Design
A new exhibition : Layered SPURA
Get a preview of the exhibition
* * * *
A visit to an exhibition on Robin & Lucienne Day
This is a spur of the moment video (shot and edited on an iPod) we made on a recent visit to the PM Gallery & Pitzhanger Manor House in Ealing, west London. The exhibition shows the work of two distinct designers, Robin Day & Lucienne Day. The exhibition shows their individual work, and crucially shows how as a collaborative couple, they influenced each other to create new forms. It was an inspiration for us to see such an interesting dialogue between their work.
* * * *
Join us for a pop-up exhibition of the Triangle Fire Open Archive!
Join us this Wednesday, March 16th, from 3-7pm, for a pop-up exhibition of the Triangle Fire Open Archive at the Brooklyn Historical Society!
The Triangle Fire Open Archive – a collaboration between Buscada and the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition – is an online, participatory archive of community contributed stories, images and documents. Each of these objects tell a piece of the history and impact of the infamous fire and its critical relevance for today’s pressing questions about labor rights and safety from New York City to Wisconsin to Bangladesh.
Join us for this rare opportunity to see some of the pictures, documents and objects from the Triangle Fire Open Archive in person!
The exhibition, honoring the Triangle fire’s centennial on March 25, will include items from BHS’ archival collections, rare documents from Our Lady of Pompei church (from the Center for Migration Studies), creations by performance artist LuLu LoLo, personal photographs, and much more.
We encourage you to bring in your own items to share - stories, photos, memorabilia, etc. about the Triangle Fire, or any kind of labor or women’s activism over the last 100 years. We will create digital photographs of your items and upload them to the Triangle Fire Open Archive, for the world to see. This event is open to the public and is free with museum admission.
The Triangle Fire Open Archive exhibition
Wednesday March 16, 3-7pm
The Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street at Clinton Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Trains :
2, 3, 4, 5 to Borough Hall, the A, C, F to Jay St/Borough Hall, or M, R to Court St.
* * * *
Playing by your own rules
It is hard to win when you are playing by someone else’s rules or, worse still, do not entirely understand the rules. By redefining the “meaning” of your project you become an expert in the rules of the game, and one of the people defining those very rules.
The Meaning to Tasks model uses the idea of a “project meaning”.
It supports a practice for teams and individuals to create fundamentally new meanings for projects, products and services. By working in this way the meaning of everyday projects are changed, and projects created are differentiated from the rest of the market through innovatively integrated strategies, rather than solely through feature-level improvements.
To read this article in full, click here to download the PDF.
* * * *
Visual Thinking
Making a sketch is often the first step towards thinking about a design problem. But I’ve found that oftentimes making that mark feels daunting – it is the first sign of my imagination committing to a solution. A mark feels risky – the idea is now out in the world for more than just me to see.
I often think of sketching an idea as making a visual list. Making lists helps move ideas forward, another kind of decisive first mark. I also think about list-making as a process :
1. Make the list (Thinking out loud, possibly in collaboration)
2. Looking through the list again and re-ordering it. (Fitting it to the needs of the idea)
3. Reviewing your new list (Critique and time for contemplation)
4. Fixing the list and deciding to follow its order (Deciding on a course of action)
With sketching, or visual thinking, these steps happen simultaneously, still holding a lot in common with a simple list.
Here’s an example from one of our recent projects with MIT’s Wolk Gallery for a exhibition promotion piece.
* * * *
Building the Triangle Fire Open Archive
This fall, we’ve been developing an exciting new collaborative curatorial project, working with the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition and Ruth Sergel. In honor of the upcoming centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire on March 25, 2011, we’ve developed and designed the Triangle Fire Open Archive, a curated online archive of community-created objects and stories. We’re encouraging people to submit objects culled from personal & public collections, and to use these objects to tell their own stories relating to the history of the Fire, or to the labor, immigration and gendered issues of the Fire that are still critical and resonant today.
Through the collaborative curation of the Open Archive, we’ll be able to see objects, and read narratives, never before seen together.
On Monday December 13, we had our first evening of collecting objects, working with Lucy Oakley and Marci Reaven’s class at NYU, who have recently curated the soon-to-open Grey Art Gallery exhibition, “Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire”.
The students did a phenomenal job of writing new reflections on their favorite objects they’ve found in researching the Triangle Fire – some drawn from public collections (as above, a portion of an image from the Kheel Center), and some drawn from their own family albums. Many contributed these objects (in digital form) to the Open Archive, and we’re thrilled to have started down the path building the Triangle Fire Open Archive with them.
We look forward to many more people getting involved, contributing objects, and telling stories through the Open Archive in the months to come – either through our online tool or at our open public events, when we’ll help photograph and digitize people’s objects.
All the digital material collected will be donated and archived by the Kheel Center which hosts the preeminent website on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The site will go live in January of 2011 – we’ll keep you posted!
