As the candy settles in his stomach a sense of doom regrows its claws around his heart: little prongs like those that hold fast a diamond solitaire. There as been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. Before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and giant ripping noise and shattered screams this whole cosy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually still feel packed into your suitcases, stored in the unpressurized hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them.
—John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (1990).

Mr Updike, you will will be missed.

One of the things I’ll be attempting to do this year is to extend the number of the voices included here beyond simply my own. When I got the following note from artist and writer Angie Keefer in response to my previous post about Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack,” I asked if I could share it here in its entirety. I was grateful for Angie’s agreement. — RG

Angie Keefer writes:
During freshman and sophomore years I did my work-study at the Yale Art Gallery, in Operations. I helped to install the shows, change the lightbulbs (a full-time job in itself, as there are thousands of incandescent bulbs in that incredible ceiling, at least a few of which fizzle out on any given day), and prepare artworks for loan. The first big shipping project I handled on my own was the packing of the 1945 snow shovel [known as "In Advance of the Broken Arm"], part of Yale’s collection. I spent a week’s worth of work-study time outfitting a very expensive crate with layers of foam specially formed to secure the shovel during transit. When the time came to populate the little coffin, I was required to wear latex gloves, lest the oils from my fingers mar the precious specimen. Though I considered myself well-paid at the time, the joke seemed to be on me, all the same. I remember thinking then that my absurd performance, and all the similar performances that have no doubt accompanied In Advance of the Broken Arm over the past many years, add a layer to the narrative of the readymade that is often, if not always, overlooked. The rituals attending and attesting to the rarity of the object don’t fall off at the threshold of the gallery space. It’s a serious business, maintaining select snow shovels and bottle racks in the style to which Duchamp’s blessings have made them accustomed. To keep the faith, significant money and effort is expended on an ongoing basis, behind the scene. Rather, there is no behind the scene—circulation is as much the work, as is the object. That’s the point of the readymade, I think. Said point is only half expressed by the emphasis usually placed on re-contextualization and the role of artists/institutions/critical texts in endowing an object with cultural and economic value.

I’m interested in Marcel Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack” from 1914.

“Bottle Rack” is thought to be Duchamp’s first unaltered readymade. He purchased the kitchen tool at a bazaar near Paris’s city hall and left it in his studio for several months trying to figure out what to do with it. He remarked to his sister Suzanne that he considered it a sculpture “already made,” which is where we get the term “readymade,” though Duchamp wouldn’t use that exact term himsef until “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” a snowshovel given to him by his friend Jean Crotti in 1915. Both the snowshovel and the bottle rack were subsequently lost. The bottle rack was thrown out by Suzanne and legend has it that the shovel was mistaken for a “real” shovel at a show in Chicago and used to clear the winter sidewalks during the afternoon before an opening.

With the readymades, Duchamp has removed design objects from their context as functional objects and recontextualized them as objects of art. If design and art were the same thing, Duchamp’s swap would be impossible, because these contexts would be interchangable. He shows us they are not, and usefully so. “Bottle Rack” never lost its ability to dry bottles, it simply lost its ability to be available for bottle drying or even to represent its own availability for bottle drying given its new context. In effect, Duchamp took the bottle rack out of circulation in one context and put it into circulation in another.

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A friend shared this test of “design judgement” with me and I just had to share a portion of it here. I think it was developed in the mid-1940s (this edition is 1948) and used for some time, though the current consensus seems to be that it is not a very strong diagnostic of a designer’s ability. To wit [PDF]:

[The test] has attracted wide attention to determine its validity. [...] Some studies have been critical, arguing that test scores do not discriminate between artists and non-artists yet more recent studies found that it did. On the other hand, critics have suggested that the test is now dated because of the changing view on aesthetic principles. Further, Gotz and Gotz (1974) found that 22 different art experts (designers, painters, sculptors) had 0.92% agreement on choice of preferred design.

Still, the test itself has such a great aesthetic of its own, moving from “simple” comparisons to more complex and multidimensional ones. Looking at it, I kept being reminded of this excellent essay by Ellen Lupton that discusses Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, Wassily Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane, Gyorgy Kepes’s Language of Vision, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion. Lupton details how each of these books contributed to the development of the idea of a “language of vision.” Among her many useful observations is this one:

The concept of “figure” operates in two ways in [Gyorgy] Kepes’s text [Language of Vision (1944)]. On the one hand, “figure” is a term from Gestalt psychology, refering to the articulation of a mark against a background. On the other hand, a “figure” is a genre of graphic communication: a visual image inserted into a scientific or didactic text. Understood in this second sense, a “figure” is not a particular form of graphic—it could be a chart, graph, table, drawing, photograph, etc.—but is rather a particular function of graphic. Scientific figures offered Kepes attractive stylistic qualities—abstraction, simplicity, linearity. He also valued their function aesthetically. For Kepes, the explanatory, instrumental, unambiguous status of the didactic figure was an appealing attribute for art and design—even though “message” of the aesthetic object would tend to be associative rather than explicit. As Kandinsky and Oscar Schlemmer made the diagram into an expressive tool, a model for an elucidating, explanatory art, Kepes used the explanatory “figure” as a model for design.

I’ve posted a few of my favorite examples below, or check out this Flickr set to see even more.

