…avanti, avanti, avanti,you avant garde architect…have gall, guts, audacity, cheek…jaunt gallantly onward… just don’t gallivant from gala to gala…don’t lose, but guard your integrity…because in your exuberancewanting to be the centerof notoriety or the toast of town, a household word…it’s beginning to show…that you are lagging behind…your cupboard stands bare…now you must play catch up with your principles…begin […]
Opinions
A hidden, deep feminist struggle at MIT
In the evolution of the office, I suspect a deep feminist struggle was started by Muriel Cooper, who always championed her independence and unpredictability against a male-dominated world, especially when very few women were in primary or leading roles in furthering MIT as an academic institution. This struggle was intuitively joined by Jacqueline Casey. It […]
In response: Gates Adresses Harvard Grads 2007
Opinion in response to Thursday, March 22, 2007, Harvard Crimson announcement: Gates Will Address Grads: World’s richest man will get Harvard degree at last—32 years after dropping out In a climate of cultural indifference, and worse, continuous assault on the value of liberal arts education—deemed useless for survival—I was reminded that the original Harvard “core” was about […]
Metaphor and Semantics
For the past thirty years I have been intrigued by the processes of acceptance and integration of new and world changing concepts in the Arts; literature (new styles of unfolding narratives embedded in lyrics, poetry, fiction and journalism), music, dance and stage performance and visual arts and architecture. It is perplexing to see often on […]
What is progress?
Industrialization? Urbanization? Globalization? Is it about Efficiency? Expediency? Introducing Scientific, Medical, Technological Solutions? Is it about Modernization, a blind belief in Science and Technology? Has Humankind been able to improve living conditions or the environment? Is it Progress, when the human biology is being ignored, even crippled, when all ecological connections with the environment are […]
Is “Meta” Better than Reality?
Can Life be Better without Reality?An “off the top” Response Unfortunately, I will always have to start at the beginning: Design has its intellectual roots in science and art and the daily human encounter with nature (and its physical/social environment/ecology). Otherwise, design is an empty vessel. It has no specific hold on knowledge because it […]
On Design Research
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
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 […]