Design Meets Documentary: Gunnin' for That #1 Spot
Today's documentary films rarely surprise me. These days, it seems doc-makers don't have the talent or the intuition to know how much distance to take from their subjects--either they're alienated from the reality of what they show by prejudice or partisanship (e.g., Borat), or they're complicit, complacent, slavish (Shine a Light, An Inconvenient Truth or any of the other recent hagiographic political docs that lack contrasting perspectives). Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys has made an antidote to this poisoning of an art form: the new must-see documentary Gunnin' for That #1 Spot, about elite high-school basketball players coming together for a historic game/summit meeting at Rucker Park in Harlem.
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April 18, 2008, 12:22 PMFUSE Conference 2008 Addresses Design, Culture, and Branding
Pity Terry T. Schwartz, senior director of brand design for ConAgra Foods. After a far-out morning talk by University of Hawaii professor and "futurist" Jim Dator, who urged the crowd at this week's FUSE conference to become "tsunami surfers" in order to build a "dream society," Schwartz had the hard task of bringing the proceedings back to budgets and quarterly reports. By way of a segue, he offered, "I'm not here to talk about the end of the world; this is about how to sell more Poppycock and Fiddle-Faddle." His awkward transition summed up the entire conference, which attempted--sometimes excitingly, sometimes uncomfortably--to straddle the line between "design culture" and corporate culture.
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March 27, 2008, 12:57 PMMediabistro's "Advertising: The New Creative Agency" Panel
The speakers at last night's Mediabistro event at Tribeca Cinemas expressed quite a few essential insights, even if no consensus was reached on pretty much any aspect of the discussion's broad topic: the future of advertising in a digital age.
February 29, 2008, 2:17 PMGoldfrapp and Big Active's Seventh Tree Design Coup
Those who helped themselves to Seventh Tree, the just-released fourth album by English pop duo Goldfrapp, when it leaked onto the internet last year as well as those who pre-ordered it on iTunes should consider picking up the deluxe-edition CD version of the album. Singer Alison Goldfrapp and hot London-based firm Big Active have created packaging that argues powerfully for the continuing importance of design to the pop-music experience.
February 19, 2008, 3:28 PMHeidi Cee in Plain Sight
I was mostly left cold by the presentations at last Friday's School of Visual Arts symposium on propaganda, entitled "Where the Truth Lies," until a late-afternoon speech by media studies professor Stuart Ewen brought chilling contemporaneity to the timeworn issue.
December 15, 2007, 7:43 PMA Bush-Bashing Design Bash
After Thursday evening's Designism 2.0 panels and the political-design omnibus that was AIGA's Cause/Effect event, held today at The New School for Social Research, I don't care if I never see another Bush-bashing poster, t-shirt, sticker, or website. I could also do without the tossed-off condemnations of conservatives that this week's speakers delivered with alarming frequency, in some cases going so far as to wish, with a broad smile to assure us it was all in fun, bodily harm, even death, upon their ideological opponents.
December 13, 2007, 11:07 PMDesignism 2.0: Part One, "See"
Tonight I attended Designism 2.0, an event at Manhattan's Art Directors Club devoted to promoting and exploring socially conscious design. The organizers at the ADC devised the proceedings with the intent of building upon the initial Designism event (held in September of last year) by adding a direct call to action. It was clear from the presentations of tonight's panelists and the audience's reactions that the design community has no shortage of desire to, as invited speaker Milton Glaser put it, "participate in the life of our times." Clear-cut strategies for putting that passion to use, however, were more difficult to find.
November 14, 2007, 4:30 PMTobi Wong for a Day
I thought I would end my short series of posts on the Tobi Wong fake-out with the perspective of the man who successfully fooled much of the audience at the Core77 panel last Friday. Rama Chorpash (aka "Tobias Wong") graciously answered my questions via email, clearing up a few of the mysteries surrounding this spectacular design switcheroo.
