Design As Thinking

Over a weekend in early May, 15 graduates of the 2011 RISD MFA in Graphic Design Program delivered their final presentations to an audience of other students, faculty and advisors in a conference room at 169 Weybosset Street in Providence, Rhode Island. The graduates were afforded 50 minutes to describe their area of inquiry, situate it in the historical and creative context and present their own work. Following the presentation a panel of critics and faculty gave their feedback about the work and the presentation. 

I was one of the 15 graduates that May. In this post, I have attempted to translate my own presentation into a form of a blog post. The process of communicating about communication is inherently difficult, and the added translation from a presentation format to that of a written script illustrated with images, probably further complicates the reading. This is my best attempt to describe my area of inquiry in the RISD’s thesis process. I transcribed most of my script and tried to include as many slides as possible. The presentation lasted somewhere around 30 minutes, but should take a lot less time to read. 

Good Afternoon!

Prior to coming to RISD, I spent several years working as a designer and an art director for the Chicago Tribune. In my time there, I was fortunate enough to work on some amazing historic nights and on some less amazing, historic ones.  One of my strongest memories of the place involves walking down the street in Chicago at the end of the shift and watch the paper that we just put to bed two hours ago being delivered as the waiters were closing up and going home and businesses were getting ready to open. That newspaper gave the readers an opportunity to  have a shared experience of opening the pages and learning how the game on the West Coast ended or what insane thing their alderman said the night before at the town-hall meeting.

Or even more likely: simply flip to the comics page and start today’s Sudoku puzzle. I was in awe at the paper’s ability to create a virtual community, the possibility that thousands of people might be feeling the same thing, thinking the same thought, going to the same place if just for a brief moment. 

The other impossibly unique thing about working at the Tribune was the Tribune Tower.

It was designed by Howells and Hood in the Neo-Gothic style, and controversially won a highly publicized design competition in 1922. The entries that did not win became almost just as famous as the one that did. This is architecture of what might have been.

Entries for 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition. From left to right, entries by: Eliel Saarinen, Walter Gropius & Adolf Meyer, Adolf Loos. 

These dreams became synonymous with reality, and though not physically present in the space, still exist in the public imagination with the physical building itself.

Introduction

In an attempt to describe his method of observing a place, George Perec writes:

Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you? You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless. The street: try to describe the street, what it’s made of, what it’s used for. The people in the street. The cars. What sort of cars? The shops. What do they sell in the shops? Don’t say, don’t write ‘etcetera’ Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. 

The way in which I observe and think about space has been highly influenced by George Perec’s method of exhaustive reading of a place as a text. Perec offers a sedentary and stable way of observing the city. He famously spent three days moving from one cafe on St. Sulpice Square in Paris to another, recording “what happens when nothing happens.”

Still from William H. Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1979).

I also identify with the social scientist cum flaneur in William H. Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. A model that fits nicely with the trajectory of observers of the city that goes back to Baudelaire, Benjamin and Guy Debord. 

I ground my work at the intersection of physical location, contemporary technology and the limitless possibilities of imaginary travel. I use the tools of graphic design to manipulate a wide range of intellectual and visual lenses to give form to what defines our relationship to location, place and space in the contemporary context.

Projects

A Tour of the Providence River

The work of Robert Smithson was my primary influence in this project. His work is situated at the intersection of space and language. His practice oscillates between a conceptual writing-based mode and grand land-based gestures like the Spiral Jetty that are still firmly rooted in language and are meant to be read by moving through them.

Spread of A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1967).

In his A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey Smithson wonders down the the Passaic River contrasting the new monuments of post-industrial waste sites to the architectural sites of antiquity.  

While his Tour of Monuments presented his sites in a sequence the Spiral Hill/Broken Circle presented a work as pair. The hill is meant to be seen from the circle and the circle from the hill.

I responded to the duality of the relationship, and a sense of synthesis one achieves when comprehending both. After trying to find a similar hill and base site pairing,

I settled on the Providence River as a natural place for my work. 

Each site was a source of a photograph for another site on the other bank, creating a flattened panoramic view of the river, that used the structure of a book spread to flatten 3-D space into a 2-D form, creating a view that would be impossible in reality. 

By erasing the contents of the historical signs, I made explicit that I was not interested in the backward looking historical vision of imagined space as created by the historical markers, but rather the concrete language of geographical space and location and how it can perceived by the walker, the viewer or the thinker.

Defining Terms

Earlier this year, I have explored the medium of motion graphics in my attempts to express the link between moving through space and reading a text.