* * * *
Hybrid Ways of Doing
In the Fall of 2009 I embarked on an experiment with my colleague, landscape architect Elliott Maltby : co-teaching a hybrid design and social science studio on public space at Parsons the New School for Design. I reflected on the interdisciplinary process of developing our “Public Space Critical Studio + Practice-based Seminar” on this blog few months ago, here.
Once the class was over, Elliott and I did some deeper reflecting, and wrote an article on our experience of developing and teaching “hybrid ways of doing.” I am pleased to announce that this article, valuable for anyone thinking about interdisciplinary collaboration and teaching, is now available in the most recent edition of the International Journal for Architectural Research. “Hybrid ways of doing: A model for teaching public space” by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani and Elliott Maltby is downloadable here and from the project as featured on Buscada.
We welcome your experiences with this kind of teaching and thinking.
* * * *
From vision to tasks : Making design decisions clearer
(Click the image to see a larger version)
This conceptual model addresses the interrelationship between several layers of a design process – from broad vision to specific goals to strategic approaches to actionable tactics, and finally to essentialized tasks.
Using this kind of conceptual model for a project allows for a number of desirable outcomes:
1. It acts as validation process for new ideas that may be created through the design process.
2. It is inclusive of user and business goals and allows the two concepts to exist in a common holistic project structure.
3. It allows for the questioning, iteration and/or reshaping of the vision and goals for a project.
The important question to ask as this structure is created is how does each successive step support the ones above it? This question can lead to two conclusions:
- the goal, strategy, tactic or task does not support the next node in the tree
or
- the next node in the tree needs to be modified to make it work with the new creative thought that has been created
Like all processes I advocate for, there is no “right way” to start this process:
- If you have many specific ideas, list them out and start grouping them into concepts to see what strategies emerge. Then, work your way up the nodes of the tree.
or
- If you have burning vision for a project or product, start at the top of the tree and lay out all the nodes in the tree that will support this vision.
[Diagram : Example concept map.]
(Click the image to see a larger version)
Here is a simplified example of this concept model as mapped out for a company that aggregates content, such as a search engine or blogs etc.
This strategic tool is useful for validating new ideas in a process. Running a new idea through the exercise of asking “what strategy or goals does the idea support?” clearly shows its pros and cons.
Crucially, a team that has created this tree structure, and agreed that the points on the tree make sense, has a baseline starting point when new nodes are introduced the team. This is important because no matter where the idea comes from – CEO or intern – the idea must support the team’s agreed upon structure. If the new idea does not support this structure, either the current structure is wrong (possible though less likely after fully following this process) or the idea has flaws that are exposed by running it through this process.
* * * *
Design + Social Science
As part of the workshop that Jilly Traganou, Lydia Matthews and I ran this past week at the New School’s Design and Social Science seminar we asked participants to identify and diagram a time of compelling interdisciplinary collaboration. We particularly asked participants to identify the material and immaterial (social, cultural…) conditions that enabled this compelling interdisciplinary moment. The results were fascinating. Planning our workshop activity beforehand, we had to think of what our own answers would be to this admittedly difficult question.
I feel lucky to have had some powerful interdisciplinary moments in my education and teaching life (not least in my collaboration with Kaushik on Buscada), but the one that sprang to mind was one that has informed (and absorbed) much of my thinking over the past few months. I recalled the blackboard shown above.
It shows a portion of my start-of-semester working process with landscape architect Elliott Maltby to develop the syllabus for our Public Space Critical Studio + Practice-based Seminar which we are co-teaching this semester, Fall 2009 at the New School. Blue post-its are my methodological and ethnographic readings, green post-its are Elliott’s design readings. Many of our readings overlapped – and sometimes we would find the same readings posted twice, on both green and blue post-its. Though we had had conversations, this process made powerfully visible our own intersecting thinking, through our intersecting literatures. This process made it clear to us that we could indeed collaborate on the class, showing us that we had often come to similar ideas via different routes.
* * * *
The importance of the design cycle : Framing the opportunity
A design process must not be a straight-jacket on creativity. On the other hand, creativity in design needs to have some form of validation; otherwise it reduces its own ability to create new opportunities.
This simple cycle is inclusive of multiple design tactics but is rigorous in how it judges the results of any design. The designer/s can enter into the cycle at any point.
If you have a great idea, start by making it.
If you need to define a problem, start by thinking and analysis.
If you already have a product or service, try critiquing it.
The most important next step is to go to the next point in the cycle.
In the design industry, many designers / product owners only go through this cycle once and then bounce between “making” and “critiquing.” This can easily turn in to a vicious cycle of iterating on tactical designs that do not really address the problem. Often, in this “bounce” the process lacks a critical piece of thinking or analysis which might unlock the true nature of the problem.
At every point of the design process it is critical to reconsider, or query, the problem, checking in to see that you are designing for the right problem.
Following the cycle is not easy. It requires you to question opinions you have formed in the course of a project which can be hard to let go of. These opinions or decisions may have been hard fought victories with other project team members / clients and seem irreversible; but nothing is irreversible if the problem itself has changed through your considered process of thinking and analysis.
This process happens at every stage of a project from concept to production and brings fresh insight to every step.
* * * *