Participants:
Blake Almstead
Helen Armstrong
Cheryl Beckett
Sean Carnegie
Kate Iltis
Laurie Kemp
Jen Lee
Emily Luce
Erin Mayes
Charles Melcher
Chris Moore
Virgil Scott
David Shields
Chris Taylor

Margo Halverson (DI president/ “framer”)
Peter Hall (DI vice president/”framer”)

special guests (popping in)
Anita Cooney (DI Board)
Jennifer Elsner (DI Marfa co-ordinator),
Gabrielle Esperdy (DI Board)
Lana Le (DI Family)
Gavin, Sam & Dylan (DI class of 2030)

via skype:
Melle Hammer (DI co-founder/ “framer”)

<<<>>>

Meet at the Gas Station, 325 East San Antonio Street, Marfa, TX 79843 c/o Meghan Gerety

THURSDAY MARCH 11 arrive, acclimatize
3PM OPENING CEREMONIES <<<SPARKS, LIGHTS AND OTHER PHENOMENA>>>

Margo Halverson (DI president, Maine College of Art) & Peter Hall (DI v.president, lecturer UT Austin) opening remarks

>>>

Chris Moore, (assistant professor, Conordia University, Montreal)

I wish to explore design as a means for understanding and mediating unfamiliar
geographic and cultural terrains. Can the tools of creative representation help us engage more directly with notions of place? What new information can be gleaned beyond the rational, staid approaches employed by sociologists, anthropologists and cartographers, informed by the scientific method? More generally, I wish to participate in a shared experience that leaves all contributors inspired and transformed.

A provocation and discussion point to explore how we mediate environments through non-objective means. Maps, statistics, climate surveys, latitude/longitude indicators, and imaging data all provide useful information about the characteristics of a region, but these artifacts lack a humanizing element, and do not readily reveal the qualities of inhabitation, adaptation to physical circumstances, or the resultant products of culture that emerge. Can design also be a research tool for sociologists and anthropologists to move away from traditional modes of analysis? What new data can be aggregated from this process?

My objective is to lead plein air creative mediation tours, whereby participants choose a method of representation (photography, drawing, painting, creative writing, etc.) as a means towards generating a multifaceted profile of the region. The accumulated documentation will form a collaborative portrait to assist all participants in understanding the location of our temporary retreat. Ideally, this activity would be scheduled for the first day of DesignInquiry.

>>>

Virgil Scott (Assistant Professor, Communication Design, Texas A&M University-Commerce Universities Center at Dallas)
Studio 2o4 / Letterpress http://www.flickr.com/photos/204studio/

Nothingness: People constantly ask me, “why do you go to Marfa, what’s there?” To which I always reply, “Nothing, it is not what’s there, it’s what isn’t.” As a designer this perception of nothing represents that unbridled possibility akin to the blank page–that inspirational promising moment of focus–where creativity lives.

I propose a night field trip to view the Marfa mystery lights as a metaphor for the creative possibility that exists in Marfa. This leap-of-faith exercise will serve as an inspirational jumping off point to be translated into story telling experiences, interviews, ethnography, artifacts, photos, drawings, etc. Anything that presents itself in the possibility of what isn’t there. The outcome could be presented and discussed the next morning. What can design learn from this reductive minimalist inspirational approach, utilizing elements that are void and full at the same time

>>>

Emily Luce (Assistant professor, University of Lethbridge)

Unexplained Natural Phenomena for Designers: The plan is to collect historical visual data on the Marfa Mystery Lights upon arrival in Marfa. These materials will form a basis for discussion around the attempt to quantify (contain?)(design?) a fleeting, inexplicable experience. The project will close with a field trip (or two or three) out to see the lights.

FRIDAY MARCH 12
9am <<< TERRITORIAL INTERACTIONS>>>

Chris Taylor (Director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX)
http://landarts.org and http://arch.ttu.edu and http://arcworkerscombine.com

Being in place and being nowhere—both “heres” of the American landscape: My presentation would hinge on the working methods of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, a semester-long interdisciplinary field program I direct within the College of Architecture to expand the definition of land art through direct experience with the complex social and ecological processes that shape contemporary landscapes. These forces include everything from geomorphology to human construction, and cigarette butts to hydroelectric dams. Each fall Land Arts brings students and professionals into the landscape to work while camping for nearly two months while traveling around 7,000 miles visiting sites such as: White Sands National Monument, Chaco Canyon, north rim of the Grand Canyon, Double Negative, Sun Tunnels, Spiral Jetty, Center for Land Use Interpretation Wendover, Muley Point, Plains of San Agustin, The Lightning Field, Very Large Array, Gila Wilderness, Chiricahua Mountains, Cabinetlandia, Marfa, and Adobe Alliance in Presidio, Texas.

