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March 30, 2006
writing plans / planning writing...
I'd begun to think (a couple of weeks back) that I'd be able to just start writing, and write my way through everything. I like writing like this usually, but when I tried to make a start I realised I'd need to plan this to some extent! There's a lot here and turning it into something more or less definitive is going to be harder than I thought... so for the next week or two I won't be posting anything new here. I'll begin posting again when I'm up and running with the thesis...
Posted by Luke Wood at 10:00 AM
March 23, 2006
Problem Solving and Ambiguity
Attempting to locate the feeling of being monstrous (as in the Church of Mau) I've been forcing myself to read, and engage in to some extent, the Design Observer blog. I tried the Speak Up one too, but I really couldn't stand it... just too painful (maybe I should have kept at it then!?). I've been trying to figure out why I can't stomach much of the discourse that is central to design, and subsequently why I seem to have very little appreciation of/for 'good design'. The answer to this (which I don't really have now anyway) is not brief enough for me to articulate here, but will be, I think, the back-bone of my thesis. I'm beginning to write it now, and increasingly I'll be pulling back from this blog I think... as Emilie pointed out, it generally seems to fracture and fragment my thinking... and I need to spend a lot of time in a dark room on my own figuring out how to piece it all back together! Right now I just want to post a couple of points of reference...
1.Problem Solving... commonly served up as a fundamental description of what designers do. I don't think Graphic Design, particularly, is 'problem solving'... any more so than deciding what to have for dinner tonight is problem solving.
2.Ambiguity... been reading an interesting paper by Bill Gaver (Et al) called "Ambiguity as a Resource for Design". It's interesting to me primarily because it disrupts (or would appear to disrupt) #1 above. Gaver's interests are in the interpretive relationship between an object, or system, and it's user... my reading of it replaces 'user' with 'designer' (I'm specifically interested in how designers engage with Design).
Gaver is attempting to offer alternatives to the very linear type of process described by 'problem solving'. There are a couple of things I wanted to mention (esp for Yoko [who's read it] and Laurene's feedback) about this in relation to my stuff... [a] the last part of the text reads like my monster manifestos, a ten point declaration for ambiguity in design. But that [b] their best examples come from an 'art' context, and the 'design' examples are weak in contrast. I guess I want to suggest that this is because (as the authors are aware) ambiguity and uncertainty aren't generally considered to useful to designers... so it's not something that's been well explored in design, as opposed to the fine arts. But also that their focus is 'product design' where the intention is generally 'usefulness'. It made me think about how examples could more easily have been pulled from Graphic Design, and that as a sub-domain of 'Design', Graphic Design is closer, more generally, to the generally more 'useless' (and retinal?) domain we call 'art'.
I've been thinking a lot lately, sparked by something Aaron said, about how much more engaging I usually find reading and talking about music. I've been thinking about the implications of teaching design in an art school, and about arguments I had last year to not separate the design department from the art school via a change in name. But it wasn't because (and I was hugely misunderstood/misinterpreted here) I wanted design to be seen as art specifically, more because I just didn't see that the distinction was useful. I thought the value of the course lay in it's fuzziness, and I think I'm starting to see that that's (partly) where my monsters have been coming from... a kind of fracture or dislocation of discourses and communities of practice. I'm not really interested in professional practice... but I'm not really interested in making art either?
Posted by Luke Wood at 05:21 AM | Comments (5)
March 15, 2006
A Paranoid-Peripheral Publication for Graphic Design
Paranoid. Apart from being a really cool song by Black Sabbath this term's been bouncing around in my work the last couple of weeks. Initially I came across Salvador Dali's "Paranoid-Critical Method" in the Koolhaas book Delirious New York. Immediately I wanted to relate this to my articulation of a monstrous practice, but as The National Grid has taken up ALL my time the last couple of weeks it ended up seeping into that (I guess to be honest I'm paranoid about the reaction we'll get). Which has obviously been really interesting because it's helped me see the links between what I'm doing there and what I'm doing here... I wanted to call this first issue "A Paranoid-Peripheral Publication for Graphic Design"...
... but Jonty (my co-editor) was paranoid about the negative connotations, so it's just going to be "A Peripheral Publication for Graphic Design". We'd struggled to write the editorial together, and it's ended up as a bunch of personal/anecdotal 'observations'. So I subtitled it "More Paranoid-Critical Map than Manifesto", with the following footnote...
1. Salvador Dali was interested in the ability of the paranoid mind to see and/or invent links and associations between things that are not obviously or rationally connected. He described his 'Paranoid-Critical Method' - essentially attempting to simulate clinical paranoid schizophrenia - as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena".
Dali was interested how 'paranoia' enabled people to construct 'facts' that weren't necessarily true or discernable to others. More precisely he wanted to be able to enact the systematics of paranoia, where seemingly unrelated or disparate things could be put together to create new meanings, ideas, or 'facts'... untrue facts that had the potential to turn the world on its head. To 'prove' things that weren't true... to disrupt 'reality'. To be 'critical' involved being able to move in and out of the paranoid state so that it wasn't simply destructive but could be constructive.
There's an obvious link to my interest in the monster as metaphor there, and one that draws in my evolving intentions for the publication. I'm not just referring to the fact that both Jonty and I are deeply paranoid people(!)... more specifically I'm interested in that idea of unexpected 'loose' connections in relation to the content/voices... also I'd just say that, like John Ford, I'm generally more interested in fiction than fact. I guess I think all research is slightly 'paranoid' in the sense that it often becomes obsessive to a degree, and anything/everything begins to relate to your topic... that is 'paranoia' basically. So of course editing the first issue of TNG Jonty and I began to see all these 'connections'... actually that's where 'Peripheral' came from...
Despite Jonty's protests I'm still going to refer to TNG as 'Paranoid-peripheral'... I like that idea that of a kind of obsessive exploration of an edge, conspiracy theories, etc...
Also, in the background somewhere, I really like the idea of claiming Salvador Dali within your lineage. I like the fact that Le Corbusier hated him (and vice versa I believe). I like the spooky (intangible) romance of Surrealism as opposed to the functional romance of Modernism. I want to believe in magic,... I'm not interested in demystifying design, rather I'd like to re-mystify it... for myself anyway. I think as far as aspirations go that one can be called 'marginal' (peripheral)?
I'd like TNG to be a place where I can invite others to take part in that.
I also wrote this in the editorial:
I think it would be really interesting if graphic design could look at itself in relation to music, rather than architecture or industrial design. Then we wouldn't have to talk about problem solving, and we could talk about resonance instead.
and this:
I wanted to write something called 'Grid Theory' for this first issue. Something huge and evangelical, but ultimately compact and entirely self-contained (paranoid), like Manhattan. Anyway I ended up living in Brooklyn (peripheral) and obviously I never wrote it.
...
Posted by Luke Wood at 01:57 AM | Comments (6)