Thoughts made visual

"Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual."
E. Tufte

“Tough times have always called for creative problem solving and individual innovative genius to change seemingly futile situations, but what our present situation requires is not the work of a few brilliant men/women behind closed doors but instead, the movement of our entire culture toward an incorporation and an understanding of the importance of a more holistic and creative approach.”

- Willem Van Lancker

Full essay available at:

http://www.willemvanlancker.com/writing/collaborative-design-0

Challenge Society exhibition at DDC

I visited Challenge Society exhibition at Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen. The exhibition present some aspects of design thinking to wider audience through numerous examples and cases that have been undertaken recently mainly in Denmark. The exhibition underlines the importance of multidisciplinary cooperation and holistic approach in design, including the end users and stakeholders in the design process from early on and expanding design thinking to all possible sectors, not just the traditional creative ones.

Most of the case examples are available also online, although the presentations are fairly brief, as they were also in the exhibition itself. The exhibition was a nice to visit and gave some food for thought but from a designer’s point of view, it could have gotten deeper in the subject matter as it ended up being a collection of different cases.

To visit the DDC’s website: http://en.ddc.dk/exhibition/challenge-society.

A curious detail from a British point of view was a really brief description of UK’s “Big Society” idea which was presented next to British Design Council. The Source of the presentation was not even a British one but a Danish consultancy organization. Unfortunately this ate some credibility from the whole exhibition, at least for me, but judge for yourself: http://en.ddc.dk/page/innovation-public-sector.

On the second floor, at the same time with the Challenge Society was an exhibition about consumerism and where it all will take us if we keep going at the same rate as today. I came across with a straight forward, although slightly provocative and even propaganda like short film called “Story of Stuff” which is worth taking a look at. The graphics are brilliant in all their simplicity! www.storyofstuff.com

The contrast of the first and second floor exhibition spaces was something to note as well, which made me spend the little time I had to explore the space downstairs rather than upstairs:

Downstairs:

And the audience’s reactions were gathered quite nicely:

Paper becomes less and less important as a space for carrying information, but more and more important in being creative exploratory space. In a way, digital technology has liberated paper to become a much more radical space.

—Neville Brody in The Blank Sheet Project

Artists’ books

Some examples of the works from the panelists of “Text and the Hybrid Book” (see my previous post.)

Julie Chen www.flyingfishpress.com

View:

Panorama:

Robin Price www.robinpricepublisher.com

43, According to Robin Price, with Annotated Bibliography:

Incidential Directions by Robin Price and M. Jordan Tierney:

Language of Her Body by by Derek Dudek and Keiji Shinohara

Elysa Voshell www.elysavoshell.com

Dialogue by Elysa Voshell and Genevieve Coutroubis:

Biblio (1): Photographs of Greece 1995 - 2005 by Elysa Voshell

The Dream of Flying by Elysa Voshell:

The Hybrid Book conference

Book Arts Conference and Fair, which took place in June 2009 and was sponsored by the MFA Book Arts/Printmaking Program at the University of the Arts.

“Book arts represents a multi-arts forum: two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and time-based, one in which design, fine arts, craft, language, and new technologies combine, compete, and intersect. The focus of The Hybrid Book was on that aspect-—the book as a hybrid art form and book arts as multi-disciplinary.”

The conference recordings can be listened to on the website - unfortunately the quality is at points really low. Should you be listening with a headset, a word of warning: in the mid point of the panel discussion on “Text and the Hybrid Book” there’s a loud disturbing background sound too much for even the audience to take. http://www.hybridbook.org/conference.htm

The dwindling importance of the makeshift organ that is our hand would not matter a great deal if there were not overwhelming evidence to prove that its activity is closely related to the balance of the brain areas with which it is connected. ‘Being useless with one’s fingers’, ‘being ham-fisted,’ is not a very alarming thing at the level of the species as a whole; a good number of millennia will pass before so old an organ of our neuromotor apparatus actually regresses. But at the individual level the situation is very different. Not having to ‘think with one’s fingers’ is equivalent to lacking a part of one’s normally, phylogenetically human mind. Thus the problem of regression of the hand already exists today at the individual if not the species level.

André Leroi-Gourhan (1964/65) Gesture and Speech

Quoted from Sonja Neef’s Imprint and Trace - Handwriting in the Age of Technology (2011 London: Reaktion Books). True food for thought.

Film: Wim Wenders: Pina

“Dance, dance… otherwise we are lost.” Pina Bausch

For a real visual delight, I can highly recommend Wim Wender’s latest film about dancer choreographer Pina Bausch and her work. Beautiful compositions on stage and in urban surroundings, a joy of colours and painfullly clever contrasts loaded with a full scale of emotions.

See the trailer for a preview (clicking the heading takes you to the website of the Telegraph). I saw the film at Barbican Centre in 3D last Friday 22 April and still feel very emotional thinking about it.

TED Talks: David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization

A well built interesting talk about information design with great examples of how information can be distorted, and how right relative figures can help to straighten the distortion. With the right question, or working the data in a certain way or with right approach, you’re able to make welcome clearings in the exhausting overload of information we receive every day. And we do receive a lot more than what we are conscious of - something this talk made me again realise and something I brought up already in my previous post.

In any case, taken down to its very simplest, information design is combining “the language of the eye”, meaning colours, shapes and patterns, with “the language of the mind” consisting of words, numbers and concepts. In order to be able to make the final outcome look good, you need to be aware of them both, simultaneously.

Update: Here’s a link to an article in the Guardian of the ways to distort data. It’s one of the good examples that was also brought up in the TED talk.

As reference to my post below, and the Easter time, this poster due to its type caught my attention from long distance. Having a closer look, the message turned out to be quite something the word “paid” didn’t first bring to my mind. Really strong poster that rose emotions, which I think was the aspect that made it so memorable. The used hairline slab serif typeface didn’t stay in my mind, though, but the use of the letter ‘i’ with its connotation was effective. 

As reference to my post below, and the Easter time, this poster due to its type caught my attention from long distance. Having a closer look, the message turned out to be quite something the word “paid” didn’t first bring to my mind. Really strong poster that rose emotions, which I think was the aspect that made it so memorable. The used hairline slab serif typeface didn’t stay in my mind, though, but the use of the letter ‘i’ with its connotation was effective. 

Typescape posters inspired originally by Wim Crouwel’s poster for Saura exhibition in Van Abbenmuseum in Eindhoven. I tried to express the three dimensional aspect of landscapes/cityscapes and how type usually can be seen in it - it’s there, you read it, but quite often you don’t pay too much attention to it or at least the formalities of it due to the amount of type you see all day long. Thus, there’s an aspect of type being there and not quite being there, seen but not seen, or at least not always read or understood or remembered. Something I’ve been thinking about recently when consciously trying to explore the type in my surroundings. What does it need for type to pop out, to really be paid attention to and to be remembered?