The presentation would draw from material published in Land Arts of the American West (UT Press 2009) about the history and development of the program, as well as Incubo Atacama Lab (Incubo 2008) about the extension of the Land Arts program into Chile. More information about those books can be found at http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/taylan.html and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9563196112?tag=christaylor05-20.

>>>

Sean Carnegie (Designer, Lewis Carnegie, Austin TX.)
http://lewiscarnegie.com/

West Texas Social Media: Social media, as you know, is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable verbal and non-verbal techniques. It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. So with a “Yee-Haw”, “Howdy” and a “How-Do” attendees will be asked to critically and without prejudice disassemble personal idiosyncrasies.

>>>

Cheryl Beckett (Associate Professor, University of Houston, creative director, Minor Design)
www.minordesign.com, http://design.uh.edu/beckett/

Being There is a thematic idea intrinsically linked to my teaching methodology. I have taken my students on numerous expeditions; a trip to Marfa and Big Bend in the early part of the decade altered their significance. An important aspect of these journeys is the belief that students need to Be There; that an analysis, a close read of place and space, would influence their design philosophy. At Chinati, an inspirational book entitled Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice by Francesco Careri eloquently articulated and expanded my awareness of how understanding a place, in this case through the pedestrian experience, alters what you make. Since then, I have taught a seminar entitled the Art of Walking, with the belief that the designer, in order to be an advocate of sustainability, needs to develop an experiential and analytical relationship with the environment.

For the presentation in Marfa I will introduce the Art of Walking in relation to the analysis of place and perform a pecha kucha on walking that encapsulates all these ideas. The discussion will explore the series of site-based projects and the general experiences gained from the rural, the urban, the foreign, and the familiar on promoting citizen-aware designers.

>>>

Blake Almstead (Visual Design, Compuware, Detroit MI & adjunct design professor)

A design charette: How new expectations of the user interface (UI) could translate into non-digital forms of design. I am currently designing UI experiences and interfaces for massive corporations. About ten years ago if you asked a CEO of a company would they use an interface like Mint.com they probably wouldn’t trust the candy color interface and “fun” transitions. Now it’s amazing what has become accepted and expected when it comes to the world of interface design for non-public software. Apple has created strict UI design brand standards, using those same limitations how would one create a book or a poster? I would love the opportunity to try a design charette to work with some of these ideas.

>>>

Helen Armstrong (Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Miami University)
www.helenarmstrongdesigner.com

I am currently working on a new book project called Designing for Participatory Culture. BEING HERE intrigues me as I am exploring ways that designers can move beyond finished polished designs to more open-ended generative work. Such designs could be fluid enough to take on a “sense of place” instigated by the user involved. I believe that by welcoming, even requiring, user participation, we open our work to surrounding locales/ideas rather then interpreting and delivering top down messages from our clients.

My presentation will include a discussion of contemporary professional projects as well as an examination of student work. Projects discussed utilize new forms of production/distribution (digital printing, rapid manufacturing, distribution through Amazon and Etsy) capable of responding to the content of individual users our select groups of users. I will address the following issues: What are the dangers of co-creation? What happens when the people making the actual content go unpaid? Is there a true value to social capital? If participatory culture loosens top down control in a positive way, how can we designers encourage it while still making a living? How can the “rise of the amateur” create possibilities for more democratic, localized expression rather than threatening our expertise?

>>>

Jen Lee (Graphic Designer, San Francisco, CA)
www.jenklee.com

Installation: I am interested in finding out what kind of impact a foreign language (say, Korean) would have in Marfa, a city that is primarily white, hispanic or native american in its racial demographic. If a Prada store installation can be relatively well-received in an area where it clearly doesn’t belong, how would the introduction of the Korean written language be received, and how does something foreign become relevant in a city like Marfa?

