Design Conferrences
Interview with Martin Venezky
Desholic February 2009
Designers Favorite Places
Design Conferrences 59
Design Repair
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The designer
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The Typography book Effect
Interview with Martin Venezky
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Designers Favorite Places
CONFERENCES
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The DX National Design Conference @ DX
Ourtopias: Ideal cities and the roles of design in remaking urban space. This interdisciplinary conference, the second presented by the Design Exchange, Canada’s National Design Centre, seeks to explore the varied and future states of cities. Interested in the roles cities play in the economic, social and cultural lives of societies, such topics as the architectural, design and material culture of cities, densification, urban renewal, branding, zoning, adaptive re-use, gentrification, social responsibility and historic preservation will be explored. Date: September 4 - 6, 2008 Location: The DX, 234 Bay, Toronto, Ontario http://www.dx.org/conference
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DGrad07– Forum on Graduate Education in Design: Development and Directions
A decade ago, Canada had only a handful of design-related Master’s programs. The options for pursuing graduate education in design in Canada were limited. Recently, graduate-level design education has been developing rapidly, with several new programs either beginning in the past few years or scheduled to launch within a few years. Together with existing graduate programs in design, a new landscape of graduate education in design is emerging. This special forum organized by DGrad07: The First Canadian
National Conference on Graduate Education in Design provides a supportive, encouraging environment for educators and students from different colleges and universities to share their experiences in graduate programs in design, from proposal stage to program implementation. Date: September 11 - 12, 2008 Location: The DX, 234 Bay, Toronto, Ontario http://www.dx.org
AIGA conference Social Studies: Ed
This AIGA design educators’ conference addresses the social life of design. Graphic designers work with clients, institutions, users, and communities to make things happen in the world. Yet education often focuses on the individual voice. How are we preparing students for a lifetime of working with and for other people? How are our students connecting to the world? Come participate in a relaxed and stimulating weekend of lively discussions, hands-on workshops, and informal activities. The Social Studies conference is a project of AIGA, sponsored by Adobe Systems. The conference is hosted by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Date: September 23 - 24, 2008 Location: Maryland Institute College of Art, 1400 Mt. Royal Avenue, Baltimore http://www.socialstudiesconference.org
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FAV O R I T E P L A C E S
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Starbucks Starbucks Coffee always figured that putting people before products just made good common sense. So far, it’s been working out for us. Our relationships with farmers yield the highest quality coffees. The connections we make in communities create a loyal following. And the support we provide our baristas pays off everyday. Starbucks Coffee always figured that putting people before products just made good common sense. So far, it’s been working out for us. Our relationships with farmers yield the highest quality coffees. The connections we make in communities create a loyal following. And the support we provide our baristas pays off everyday.
R.O.M The Royal Ontario Museum is among the world’s leading museums of natural history, and Eaton Center
of world cultures. Indeed, in combining a universal museum
Toronto Eaton Centre is
of cultures with that of natural
a place like no other. Its
history, the ROM offers an
spectacular glass galleria
unusual breadth of experience
soars above a fascinating
to visitors and scholars from
selection of more than 230
around the world.
retailers, restaurants and services.Toronto Eaton
Subway
Centre is Canada’s premier
The Royal Ontario Museum offers a unique platform to
shopping destination and is
Wherever Subway
the engage the worlds of
an experience that defines
restaurants are located,
culture and the environment
elevated living, offering
the core menu stays
at the centre of one of North
international retailers
relatively the same
America’s great cities. We
unrivalled by any other
—
shopping in downtown
of some cultural and
here, and to sharing the adven-
Toronto. Truly a unique
religious variations.
tures of this place, with all
destination that offers an
World travelers can
its treasures.
urban vibrancy and
expect the same high
exciting possibilities
quality of ingredients
with every visit.
regardless of what
with the exception
nation they are visiting.
