Davis Response

Luke, wtf? 32 pages? really?? ok....

design as a craft, vs. design as a discipline. yes, i see how that needs talk. its the difference between fosque and ... you. i too share concerns about how many graduates of the fosque school can actually find work... how many designers do the sunday price and item circulars actually need? especially in a recession. I'd like to amount to more in life than the gal who can squeeze 105 different washing machines onto one broadsheet.

thinking about the people for whom we design in the design process. omg. YES. the customer matters. communication is the goal, and so OF COURSE we have to think about who the heck it is we want to talk to. nice to see someone say it out loud... sometimes the simple things are the toughest to bring to light.

an increasingly intricate web of interactions. this is something that we're seeing across disciplines. we live in a postmodern age. I love my liberal arts education, because i get to see the connections between all things which in the past were supposed to be separate.


shes talking now about the foolishness of starting with the abstract and moving on to the real. point, line, plane. letter, word, sentence. As if we're born blind and dumb, our first moment of comprehension is a perky blond in our face, screaming "Gimmee A G!" (what the heck is a g? how do I use thing random thing?)

Now she's talking about the classic picture of the designer, who is so hell bent on control and impact that he has lost sight of why hes talking in the first place. To say something to someone.

"ive come to think that if i hear the phrase 'the computer is just a tool' one more time, I will shoot myself" lol, snort. im falling out of my chair this is so great. technology is. there is no other way, get used to it, accept, integrate. "design is the medium of interaction"

next, research. the information that professionals amass is not, generally, shared, and therefore, consensus on 'what is research' is not reached. The result is that design, as a discipline is sorely lacking. No culture. So sad.

form can be taught within a context. if you only think about one thing in this piece, pick this one.

The 21st century arrives at the design school. I knew there was a reason I signed up.

The thing, though, that saddens me is that before I read this article, i had clicked into each and every one of my classmates blogs, and reviewed their reactions. Overwhelmingly, their reactions to this article ran along the lines of "what is she talking about?" Which, as davis is talking about how narrow and technical the teaching of design is, technique without context, and how what our new world needs is design within the context of the rest of the world... proves her assertions are true. If the marketing types are right, that it takes more than one "impression" for a message to hit home, I can only hope that papers like this are assigned again and again.

Start of project 2

this is the email i sent to (the revised) team antfarm on Tuesday am, before learning of the new, more efficient, grouping method for project #2. I'll most likely stick with and jump from one of these ideas as I move forward.

side note - a shout out to Dr. Todd Beck, DDS. I (heart) root canal. Love you, man.


Howdy Rock stars,

Doubt any of you will necessarily see this before today's class, but as a reminder, I wont be able to make it to either of the classes this week. (whee! dental work! Ug)

I am though, really excited about this one, as it touches on a lot of my areas of concern so I have some ideas for the project that I wanted to share with you.

I suggest that as a first step, we really hone in on what segment of homeless/transitional population we want to be looking at. The issues and challenges facing a 50 year old man with a lifetime of alcohol and/or drug problems is going to have different resource needs, and challenges, than a 25 year old single mother, or a 14 year old runaway.

Once we've decided what segment we want to hone in on, and have a few ideas about what our question is, we should gather our research data. It's the research data that will drive our mapping options. A traditional map of the city, with sample housing prices for inner city and outlaying areas, plus transportation costs and food access points could be interesting as a starting point. There's a lot of potential meat to this assignment, and I get teh idea that Luke would ultimately like us to produce something that would be relevant to City Hall as a part of a campaign to affect their legislation.

On the transitional housing/general info/affordability side, one shooting off point we could attack this from is by looking at how expensive housing in portland. By calculating average wage -- for example, pre and post tax income at full time minimum wage - (which comes out to 1456/mo Gross 1092 net, and doesn't even begin to address the difficulty in actually getting full time employment in this economy / for these populations, which we could map by itself) then looking at teh average cost of, say, a studio apartment in Portland (search craigslist/housing term = "studio apartment" and compute the mean price listed, lets say, @ 500/mo) we already show that the housing costs alone ( no utilities, transportation, or food, or god forbid - daycare) puts our sample person at a 50% debt to income ratio right off the bat... which is not classically affordable.