>>>possible evening trip to Fort Davis McDonald Observatory “star show”

SATURDAY MARCH 13
9am <<>>

>>>

Erin Mayes (Owner/Design Director, Em Dash LLC. Austin TX.)
www.emdashonline.com

A a case for inspiration in the canned-food isle: Being HERE is just about the only thing we can completely control in life – you always are where you are. I find it very difficult to attach to the high-minded world of design – deadlines, kids, clients, and so many dramas that need my immediate attention pull my focus away from looking at the world with designer eyes. Life tends to distract me from continuing to learn and feed my head with good ideas. There are plenty of ways to adapt to this, of course, but I choose to plunge into the world of the vernacular and mine from it the gems of beauty or truth or silliness that are always in front of you….in my case, that’s mostly at the grocery store.

>>>

David Shields (Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin)

Site specific Typography: the here-ness of letters or West Texas Town as Specimen Book. The short talk will outline the initial stages of developing a san serif type for Marfa, Texas. A brief historical overview of projects dealing with designing type for places, with an emphasis on contemporary physical manifestations, will give the Marfa project a temporal context. The presentation will show samples used to direct design decisions, gathered from walking tours of town conducted over several trips to Marfa.

>>>

Laurie Kemp (landscape designer, Dig It Gardens, Austin TX.)
http://www.digitgardens.com

My work and life as they are now are defined by and evolve with each day, month, season, year, all dependant partially upon mother nature, and totally hitched upon what is relevant NOW and HERE.
My aim is to reflect a sense of place as is. And, transform not only individual home scapes outward to communities, but also within our sense of ‘norm’ as our inner city landscapes. The hope is to reflect our greater wilder connection to our collective here, regarding our immediate native spaces and resources, as well as our long term global sustenance and ability to be here in time for the long term now, with this more urgent sense of presence being tied to all things.

My job as I see it is to create design solutions that will sustain our now and create joy within it, from it, here on out. My base is a soulfully provoked one and not founded on academia. I’m self taught and self seeking and strive toward consciousness in all things work and play. Beyond this, I’m a fan and founder of small grass roots gatherings and causes within unconventional thought, gathering to create, sustain, and affect change, movement, community, soulful living, and above all JOY.

I believe that the ripples of such brain and people power projects can and are affecting thought and change, everywhere, everyplace, every cause, and each and every moment.

>>>

Kate Iltis (Art Director, EmDash, Austin TX)
http://emdashonline.com/

How Happy Hour Saved the Creative Process: A challenge I find as a designer in a world of emails, phones, the internet and technology in general is finding creative time. Where do ideas have time to surface in an environment of deadlines, interruptions, expectations and of course, fear of failure? What I learned from joining EmDash a few years ago, is stepping away from all of the above is where the ideas come. Our ritual is “calling it” when things have fallen flat. Everybody steps away from the computer and heads for a margarita or a beer (and when its really bad…a whisky). We sit, and take a few sips, and start to talk. No rules, nothing is off limits and no egos….and this is where the magic happens. An adult beverage and time away from the digital world takes the edge off of getting to the finish line and allows us to have fun with the process. For that hour we are purely in the moment of idea making without the pressure. It hasn’t failed us yet and inevitably the great idea is born from an off shoot of the ridiculous one.

For my presentation I plan to explore this process further along with an ode to my muse, booze. A showcase of beautifully designed beer, wine and whisky bottles along with a collection of bar napkin sketches…(i hope).

>>>Evening meal & wrap up>>>

SUNDAY MARCH 14
Make stuff!
>>>Possible afternoon trip to visit Simone Swan in Presidio,
http://www.adobealliance.org/

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The post Not-The-Schedule appeared first on DesignInquiry.

TRUTH & MESSAGE
http://www.portlandphoenix.com/art/top/documents/03917120.asp

DesignInquiry BEING HERE Marfa, TX 2010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV8-E_IhV9M&list=UUPYa1wFDgzoAZdYpKDFmvtw&index=31

The post Residual Works appeared first on DesignInquiry.

Our first 4-day Spring Inquiry was held in the high desert town of Marfa, in far west Texas. With mesquite, cacti, tumbleweed, and pristine mountain air, Marfa has a spare and sublime atmosphere that literally suggests a site-specific creativity. BeingHERE was an opportunity to explore an approach to design that is contemplative and reactive, a design that does not prescribe or impose formulas but responds to the conditions that surrounds it.

The post Being Here: appeared first on DesignInquiry.

