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An oldie-but-goodie today, from Lorraine Wild’s 1996 Emigre essay “That was then and this is now: but what is next?” (aka “The Macramé of Resistance”). This list, in my view, is as inspiring now as it was then: “[T]here are other things that must be added to the education of designers to enable them to participate as something other than visual packagers […]: writing as a means of conceptual and expressive development; techniques of verbal expression, rhetoric, narrative and story-telling (the engineering underneath verbal communication); the grammar of film, particularly the syntax of editing, cross-cutting and sequencing in time to create narrative; sound; the grammar and psychology of games, which function as narrative structures as surely as story-telling or film; techniques of visual rhetoric, syntax and semantics, using examples from the high art to popular culture, including advertising; the awareness and critique of communicative systems as artificial constructs; understanding the social, cultural and functional possibilities within the realms of real and simulated space, the public and the private; collaboration; “knowing what you don’t know,” looking at models of other team-produced design (advertising, film making, architecture) that involve negotiation and accommodation, complex technical processes, and the negotiation of consensus; […] a history that expands to include a social and cultural development of media; and perhaps in contradiction to the last few points, a more serious consideration of fantasy, surrealism, game playing, pranks, simulation, bricolage and other forms of marginal subversion to map out the spaces in between, the entrepreneurial possibilities as a source of stimulation and creativity in approaching new media with a free hand.”

12 August 2008 — Recommended Readings