In this project that sought to define terms important to my thesis, typography is rendered architectural, and the camera takes the viewer through the spaces between letters to reveal definitions of terms that have a meaning in both typography and language of space.

To see the full work go here.

The next project created for Cavan Huang’s Urgent Vignette class aims for a similar result but with different means. 

I initially tried to use the assigned text from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons poem about space to convey a sense of movement through language  with analog means, but only was able to achieve the desired effect when physical manipulation of the ribbon into typographic shapes was combined with digital typography. Thus an alternate space that merges digital and analog dimensions emerges through time, through the experience of reading.

I did not feel that the previous projects elevated above the level of studies and experimentation with technology. I was interested in continuing exploration of different ways of thinking about space. I turned to….

These self portraits by Vincent Van Gogh and Joseph Kosuth.

The way these two artists chose to represent themselves in their respective portraits reflects their own personal philosophy about how and where the artist should work. Van Gogh chose to show himself carrying supplies for painting, walking stick in hand, on the way to paint/work outside. Kosuth shows himself dressed in a suit, wearing dark sunglasses, caught in the moment of self-reflective thought in his reading room/studio. 

These images speak about the role that process played in their work. One relied on direct experience with the subject while the other preferred to use symbolic systems of language as primary supplies for his art-making.  I tried to combine the two practices.

I ground my work in the legacy of plein air painting that advocated the primacy of direct interaction with space as well as the conceptual art practiced by Kosuth and other artists after him that link art with philosophy of language. 

What do you get when you combine: 

Vincent Van Gogh, Joseph Kosuth, Situationists, Fluxus, Seth Price’s Dispersion article, Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, Lonely Planet Travel Guides, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Google Maps and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project?

The Close Not Far project is a frame that holds many different projects and proposals that allows me to test out and develop my thesis ideas farther. 

Looking for Le Corbusier’s Le Petite Maison

The first work that I would like to discuss under the Close Not Far umbrella is the Looking for Le Corbusier’s Le Petite Maison book.

Corbusier built  La Villa Le Lac in 1923-24 as a home for his parents. In 1954, Corbusier reflected on the making of the house in a small book: Une Petite Maison. 

In the book, Corbusier revisited the building he created 30 years earlier through retrospective text, images and new drawings he made especially for the book publication from the photographs.

This book was created as part of a weekend workshop with designer and publisher Lars Müller, who urged us to create a contemporary take on Corbusier’s book.

This book is my own attempt to see Corbusier’s  La Villa Le Lac using satellite and Street View imagery from Google and photographs of the house uploaded to the internet.

It is a visual memoir that ponders ways to look at places and possibilities of imaginary travel in 2012. It recognizes that each of the modes of travel—through memory, physically or via the internet has its own distinctive characteristics and I sincerely hope it contains seeds for a template for subsequent journeys.

Convention Conventions

As part of the publication that the Department of Graphic Design created for 2011 Annual Graduate Thesis Exhibition I created a downloadable guide to the spaces of the convention center.

Spread from W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996)

Influenced by W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants in which the narrative describes the images but the images are not what the narrative describes, the guide exists in the creates a space that allows for the participation of others in the creation of the work’s meaning. 

The guide to the conventions on convention centers will exist in the publication, which itself questions the conventions of exhibiting graphic design, and will be distributed during the Graduate Exhibition.

The Pre-Function space, The Exhibition Hall, The Ballroom, The Meeting Rooms, The Metro and the Terrace Cafe, and last but not least The Rotunda Room reserved for executive meetings and high profile functions, using the imagery taken from similar literature for convention centers ranging from Florida, to Utah and Minnesota. 

The city’s convention centers are bustling with activity while a lot of its public spaces are empty.  What would happen if the events that bring business tourism to the city were more spread out through different neighborhoods and not just the convention center/mall/hotel/adjacent restaurants complex? Would Convention-goers get more excited not to spend most of their time in a multi-purpose building that looks and feels exactly the same as the one in their own town?

Walking Tour of Parking Structures Downtown

Downtown Providence has a long involvement with parking lots, the Providence River was covered with roads, tracks and lots until the 1980’s.

The tour will focus on the history of still existing parking structures in downtown providence. 

Such as the Former Packard Motor Cat Showroom at the corner of Washington and Empire Street. Unique for its downtown location, this two-story building was designed but Albert Kahn in 1912, who also designed the Providence Journal Building, has had the original enormous plate-glass windows of the automobile showrooms replaced with a storefront. It owes its rich details to the prestigious image of the Packard Motor Car Company, for whom Kahn also designed factories in Detroit. The building is currently occupied by Bravo Brasserie, but in this photograph from the 80’s it clearly houses an adult book store.