Passive consumer >> Active creator
I went to the Marfa Design Inquiry with this question in mind: How can design be more responsive to the conditions that surround it? The answer, I found, lay not in isolated, experimental work but in a larger shift already occurring—the emergence of participatory culture. Creativity, I discovered, is no longer the sole territory of a separate creative class. Professional creatives now face a newly activated public. No longer content to simply digest messages, these users increasingly approach design with the expectation of contribution. Designer Dmitri Siegel calls this “The Templated Mind.”(1) Users approach a design with the expectation that they will have to fill in the blanks—actively insert content.

Technology drives this fundamental shift from passive consumer to active creator. The Internet places the means of production squarely into the hands of the user. Sites like Threadless, Ponoko and Etsy, for example, encourage citizens to produce their own products relying on the expertise and production/distribution methods of the sites. Using Lulu.com the public can write, format, upload, print and disseminate publications. Both amateur and professional photographers can inexpensively share their work through Flickr with millions of people. Technological advances in the mechanics of production, particularly digital printers and RM (rapid manufacturing), are revolutionizing printing/production making small runs and print-on-demand publications/products viable. (2) As the means of production and distribution open up to individual hands, distributed content creation surges.

Innovative designers are currently developing open-ended frameworks that not only enable users to create, but depend upon them for the realization of the work. Savvy creative professionals, like Keetra Dean Dixon, Luna Maurer, and the studios Moving Brands, Post Typography and Winterhouse are developing projects that don’t express a predetermined message. The message of the piece, instead, relies upon a continuous infusion of outside content. (See examples at the end of this essay.) Users redefine such products with each input. Participatory design moves away from top-down messaging, transforming designs into flexible frameworks capable of expressing local, individual voices.

This expression of user, rather than client, content, is part of a larger destabilization of corporate control of mass media. As explained by Henry Jenkins in his seminal book Convergence Culture, mass media privatized the production of content over the last 100 years. (3) As technology bolsters the individual’s ability to create—and the designer’s ability to support such creation—corporate media, in particular, struggles with relinquishing monopoly control.

Established intellectual property laws inadequately respond to the complexities of aggregate authorship. Users typically give up rights to their contributions in large collaborative projects. Could and should some type of monetary compensation be set up for these contributors? If contributors are satisfied with their own resulting creative happiness, is that enough? At the same time, designers struggle with sharing the source code of the open-ended systems they create, while still profiting financially. (4)

Expanding more flexible intellectual property laws, like those advocated by the Copyleft movement, could enable users to more freely produce and share content, but such changes won’t come about without conflict. As consumers transform into creators, our society and, more specifically the design profession, struggles to accommodate them. Historically, the profession of graphic design has depended on old proprietary models of business, models that encourage the transmission of singular corporate messages. Participatory design replaces such one way transmissions with dialogue. Cultural critics suggest that such dialogue makes messages less controllable and populations less easily manipulated by consolidated power structures. (5) As individual voices link together in distributed communities, democratic expression strengthens. And traditional models of business are threatened.

Recent movements like the Free Culture Movement, (6) the Open Source Movement, (7) and related flexible licensing led by Creative Commons (8) speak to a new model of business, a model less proprietary and more adept at utilizing peer-production and co-creation rather than guarding trade secrets. In these new models local voices trump corporate messaging. Users can express individual, local concerns. Expressing the local becomes a reasonable and increasingly profitable goal. For decades media activists like Kalle Lasn of Adbusters have pleaded with designers to answer for the societal damage resulting from frenzied advertising-driven consumerism. (9) The design community itself has called for more social responsibility through treatises like the “First Things First Manifesto” of 2000 (10) or the more recent “Designers Accord.”(11) By building projects that express and link individual voices, designers can combat singular top down visions of culture. The conditions surrounding design can infuse the design itself, making room in both culture and commerce for a local voices and concerns.

SENSitive:  fromkeetra.com
Keetra Kean Dixon’s SENSitive study partners the unpredictability of material structure with rudimentary tools. Dixon produced SENSitive by feeding clay into a small scale extruder fitted with a custom type template. The piece is a study for a future much larger, publicly located installation that will invite users to feed clay bricks into a machine, squirting out 1 foot tall letters.

THE POLLING PLACE PHOTO PROJECT:  pollingplacephotoproject.org
Initiated by Winterhouse with AIGA, the Polling Place Photo Project began during the 2006 elections. Winterhouse urged citizens to photograph polling places on election day and then contribute to an image archive as a commentary on American voting. In 2008, the project was supported by The New York Times and promoted as a part of their online election coverage. The archive currently includes 6,000 photographs, representing all 50 states, as well as abroad.

