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 […]
Design Theory + Criticism
Indentity in Sheep’s Clothing
Americans May Have No Identity, But They Do Have Wonderful Teeth. * -Jean Baudrillard, paraphrased Identity as Territorial Marker Behind the concept of “identity”, hidden, lies a much more powerful human trait, namely the sense and extreme need for ownership, control, and territoriality. Through physical, social, and cultural territoriality, humanity is animated by nature […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts MIT’s publishing operations were formally instituted by the creation of an imprint called Technology Press in 1932. This imprint was founded by James R. Killian, Jr., at the time editor of MIT’s Technology Review alumni magazine. He later […]
MIT Office of Publications Legacy
The authorship of many documents designed by the staff of the MIT Office of Publication have never been verified or corrected. So one will find resumes by Muriel, Jackie and Ralph that are erroneous. The reason for this is that they were copied over and over again by many publications who never checked in with […]
More Thoughts on MIT
I would question the scholarship. This must have been concocted by a “design historian,” but not by a researcher or scholar trained in the discipline of art history. From my vantage point, there is no way that Muriel Cooper would have been in the position of appointing/hiring Jackie Casey. I agree that Muriel was able […]