look forward to meeting you
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Feb 2009
Many would call your approach “experimental.” Do you believe this is a fair appraisal? The term “experimental” is often used as a code for unusable, weird, “crazy” or “going wild”. But I think that is a big misunderstanding, and something I try hard to correct in the classroom. When I teach an experimental class, I am quick to explain that experimentation is a methodology. What do you think is being implied by that? It suggests a circular set of steps: setting up an experiment, running the process, analyzing the results and then letting the results guide the next experiment. There is no external aesthetic to experimental work. It is as much about setting criteria and using them to analyze results as it is about the producing of the material. Far I N T E R V I E W
W I T H
M A R T i N
V E N E Z K Y
from “going wild”, it is a very rigorous exercise that allows a designer to confidently engage in work whose results are unpredictable. So, yes, I think that a lot of my work is experimental, but not in the ways that most define it. If it’s not just about the gestational speed of your working methods, it’s often about the physicality of them. Why is materiality so important to you? Because I’m a human being and human beings seem to like to hold real things in their real hands. And like to learn from other human beings. You’ve devoted an entire section to teaching in your book. Here is a bit of a Chicken and Egg riddle: What is the relationship of your practice to your teaching methodology? Does your unique way of working inspire lessons and pedagogy, or does working with
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students influence your own projects? The way I make things is a result of the way I interact with the world, in all its eccentricity. And the way I teach is a result of the way I make things, in all of its stubborn (though not ineffective) abnormality. The classroom forces me to articulate my point of view, my opinions, my process. I must develop a persuasive argument in my own defense. But that very articulation changes me by nudging me towards self reflection and criticism. And that then changes my interaction with the world and its reflection in my work. Early in your book you say that you, “search for an internal logic within the work. That logic may become more complex or turn in on itself. But it is no more random than a twisting vine.” I have seen the term “internal logic” used to talk about postmodern sculpture by Rosalind Krauss, Andrew Blauvelt suggests it in his Emigre rant on critical autonomy, and in the follow up Emigre issue Experimental Jet Set says: “In our view, design should have a certain autonomy, an inner logic that exists independently of the tastes and trends of so-called target audiences.” What do you mean by internal logic? It is the same internal logic that feeds the other arts – film, writing, music, drama, painting. In each case it seems that the role of the creator is an attempt to create a piece that seems to have created itself. It’s like developing a machinery that generates the entire work. A writer or dramatist may craft a series of characters and a basic premise and then set them loose. The characters and the premise might be absurd when compared to an external logic. But within the world that has been created, it all makes sense. This is not an easy thing. That’s why there is an awful lot of bad music and bad film. Contrivance has a way of creeping out of the seams of an
imperfect work. Effortlessness takes an enormous amount of effort. This is the part that is so often missed, especially when discussing “intuitive” work. The best intuitive work seems to be a result of immense preparation and development, and comes from a source of confidence, not simply “anything goes.” In “Thoughts on the Classroom” you seem to be saying that your teaching and practice, and process, it all seems to come back to a certain kind of physicality. Is this the thread that ties together, thinking, making, teaching for you? What is the importance of tangibility? Yes, tangibility is a result of my experimenting with materials and their reproduction. Are their other threads I, or others might miss? Other threads, which I discuss in the book involve the emotions of melancholy and sentimentality, which affect me very much. They don’t
always come through in the subject matter, but often in the fragility and decay of the materials and construction. How can any designer know they’re ready? If you are ready and open, the right graduate program can change your life. You begin to see design in terms beyond a profession, but as a way of examining the world. Once you develop the tools of investigation, everything becomes so much more curious, and you can see your own work as a response to that curiosity. In an essay Katherine McCoy wrote in Steven Heller’s The Education of a Graphic Designer (1998) she closes with this paragraph: “Emotion, subjective interpretation, and hand gestures are what humans can contribute and computer’s expert systems can not. Highly technological societies will likely put a premium on subjective human values. This suggests the possibility of a renewed appreciation and new applications of our earlier, intuitive, image-oriented, and generated
design approaches. Design as a cultural activity, including aesthetic and personal expression, may be the essential source of values, emotions, and play that we all need in the digital domain.” The Mcoy’s were the designers in residence when you where at Cranbrook, and left shortly after you did, three years before this was written. Does this sound like something Kathy would have said to you while you were her student? If so it is easy to see how this way of thinking has influenced your process and your way of thinking about physicality and materiality that you mentioned earlier. In 1991, the computer was not yet seen as a limitation. It was a transitional period and the computer was still an awkward instrument (or at least we students were awkward operators). No world wide web, no emails, just the very beginnings of color printouts (and expensive beginnings at that)… So technology’s chipping away at subjective human values was not yet apparent. We were just trying to keep our damn Syquest
disks from crashing! I turned back to handwork because that was how I had been working for years. My formative years were based on wax, rubber cement, and parallel rules. So it was less a response to the coldness of the computer and more a safety zone where I felt I could control and express things more efficiently. Kathy was (and still is) an influence on me, but not in the obvious ways this statement might suggest. During my time at Cranbrook, she never preached one kind of design, or one methodology over any other. Her skill was more personal. For me it was seeing a direction I was too comfortable with (using vernacular imagery in a smart-alecky cold way) and challenging me to tackle its direct opposite (replacing it with something painfully personal). Those kinds of engagements are far more powerful than manifestos.