WEARE SCARF: weare.movingbrands.com
London design studio Moving Brands created one of the first examples of user generated fashion. Through a website, the public uploaded simple images. Moving Brands constructed a scarf pattern from this visual material. Users could buy the finished scarf online and in select independent design shops. The Weare scarf generated a publicity buzz both online and in the press.

RED FUNGAS: poly-luna.com
Luna Maurer created Red Fungus as part of the exhibition Process as Paradigm, at LABoral in Gijon, Spain. Upon entering the museum, visitors are given a sheet of four stickers. They are then instructed to affix these stickers to the exhibition floor, according to a simple set of rules. As noted by Maurer, “The show reveals the elementary shift from a culture based on the concept of manifestation and the final product to a culture of process resulting from a networked society.”

PUBLIC PRINT LAB: publicprintlab.com/about/
Post Typography created this user-generated interactive art installation in collaboration with Beatbots.com’s Justin Blemly. They first connected a small laser printer installed in Baltimore’s Minstallation Gallery to a public email address. Users could then email or text images directly to the printer. After the close of the exhibition, an online gallery and a documentary book displayed the collected prints.

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1. Dmitri Siegel. “Designing Our Own Graves.” Design Observer blog, June 27, 2006. designobserver.com (accessed April 28, 2008).

2. For a discussion of new fabrication techniques and customized manufacturing, see Chris Anderson, “In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms are the New Bits” Wired, 25 January 2010 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/ (accessed 14 July 2010).

3. For key discussion of the democratic potential of decentralized participation see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 240-260.

4. For an extended discussion about the negative impact of amateur creation see Geert Lovink. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. (New York: Routledge, 2008).

5. See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008).

6. For a discussion of the Free Culture movement see Lawrence Lessing, Free Culture (New York: Penguin, 2005).

7. For more information on the Open Source Movement, visit http://www.opensource.org/

8. For more information on Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org/

9. See Kalle Lasn, “The Future of Design” (lecture, TYPO Berlin, 11th International Design Conference, Berlin, May 2006).

10. Rick Poynor, “First Things First Manifesto 2000,” AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 17, no. 2 (1999), 6-7.

11. For more information on the Designers Accord, visit http://www.designersaccord.org/

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The post Losing Control appeared first on DesignInquiry.

The presentation at DesignInquiry 2010 (Marfa) was intended as the start of a process rather than its culmination. The framing of an open-ended intention rather than showing finished work, it was to act as a proposal for building a typeface for Marfa, Texas. The proposal cited historical precedence to define parameters of the project. These examples illustrated work that embodied three interrelated characteristics pertinent to the proposed Marfa project: site-specific, place-reflective and position-oriented typography.

Typographic works that specifically required the presence of unique data from a physical site to create an integration with the location were identified as site-specific. Examples included Stefan Sagmeister’s Casa de Musica (2005) a fluid, malleable identity system that fixed placed-ness in typography through extractions of the visual elements from the museum’s existing architecture and archives; Optimo’s Detroit (1998) a typeface as response to place, an homage to the Motor City’s almost infinite range of decaying/softening structural details programmed as a Multiple Master font comprised of a range of details from hard edge to softly rounded; and Letterror’s Twin (2002) an expansive typographic system that reflected the broad range of daily environmental conditions in Minneapolis/St Paul and incorporated them in the letter forms.

Place-reflective work encompassed pervasive systems that responded to a location, or represented an aspect of the place as subject. Examples included the 1968 Mexico City Olympics visual identity, by Pedro Vázquez, Alfonso Sorio, Lance Wyman and Edwardo Terrazas, which manifested flexible articulations of the visual characteristics of indigenous/local culture. Another example shown was the Mexico City subway system developed by Lance Wyman in 1969, a signage system that employed non-textual visual cues to facilitate spacial navigation of the transportation system by the large non-literate indigenous population as well as benefiting non-Spanish speaking visitors.

