. I realized that there used to be a hard callous on the left of my middle finger’s first knuckle, evidence of having held a pen and written a lot. For the first time I noticed that my callous was gone. Since primary school, the callous of my middle finger became a part of my body that I am anxious about. I tended to hold the pen too tight when I was young, trying to control exactly the direction of my strokes. As the result of the chronic pressure and friction, my knuckle turned pink and smooth, sometimes even glossy
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For the first ti that my callo Ironically, I just now I’m typi in the New Y with my smart the intimate me with my the lost of m after finishing a long exam. Writing too much seemed to erase the lines somehow, and replaced the lines with a prominent callous. Its existence was too strong to ignore, so I couldn’t help rubbing it with my thumb. This is something universal since most students had that callous. We used to joke around with boys who didn’t have that obvious callous, stereotypical students who didn’t care about coursework that much and probably only cared about playing basketball. After I went to college, more and more learning materials are in digital form. I don’t write by hand as much as I did years ago. Gradually, my callous regressed unnoticed. As I moved a lot
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ime I noticed ous was gone. ust realized that ing this draft York subway tphone. I lose e moment of words, like my callous. between schools and home in different cities, books and journals became a sweet burden. I love physical books and journals but I know I have to travel light. I persuaded myself to use more digitalized books and notes when possible. I kept a diary every now and then. It does not necessarily contain sentimentality, but some trivia facts that happened. I still have a small notebook with me since 2009. When flipping the pages, the changes to my handwriting are too obvious to ignore. One saying goes that you can read a person by reading his/her handwriting. It is no doubt that handwriting could capture some emotions of that moment.
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For the first ti that my callo Ironically, I just now I’m typi in the New Y with my smart the intimate me with my the lost of m Now I still keep a dairy every now and then. Instead of writing with pen on paper, I type in applications now. One major advantage is that I can search and navigate in a calendar view so easily. Features such as mark and tags help me to be organized. Same as we highlight some words either by underline or marker. However, I feel something has been lost. In digital form, typefaces can also express emotion certainly. Typographic treatment is conscious and intentional, whereas handwriting could reveal something you might not even notice at that moment. The expressions of handwriting is more spontaneous. The impact of a change in
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ime I noticed ous was gone. ust realized that ing this draft York subway tphone. I lose e moment of words, like my callous. writing tool is more than that. When I type a sentence instead of writing by hand, my habit changes. Since it’s easy to modify, I often start with writing down fragments and turn them into sentences later. I hesitate, with less confidence in what I am writing. I feel written words bears much more than typed words. Ironically, I just realized that now I’m typing this draft in the New York subway with my smartphone. I lose the intimate moment of me with my words, like the lost of my callous.
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Fifty things
Crying Baby Phobia
The cries of babies or young children make me anxious. I cannot stand their screams or noises. Why couldn’t their parents do something to stop them from crying? If a noisy baby is seated behind you, either in an airplane or a
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bus, and keeps kicking your seat, the whole journey would be a nightmare. At least in this situation I don’t have to intervene with the baby directly. I cannot imagine a situation where I would be left with a baby and was asked to take care of it, since I won’t know what to do to calm her down — as if she know what calm is. If I calm down to analyze, what drives me insane is that I would not be able to talk to them and communicate by presenting facts and reasoning. I couldn’t amuse babies nor play with them. It could be related to how I communicate with adults. I tend to be straightforward and direct without beating around the bush. Being tactful
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is a skill that I haven’t developed. Another fact that annoys me is that babies are not in control of their emotions. They are helpless and express whatever discontentment they might have. Babies cry for expression, for communicate, for attention, and for no reason. One single activity carries so many possible meanings that makes it nearly impossible to understand babies’ minds, thus it is hard to meet their needs accurately and comfort them. Generally, high pitched noises can be very stressful. Screaming of babies is just one of them. Hearing noises will simply cause an overwhelming feeling, as if losing control of the world around me.
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After a quick search, I found out that I am certainly not the only one. My symptoms could be explained as a slight dislike of children. There is a more serious disorder called pedophobia. Paedophobia is a general fear of infants and young children. It could be a sign that a person has not developed a strong parental role in life, and is not emotionally strong enough. The tie between parents and offspring is always delicate. I’m still too immature to think about it.
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PLACE
Trader Joe’s in Chelsea
When it was about off-work time, streets were full of fast-paced New Yorkers. Some of them were walking in sneakers and tights, some with heavy-looking grocery bags on their arms. I headed out from our studio on 18th Street. Following the origin of those people, I happened to enter the Trader Joe’s grocery store on 6th Avenue during the rush hour. The line occupied almost the whole store. Near the entrance, a fellow held a sign which said: this is the end of the line. I was frightened.
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The store was brightly lit and packed with fresh foods as well as prepared meals, but it was not as crowded as Westside Market, where I am always afraid that I would bump into stacks when passing by. Bananas were only 19 cents each; a bowl of prepared salad was just 3.99 dollars; a chunk of Angus ribeye steak was only 9 dollars or so. The prices were even lower than in the market I often go to in Jersey City. Moreover, it seemed like most of the items are organic. Stacked goods prevented me from looking around and observing the environment after being in the store for a while. Walls were decorated with illustrations and sign paintings . Pricing tags and promotion signs were hand lettered with drop shadows . Tropical
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patterns on the recyclable shopping bags strengthened the vintage  aesthetics . It was easy to see that the store is trying to convey a friendly and organic feeling.
Red mini shopping carts and baskets circulated. Thinking about what could I cook with those ingredients, I started to wander around and put things into my shopping basket. The line moved faster than I thought it would. Since the store was not spacious enough to cater to twenty lines, we were lining up as a single line and would be called toward a free cashier. Cashiers were nice and polite. They welcomed me with warm greetings and packed my groceries reasonably into two layered kraft paper bags in a gentle manner. Unlike cold-faced cashier who throws
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stuff randomly into tons of plastic bags with a careless attitude, crews here seemed passionate about their work and to care about the items they sell.
Opened in 2010, this branch is relatively new. The location was last occupied by a giant Barnes & Noble store. Dose the public favor cheese instead of literature these days? Chelsea has seen many transformations. From a place of industry, to residential apartments, art galleries and theaters, Chelsea become a neighborhood with a creative vibe. What would people with an  artistic  eye say about the unfashionable Hawaiian T-shirt? Thinking about New York is overwhelming, because its profound history. Manhattan is old, and each building is full of history and anecdotes. I have returned to the store for plenty of times, not only because it is on my way to the PATH train
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station on 23rd Street, but also because I enjoy the shopping experience as a whole. Although the deliberate boutique statement seems banal, it does make for an easy environment for grocery shopping. When it comes to trivia of life, the reasoning and questioning don’t seem to matter that much anymore. I have become one of the fast-paced walkers, carrying weighty bags home and rushing to devour my dinner.
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