By Jorge Frascara and Dietmar R. Winkler From Design Research Quarterly Volume 3, Number 3 July 2008 Design Research Society ISSN 1752-8445 Peter K. Storkerson, Editor Editor’s Introduction: Communication design, generally, is an outlier in the larger field of design, by virtue of its non-participation in empirical research and its lack of interest in […]
Month: January 2019
Appendixes
At the beginning, they say, the word was birthed. That may be true. But at the end, it says right here, in the mechanics of life, at the end of the book, there fall the appendixes . . . Any encyclopedia will mark “appendix” a collection of supplementary material, usually placed at the end, […]
Papier is geduldig!
Paper is patient! Even though Paper may appear without blemish or crease or without smudge or fingerprint, its only capacity is to live in servitude to the pen and the lucid or confused mind that guides the hand. It endures without anger or upset, while carrying all kinds of messages that vacillate between fact and […]
MIT: Some Notes on the Unwritten History
It is somewhat dumbfounding to realize how some persons rewrite reality, especially in Design History, which in many ways does not really matter. Design would always like to play a bigger role than all the other professions which aid us in making each day. Still, it is quite amusing to see documents full of little […]
Helvetica: the film (unedited)
In Visible Language journal, 2010 The King has been dismissed. Long live the Commoner or long live the next king and the next common fad. Most likely, anything useful about “Helvetica” the film, has been said already. The individual designers who were interviewed during the documentary process framed some of the reasons for its success, […]
What’s in a Title?
Anecdote 1 My father was a well-established psychiatrist and general medical practitioner. Living in very small towns, on asylum campuses, people would inquire about his profession. His frequent answer was: “I am a psychopath,” to which most often he received very enthusiastic responses, with a nod, a slap on the shoulder, and a cheerful endorsement: […]
James F. Pfeufer, My Sponsor
James F. Pfeufer, 88, died at home on February 6, 2001. He was the husband of Rika Henderson and the late Reed Champion Pfeufer. Mr. Pfeufer was born in Comfort, TX, in 1912. His grandparents were members of the German Freethinker movement who settled the area around 1848. He was raised in Harlem, NY, where […]
MIT: Casey, Coburn, Cooper, Matill
Not Veni, Vedi, Vici? Rather…in truth and honesty: I came, I saw, I did not conquer…I just appropriated… and now…it’s all mine! If one would tell American designers that few among them are true originators, many of them would shudder and object, even if most of them suffer from Cryptomnesia, which occurs “when a forgotten […]
Simmons Valz Project
It had never occurred to me that teaching is in my DNA, until recently, now that I am retired, and have the time to think. I understand there were other distant relatives of mine involved in education, but my grandfather (1865–1963) was a headmaster; his brother a music professor at a Berlin conservatory. My father […]
My WGBH Experience
In the early seventies (1970), Hartford Gunn resigned as general manager of WGBH to assume the presidency of the newly formed Public Broadcasting Service in Washington. Stan Calderwood, former chairman of the board of the Polaroid Corporation, having just been appointed president of the WGBH Educational Foundation, invited me to make an elaborate design presentation […]