Work that predicated the necessity of inhabiting a place, or a particular perspective, to decode the intended meaning was described as position-oriented. Andrew Byrom’s Letter-Box-Kites (2008) letter forms built as kites needing to be flown to achieve legibility as well as the steel letters of his project St Julian (2009) whose forms were only visually completed as the viewer changed their own physical orientation in relation to the mounted letters. Another example was Catherine Griffith’s Wellington Writers Walk (2002), dimensional text sculptures installed around Wellington, New Zealand’s waterfront with visibility dependent on the ocean tides, and Ponatahi House (2003) a domicile wrapped in it’s own poem only readable from the inside by the viewer/inhabiter moving about the house.

The quality of modularity was introduced out out my own personal proclivity toward recombinable systems. The idea being that the project would entail a fixed system of elements that could be recombined to produce an expansive set of visually related type forms. Historical examples of modularity included Mathew Carter’s flexible serif system of the Walker typeface (1995), the Hamilton Mfg Co’s Unit Gothic (c.1915) a family of proportionally related sans serif typefaces and the modular compositional-type forms from Petibon’s Nouvèua Caractere Allongé, Gravé et Fondu (Paris, 1842).

Finally, conditions from the site itself provided the most obvious components of the project proposal: Gothic letters and sun light. A san serif style letter appeared appropriate for the typeface proposal because of the predominance and ubiquity of early 20th century gothic letter forms in Marfa’s commercial and architectural signage. Most importantly, the quality of atmospheric light specific to Marfa, Texas. How this light seemed to physically fill up the space struck me, metaphorically, as an occupation, or the presence of an absence. Put another way, this light seemed to be a positive negative.

Building on historical precedence and the site’s own conditions it became apparent that the proposal would be to develop a modular sans serif typeface(s) intended to register and fix Marfa, Texas, as a place and would be designed with a particular physical perspective needed for viewing. Light (and shadow) would be active agents, requiring a particular orientation in time and space to visually complete the type, affording legibility.

____________________________________________________________________________________
Image Citations
1 Stefan Sagmeister, Casa de Musica (2005)
LINK

2 Letterror, Twin (2002)
LINK

3 Optimo, Detroit (1998)
Stephane Delgado, Gilles Gavillet, David Rust, “Detroit”
Whereishere (Ginko Press, 1998) pp 140–141.

4 Andrew Byrom, Letter-Box-Kites (2008)
LINK

5 Catherine Griffith, Wellington Writers Walk (2002)
LINK

6 Catherine Griffith, Ponatahi House (2003)
LINK

7 1968 Mexico City Olympics visual identity
Carolina Rivas and Daoud Sarhandi, “This is 1968…This is Mexico” Eye magazine, No 56 (Summer 2005). Eduardo Terrazas and Beatrice Trueblood, “Letters Eye 59: This is not Mexico” Eye magazine, No 59 (Spring 2006).

8 Mathew Carter’s Walker (1995)

9 Petibon, compositional letters (1842)
Petibon, Nouvèua Caractere Allongé, Gravé et Fondu (Paris, 1842)

10 Hamilton Mfg. Co, Unit Gothic (c.1915)
The Hamilton Mfg. Co., Specimens of Unit Gothics and Roman Flame Borders (Two Rivers, c.1915)

Thanks to Emily Luce for use of her two Marfa images on this panel.

The post Finding the Here-ness of Letters: A Proposal appeared first on DesignInquiry.

As a university design student “making” was my raison d’être. It was a ritual to trek up to my studio (in any form of weather) to meet a quota of the somewhat unrealistic number of explorations I aimed to meet daily early on in my career. I felt spiritually satisfied if I met my creative demands, and bitterly frustrated when I missed the mark. This regimented process was influenced by professors who demanded precision and per-fection on every project. I found their expectations impossible to meet, but reveled in the chance of getting “close”. Reams of paper, alcohol-based markers, and charcoal pencils were my initial tools for making that changed over time to become lay-out software and dozens of laser prints detailing my ideations. It was fulfilling to step back and marvel at the immense amount of work pinned to the wall. I found that the abundance of con-cepts was a significant indicator of a successful design process and its bounty a monument to design. Years earlier, as a tennis player in high school, one thing I discovered almost immediately was that the more I practiced the game, the more matches I won. I made it a mission to scrim-mage against stronger and more seasoned teammates, hit the ball against my garage door, and sort through the mechanics of a killer serve (even without a racket) in my living room. It was this same work ethic that translated so nicely into my design process. Hitting a winning backhand was essentially the same as drawing a perfect circle, while a good rally was equivalent to three hours of solid concepting. Some students found their creative juices gurgling in a keg, I found mine in the countless hours of drawing and creating miniature mountains of sketch-books. Less wasn’t more. More was better. As a design professional I still cherished those tenets of investigation and experimentation that were instrumental in my maturation as a creative. Working in big and small studios as well as large corporations refined my skills and increased my vocabulary. Understanding manufacturing and printing processes revealed more about the profession that theory never covered in school. The bigger the press run, the happier I was. The more printed work, the better chance the world would see my efforts. It become an insatiable thirst to design more. I took on freelance outside of my day job and found myself working into the night. The more work I made, the happier I was. However, one day as I checked my mail outside of my apartment, I found myself throwing away the very design work I created on my job. In the trash bin in front of the bank of mailboxes lay even more discarded and unappre-ciated pieces of direct mail. My neighbors had the same reaction to the beautiful print pieces selling cellular phone minutes that I did. Was I making trash? Consequently was I then creating too much? It was a question that I really didn’t want to address. The answer could very possibly throw my perfectly acceptable world of making out of orbit. Whether I wanted the answer or not, the facts are undeniable.