That's just a start, there are many organizations in pdx that offer transitional housing, and we could research how many applications they get, compared to how many units they have to offer. How long the period of transitional support lasts, and what percentage of their clients 'make it' through the program and come out with secure housing at the other end. What are the challenges they face, adn what can we think of that might improve/impact those ratios?

Another, more fanciful route we could take, (this idea comes out of a conversation i had with a grad student in the Urban Studies Dept -- i think they could be a good resource for research sources) is looking at access to utilities for homeless populations. Water, electric, heat, etc. How do they plug in their cellphones and other electronic devices (many do have cellphones) How much could better access to power sources improve their quality of life? is this enough of an issue that we should design some sort of public power strip (solar powered?) As i said, this one is fanciful.

Those are my initial thoughts, please, if you have a minute, fill me in on yours, and on what transpires in class this week. I'll be in touch.

Best,

Jana

bioStyle Process Recap.

ah, bioStyle, how I loved ya....



Overall... {insert time to reflect here} I think things went really well.
I'm happy with the brand we produced and the fact that we got a reasonable presentation together in the time allowed. When Luke described the customer that our product made him envision, it was exactly the target I wanted to hit, so.. bulls-eye.

It seemed to make sense that since the timeframe was so tight, the best route to take was to narrow the brand to an image and a color palette and a font, stay simple. I think it takes a lot of courage to slim down your design to a few key points and retain the confidence that you're presenting something with impact and voice. On the flip side, once you make the choice for brevity, everything you present absolutely has to be tight and in line with the other elements. This is where we had some last minute complications.

I felt that with such a large group, someone had to take ownership over the cohesion of the final product, so i branded myself as that person from the get go, with no apparent push-back . Since the idea was to have a cohesive brand that we could all feel good about, I was aggressive about asking my teammates for input and feedback on my designs throughout.

That being said, I'm sorry that once push came to shove, the boys in the group ended up with hurt feelings. Reading their blogs, I got an impression of their feelings that didn't come through during the process. It didn't feel like a "girls vs. boys" vibe while we were working, there were definitely some issues with listening skills, but it wasn't gender-universal at all... I would have liked more constructive push-back at the time, if it could have improved our final project, but I'm not surprised that there was a bit of fallout from asking just one member to leave the group. (sigh....)

I will admit, I felt from the beginning that the ladies in the group were able to listen to each other really effectively and that we got onto the same page quickly, maybe this can be chalked up to the fact that the target audience for the event is women. Regardless - but, sadly- this is an issue that became a non-issue when Luke decided to break everything in to two person teams for project #2.

In addition to naming the team and the event, picking the font, and finalizing the color palette, I produced over 15 versions of poster/program cover possibilities.
Randi had 8-10 handbills (the one we ended up using exemplified the simplicity angle - it was bold and bright, but basic.) and Elizabeth, in addition to drawing the tree, had a ton of sketches for the stage embellishments. Logan's banners were great, and his work on the technical tweaking of the logo was a lifesaver. Tim took the web page mock up that Logan designed and turned it into a fully functional page, he used my suggestion as a launching pad for a cute comic-style logo for team antfarm, and he showed me how to use layers in Illustrator, which made layering the yellow into the dress and the color-dots onto the tree so much easier to accomplish. (luke's suggestion, the color dots were..and what a great difference they made... I guess that's why they pay him the big bucks ;-)

For my part though, I do wish I hadn't gotten so frustrated with the last minute complications.

I could have let myself use that energy for filling in the program, which definitely got shorted for the attention it deserved, paying more attention to the typesetting on my pieces ( this is where I consistently get lazy - I block in text as a placeholder, and fiddle with everything else right up till deadline, leaving the words orphaned and unloved. I have to change this habit) and actually writing a design proposal to attach to our board.