The tour will also cover one of the oldest surviving parking structures in Downtown Providence — the Narangansett Hotel Parking Garage on Dorrance Street built in 1927 which outlived the Hotel it was named after at the corner of Weybossett and Dorrance streets. The hotel was demolished in 1960’s to give way to another parking lot before The Johnson and Wales library was erected in 1979. 

The Narangansett Hotel Garage did not itself become a parking lot probably because of its ability as a garage to park three levels of cars instead of three. 

Speculative Journeys at the Providence Train Station

Taking a cue from the  writing of Georges Perec  I spent a few weeks observing the Providence Amtrak Station, attempting my own exhaustive portrait of this place of transit.

I listened to the rolling rhythm of the letters flipping on the train information board. I observed the way people used the waiting area, what they did as they waited, how they moved through the space upon entering and getting off the train. I took notes, sketched diagrams and took photographs. 

Taking a cue-from the list-based nature of the train station experience (The content of the station is encountered superficially and in passing) as well as the way the mind wonders while waiting or riding on the train I made a series of booklets that offer another kind of itinerary and movement that navigates through information via connections.

There is a booklet on films about trains, one listing songs about trains, another listing the types of travel luggage, and common ways that people greet each other.

Providence Train Station Proposal

Based on my observation that people leaving the train are instinctively looking for a familiar face or a message from someone close, I am hoping to use  the Close Not Far Publishers to propose an interactive public sculpture for the space that will display welcoming messages for arriving passengers.

The proposal builds on the interactive sculpture work by Antenna design in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum Lobby and the dynamic wall in the Bloomberg Corporate Headquarters designed by Lisa Strausfield as well as the text-based environmental work of Jenny Holzer. 

The sculpture is proposed to occupy the center of the trains station and serve as an indexical “welcome home” sign, that can be accessed via text-messaging or a web-based interface.

Second Life Providence

As part of another Visiting Designer’s Workshop, this time with Jan Van Torn,  the very talented Dylan Greif and I set out to design a series of posters that encouraged an alternative vision to the  empty public spaces of Providence.

Inspired by the speculative architectural dreams of the Constructivists and the dream-like architecture and social life of 3-D virtual world Second Life, I attempted to fracture and bend the space to integrate the fantastical game imagery with the very real emptiness of Providence.

Following the completion of the workshop I continue experimenting with the forms and hope to develop a series of posters that posit a Second Life for the spaces of Providence.

How about a trip to…

How about a trip to… is a series of postcards that capture the reaction of a contestant on the Price Is Right at the moment that it is announced where they might be going if they win this round. Thus For a split second, their faces become images of instant imaginary journeys.

Weybosseptember

Weybosseptember is another response to 48 hour Visiting Designer’s Workshop with designer Vaugh Oliver who wanted the students to imagine a calendar for a 13th month.

In collaboration with another talented designer from the class of 2012, Jeffrey Waldman, we looked at the street numbers of Weybosset street as marks that divide space and therefore time in the same way that calendar days mark off time. 

Weybosset Street begins close to the Providence River at the intersection with Westminster Street and ends at the intersection with Empire Street. Originally part of a Pequot Trail, its name refers to the crossing point in the Providence River between the east and west sides.

All the visible street numbers on the street were photographed and the typography was traced and applied to colored office paper, transforming and recontextualizing the mundane material  into a wall installation in the same way that the everyday vernacular of street numbers was transformed to create a portrait of the street.

Each number was color coded according to the program of the building on the street, thus blue numbers are educational buildings, office space is green and retail and service buildings take the yellow color. Each of the numbers was also represented according to its size. smaller building were printed on half, medium—full and large tiled on four sheets of letter-sized paper.

Conclusion

In some way this project was my own 13th month, another quick study done in overtime to try out my thesis ideas, another short trip that I just couldn’t resist to take as part of a larger journey through the development of my own ideas, and a body of work that traverses the area between perception and experience of place and defines our relationship to location, place and space in the modern context, while demanding a breadth of intellectual knowledge and technological agility in creation contemporary visual communication. 

Thank you!

Sincere thanks to the following people: 

Bethany Johns, Hammett Nurosi, Cavan Huang, Tom Wedell, Anne West, Doug Scott, Nancy Skolos, Lucinda Hitchcock, Andrew Sloat, John Caserta, Rob Giampietro, Dmitri Siegel, Janet Abrams, Julie Talbutt, Eva Laporte, Class of 2011.