Designing Systems

Faced with all the gory statistics, I used to simply and somewhat naively believe that designers can solve our resource and affluence issues by simply just designing less. Smaller packaging that is effective can equate to less money spent in shipping (due to a lighter weight) and also on materials. Designing to minimize materials means less waste, less pollution and can in many ways be more efficient in its simplicity. However despite smaller posters, slimmer magazines and reusable bulk packaging, the end of life disposal for all these pieces of ephemera is the municipal landfill. Less isn’t enough. Despite the positive intentions, its only a step in the right direction. Moreover as “makers” how we can we rectify our innate desire to create? Designing less in it’s purest form – slowing or at worst stopping our creative process – impacts our pocketbooks and starves ourselves from the outlet that ignited our interest in the profession to begin with. Designers tend to solve problems with material objects. The designed artifacts solve smaller problems within a system of other problems, however they are really only bandages mas-king a deeper and possibly more sinister issue. Moreover, these objects in turn create new problems if not fully thought out. Slick and trendy magazines deliver relevant and important con-tent to its readers, but rob our landscape of a forested skyline, and pollute our air in its manufacture. Planting new trees to replace those removed allow for more magazines, but displace the wildlife and biodiversity of the area until they mature – dis-rupting parts of the fragile food chain in the meantime. The automobile allowed for faster transportation from point A to point B, and helped ignite our economy, but also has killed mil-lions of wildlife and people. More seriously the automobile has helped alter our planet’s atmosphere effectively changing our climate. The problems of disseminating information and trans-port are system problems. How do we visually distribute vital information quickly and to a large group of people effectively? Once we get that information, how can those affected quickly and safely move to where they need to go based on what they’ve read/seen? The two need to work together. It is at this juncture in which I believe a new opportunity for exploration exists for the grahic designer. Redesigning broken systems and creating new means of connecting are ripe for exploration considering the 46.6 percent drop in print buy-ing by 2009 advertisers1. Graphic designers are already astute at working with systems, so the translation to larger and non-tangible solutions can be a relatively painless jump. Daily we work with a system of type (the alphabet) and grids to produce the digital and print material we have created effectively for decades. Designers also utilize systems of icons, colors and messaging to communicate brands and those working online understand systems of programming languages that allow for images, animations and layouts to be seen on screens ranging from a theater to a mobile device. The challenge with designing larger systems lies in the acceptance that the graphic design profession is slowly chan-ging. Change isn’t easy, and at times avoided when comfort and habit is confronted. This was initially my reaction (disdain) to the fact that designing more artifacts has inherent flaws after finding my direct mail piled up in an outdoor garbage can. However, I felt confidence in knowing that the theories that for-mulate the foundation for the design process enforce the idea of research and thorough investigation, which were integral in helping print design move to the screen and now to a more systems-oriented approach. The holistic nature of the design process is definitely needed to help design better systemic solutions for bigger issues like water rights, affordable and sustainable transportation systems, renewable energy pro-duction and dissemination etc. These issues are ones that not only impact the longevity of the graphic design profession but trouble our society in general. As we are faced with dwindling resource issues that will hamper our ability to create printed pieces and packaging, we must be flexible enough and ready to jump on and lead within the next innovation, similar to how we succeeded with our transition to the internet and web design. Understanding how our pieces are printed and how paper is manufactured show knowledge of systems. However, those sy-stems appear to have broken over time due to shortsightedness and currently need our help to remedy. Designing immaterial solutions is the next and most logical step for the graphic designer. As our current printed posters and social justice websites encourage people to recycle, what seems to be more important is to not tackle the symptom of the systemic problem (waste) but instead design a better ma-nufacturing and dissemination system that eliminates the need in the first place. Creating better communication and awareness may not be solved by iChat or the iPhone but instead by the reinvention of our public education system and how we relate to our neighbors based on the planning of our communities. The magazine may relay important information but lives in a flawed system of existence. Solving that problem may create new opportunities for creation that allows my mantra of “more making is better” to be true. The key is to begin this movement in schools, daily practice and conference discourse. It might take an enigmatic leader to forge ahead through example or simply more and more practice. Without that I wouldn’t have achieved such an effective backhand.