As it was, I wasted a lot of energy fretting over whether or not the crucial elements that we needed to use across all the components were going to materialize; if everyone was going to actually use the color palette, the same font, the logo, etc. In my dream world, we would have made the time to get together with all our elements and do a final check for consistency and each others final input, rather than scrambling at the neuberger printshop on the morning of hand in, but this is the price you pay when you work with real grown-ups.. we all have jobs and lives and getting the time together proved a stretch.

(note - somewhere in the process of drafting this blog, a few sentences were lost. 2 were devoted to my list of the things i contributed (psh, whatev' ;-) , the one that I'm sad to lose contained my feelings about Liz's tree. It used words like skillful, tender, perfect to message, and an anecdote, overheard at the Marketing Dept. Cannes Lions ad award event where the judging was done... which I'll try to reconstruct now....

" I don't know... they're all great, and have a lot going for them.. but there's just something about that one... that tree just makes me feel so good.. i just want to touch it, and be there, ya' know? The whole package is just so lovely"

no matter the fallout, or bitching in the heat, someone looked at what we did and wanted to be there.

bulls eye.

team AntFarm rockin it ;-)

Randi came over today for a studio session. poster, program and handbills are a go. The swatches and a working version of the tree are posted on dropbox, and I'm hopin we'll all get together on Monday for a review and catch up.

image is: process on the poster and program cover...

love liz's tree. and her drawing.. break it, bend it, bash it... on and on...

I should be responding, to maus, to Waterford/Wedgwood dissolving before our eyes, to yet another day in the steady decline of western civilization...

but... "mimosa embodies happy thoughts in these times of frantic desperation" ... or.... something like that.

2 sketches for the project, poster... program cover.. possibly handbill.... very rough, WIP...

they are, so far... far too easy, too safe so still loose, and bored already with... not even so good as to be sweet and simple even.. just... imitations. I was starting to love something here, but got lost.... so it goes.

ant farm

Team Ant Farm is off and running. We've renamed the event BioStyle 09, and the design components are coming together.

Elizabeth, here's a mimosa shift dress.

Cheers!

"Mimosa Embodies Hopefulness and Reassurance in a Climate of Change"

While browsing, looking for inspiration, and justification, for the use the exceptionally bright (read: potentially-glaring-to-the-point-of-blinding-if-used-in-excess) 2009 Pantone color of the Year- mimosa - for the design class assignment, I need look no further than Pantone's description of the color itself:

"Mimosa Embodies Hopefulness and Reassurance in a Climate of Change"

And indeed, flashes of mimosa pop up in the otherwise recession acknowledging and austere palettes of the Spring 09 shows for Prada, Hermes, Dior, and Vuitton, among others. The main page for the well built NYT section devoted to the collections can be found right here.

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Further linking together my two loves, economy and design, superstar Michael Beirut shares his wisdom about how a designer can expect to see their workload behave, and helpful tips (applicable to freelancers of any field) on managing business during the downturn here.

Even more evidence of the bond between design and economy: Beirut links to an article by Michael Cannell in a recent NYT, "Design loves a depression". The article builds a sunny prediction: the current worldwide evaporation of wealth just might encourage designers to turn their attentions away from designing 10k couches and toward more humanistic goals like energy, infrastructure, housing and city planning. He says, "This kind of innovation means rethinking the economy of production and distribution."

Cannell goes on to say, "Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems." With Bernake and Paulson desperatly throwing sand at the inferno of costs inflicted by the robber barons of the most recent boom, I'll dive into my work on design with a hopeful and reassuring mimosa in hand.

New Term

Winter 2009, Art 224, again with Luke, and many of the same comrades I've had classes with before.

Assignment 1 is a group assignment. I'll be working with Tim, Logan, Randi and Elizabeth on a design suite (for entry into competition) for a sustainable fashion show the school of business is planning, in conjunction with fashion designers from the Art Institute.

Todays brainstorming session was somewhat fruitful: we have agreed on color scheme (mimosa and grey) and motif (branches). Now, independently, we will mock up some potential logos and keep flushing out ideas.

As Luke updates the main class blog page I'll be updating this page to reflect the current classmates, and the progress of the assignment.