November 13, 2007, 3:17 PM"Tobias Wong" Unmasked
An update on yesterday's post about the "Tobias Wong" hoax at last Friday's Core77 panel:
This morning Allan Chochinov of Core77 responded to my voice-mail from yesterday and told me what he knew about the switch. One of the organizers of Friday's event, Chochinov was informed of Wong's plans only a few days before. As he explained, it was planned that the fake Wong would unmask at some point during the panel discussion. It's still unclear why this "reveal" never occurred. Chochinov said, "I'm of two minds on this. I know that the plan was to do the reveal, but it seemed that Ze [moderator Ze Frank], Rama, and Tobias decided to go the distance. I think it would have been spectacular for the Q&A to have culminated with the reveal, but I also respect their decision to take it all the way." Chochinov convincingly argued for the art value of the hoax, saying, "Tobias Wong was adamant that this was no 'prank' or 'stunt'--it was something that he undertook with great seriousness and rigor."
November 12, 2007, 2:24 PMDesign, Wit, and the Creative Act
The New York design world was the victim of a conceptual-art prank at "Design, Wit, and the Creative Act," last Friday's Core77 event held at the Art Directors Club in Manhattan. Never content to be conventional, designer Tobias Wong, scheduled to speak at the event, was nowhere to be found onstage. In his place, there was an impostor who in no way resembled the artist but mounted the podium and spoke with surprising authority about Wong's work, personal history, and mission. Moderator Ze Frank and the other panelists--Cornell professor Kelly Dobson, Kidrobot founder Paul Budnitz, and design historian Steven Heller--treated the knockoff as though he were the genuine article...whether through cluelessness or complicity, I can't say.
September 7, 2007, 11:48 AMMediabistro's "Future of Design" Panel
Cooper Union's Wollman Auditorium was the setting for Wednesday evening's Mediabistro panel entitled "The Future of Design." The five-member, all-female panel was convened in order to explore "what's driving change in the design industry today." The discussion was founded on the assumption that the old-school, craft-focused concept of the designer as individual creator or "author" is rapidly becoming obsolete. To replace it, a multidisciplinary, interactive approach to design is forming, one in which clients play almost as active a role as do creatives. The panelists hinted at the causes for this evolution (technological innovation and economic change being foremost among them), but they mainly spoke about how designers can apply the emerging paradigm.
July 30, 2007, 4:02 PMArmond White's Music Video "Introspective"
On Saturday I caught a presentation of classic music videos by renowned pop-culture critic Armond White of New York Press. The event was part of Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual New York Video Festival, in which White has participated for the last decade or so. Some years he's shown a selection of the best videos from the preceding 12 months; other times he's hosted in-person dialogues with especially accomplished auteurs such as Marcus Nispel and Benjamin Stokes. Always, he offers the rare chance to see great music videos interspersed with terse commentary that widens your perceptions to suit Lincoln Center's big screen.
June 1, 2007, 3:31 PMPoynor's Postscript
Rick Poynor has responded in Print to his critics on the prominent design blog Speak Up. The heart of his short response is a list of eight qualities that all published writing should possess, e.g. "Exceptional knowledge of the subject" and "Originality of individual sensibility and approach." As interactive and informative as the blog form can be, Poynor argues, without these eight timeless qualities it can't have "value as writing and commentary."
May 25, 2007, 12:34 PMDesign-Related Reading for the Weekend
Rick Poynor sparked an online firestorm when he took on design blogs (Speak Up in particular) in the May/June issue of Print. The upcoming long weekend presents an ideal opportunity to catch up with this often-heated debate. One of the most lacerating commentaries I've encountered on the subject can be found on Joe Clark's Fawny.blog. Clark is a Toronto-based writer and business consultant whose ferocious broadside brings to mind the bat-wielding high-school principal (played by Morgan Freeman in the movie Lean on Me) with whom he shares a name. Sample sentence: "Why are we even having a debate about Poynor-style unreadable, unillustrated, turgid, overintellectualized design writing on the one hand and design blogs on the other?"
May 22, 2007, 3:02 PMAIGA Design Resource Expo
I caught two interesting presentations at yesterday's AIGA Design Resource Expo at the Puck Building in Soho.