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1. “Media Dollars Shift to Digital in Downturn”. eMarketer. December 17, 2009.

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>> Untitled (Marfa Project) video

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In 1990, an episode of the television series “Unsolved Mysteries” featured the Marfa lights, detailing personal reports and plausible theories to explain the inscrutable supernatural oddity. This footage formed the basis of my exploratory process and, ultimately, provided sufficient content to generate the final piece. Initial steps involved processing the video using a number of algorithmic filters to blur the image, invert the channels, adjust the contrast, and generally create the appearance of shifting colour hazes. Following additional adjustments, I generated an ambient soundscape to accompany the moving visual content. Two brief audio clips from the source video were extracted, time-shifted and further processed to produce an unearthly vocal transmission. The spoken word “Marfa” is replayed at 200 times its normal duration, building to a crescendo as the piece unfolds. Rumbling clicks and pops underscore the dominant drone, which is derived from the following narration:

Appearing nightly in the desert just outside Marfa, the lights are one of the longest standing unexplained phenomena in the United States.

The finalized video serves as a metonymic representation—closely related to the original content of the television segment, but vastly different in its visual articulation. Interpolation of the found media unlocked embedded content and coaxed out hidden layers of coded meaning. This process of revealing and concealing has facilitated a greater subjective understanding of the lights, but their true origins should forever remain a wondrous mystery.

Please experience “The Marfa Unsolved Mystery Lights” with headphones.

>> Click to view (Link directs to Vimeo)

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ON DISPLACEMENT

Marfa is a refuge for the displaced. Marginals, migrants, and the mysterious converge on this destination, as a retreat from the socialized normalcy of ordinary life. A restaurant resurrected from the bones of a service station for passing journeymen, and an abandoned Prada boutique in the barren Chinati desert are emblematic of this transient, eclectic community. Nothing is what it seems.

Marfa is a paradoxical wonder. Forever moored in a seemingly endless landscape of scorched earth, monumental artworks court art world pilgrims. Far from the sterile and frantic culture machine, these works require time and commitment, defying the rationality and logic of a capitalist market. This is the town that Donald Judd built.

MARFA DISPLACED

CONCEPTUAL DRIFTING

In Marfa, I am a pedestrian, a flâneur, and a tourist. It is rare to encounter locals who can claim long-term familial ties to the region beyond mere decades. We are all outsiders or transplants drifting through the dusty landscape like so many travelers and tradesmen who have gone before. This is a site of reinvention, bearing the scars and wrinkles of each passing population. Cycles of birth, decline, and renewal are evidenced without shame.

A four-block parcel of land, bounded by side-streets and alleyways is the site of a typographic intervention. Contemplating issues of displacement and shifting identities, I explore a microcosm of the town focusing on the banal, the discarded, and the unwanted detritus of the region. Through repeated passes of increasingly familiar locations, I wear out a continuous path spelling out the letterforms M-A-R-F-A. As a de facto archaeologist of the hard-worn streets, I study the culture of waste and ephemera. A beer cap from an unknown brewery. A candy-coloured straw. A mobile telephone. These traces are important clues, aggregating into a portrait of the built environment and its inhabitants.

Each juncture signals a shift in direction. Left, right, right, left, right. As a subtle intervention in the landscape, I transport one item to a new destination with every change in course. Document. Record. Repeat. This exercise provides an intimate connection to the place that cannot be experienced in the showy Foundations and tourist literature. Yes, Raymond Williams, “culture is ordinary.”

Click to view interactive website for this project.

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