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Above: A still from Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad. The screenplay was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

I’ve talked about pantoums before, but we get the form (and word) from Malaysia, where it is an ancient type of verse, though it was not introduced to English until 1812. In a pantoum, the second and fourth lines of the first stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the following stanza until the final stanza, when two new lines are introduced but not repeated. So writing one is not so much a challenge of rhythm or rhyme but of sequence. The poem has only half as many original lines as it appears to have, but, when these lines reflect or repeat, they can become like a hall of mirrors.

One of my favorite pantoums is Elaine Equi’s masterful “A Date with Robbe-Grillet.”

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Above: Portrait with I AM A MAN (Memphis) poster.
Photograph by Yoko Inoue.

I was really honored and excited when the editors of Idea Magazine asked me to be a part of their new issue, How does graphic design change? In the description that frames the issue, the editors write, “It is apparent that the line between the private and public domains of activity is blurring. The movement to acquire autonomy in client-oriented, heteronomous activities as well as the movement to gain a larger public audience for the products of self-initiated, autonomous activities are already underway. [...] In a modern society, what mode of production will designers attempt to utilize and, on a daily basis, how will they attempt to construct the world in which they live?”

In a break from the usual magazine portfolio presentation, the editors asked each contributor to take time to write a reflection on the projects they were being asked to show. I found this to be a thoroughly helpful exercise. Many of the ideas in the passage below will be familiar to regular readers of this website, but I include it here as an introduction to some, a compact and easygoing synthesis for others, and, as usual, an archive for myself. —RG

Above: The “Give-and-Take” Business Card Holder by Design Within Reach. With one side for incoming cards and the other side for outgoing cards, a pattern of exchange is designed into the object itself.

In the spring of 2006, I had been thinking a lot about gifts. In a meeting with a cautious client one day, I pointed out that I couldn’t really sell him a finished business card—it would only become his business card when he handed it to someone else, or gave it away. Somehow, even though the design process was finished, the client’s business card could not be fully realized as an object until it was distributed by him. 

This offhand comment stayed on my mind for weeks, and the more I thought about it, the more interested in it I became. It seemed the card worked in a giftlike way. No one asked for it, and no one paid for it, it was simply given. In giving it, some kind of emotion was expected, or some kind of action was undertaken in response. Perhaps the receiver would be excited to have this new person’s contact information. Or perhaps he would pass the card along to someone with his recommendation. Whatever the case, distribution was an integral part in the design process, but it was one that designers seldom discussed openly. How does design enter the world once it’s been made? It seems like that question can be just as important as what the design itself looks like. Certainly that was the case with business cards.

Around this time I read an article in The New Yorker about the Shakers, which also mentioned gifts, and, in looking for a good book to read about the Shakers one day, I stumbled across a book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde and decided I had to read it. The Gift is not a book about design, but it fundamentally changed the way I think about design. I began reading it in the summer of 2006 and brought it with me everywhere I went.

In the meantime, I found myself thinking a lot about the work and writing of Milton Glaser, and particularly his thinking about the ethics of design and the role design plays in our culture. It seemed that—like all gifts—giftlike design could help to bring people together and feel a sense of shared identity, regardless of what it looked like. This idea transcended aesthetics and seemed critically quite important. Glaser, who I later discovered is also a fan of The Gift, put it quite well in a film by Hilllman Curtis: “[The] passing on of gifts is a device to prevent people from killing one another, because they all become part of a single experience. And [Hyde's] leap of imagination occurs when he says this is what artists do. Artists provide that gift to the culture, so that people have something in common. And I think that all of us who identify with the role of artists in history want our work to serve that purpose.”

When you look at design through the lens of gift exchanges, its objective shifts from making the world more beautiful to making the world more shareable, and its basis shifts from the production of forms by its practitioners to the production of actions by its recipients. The way things look is still important, but the creation of compelling things now serves to maximize appeal and shared experiences. New designs are not always necessary to do create these shared experiences, and in fact often the recycling of forms is more effective in spreading and sharing a message.

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Above: y=mx+b magazine project. Custom tote bag designed and screenprinted by Yelena Avanesova.

Above: A spread of Ryan Quigley’s well story, “The Future of Fashion,” from y=mx+b. Page through the whole magazine from Issuu below, or visit the website to order or download your own copy.

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Above: Christopher Miller created “A Gentleman’s Guide to the 21st Century,” a buying guide divided into three booklets: work, play, and love. Inside, the guides mixed a kind of email informality with a nostalgia for the classicism of centuries past.

Create a product catalog for an object from the future. This should be an object that you will desire, but it may be anything from an overpriced luxury item to an essential tool for surviving 10 to 20 years from now. Use your imagination. The market for this product will be an important consideration. Your catalog should be largely image-driven and should use minimal text. It should pursuade, convince, and seduce us.

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Above: Yelena Avanesova’s project focused on a book she decided to read for the class, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which imagines our planet after the last human has died off. Yelena’s underlined passages combined with imagery from vintage National Geographic magazines in this unique presentation of a world and text remembered. More + 10 to 20 projects below.

Above: Isaac Weeber’s book centered around sorting predictions about the future into three categories: plausible, possible, and impossible. These were color-coded and these colors showed up on the outer margins of all the content he chose to reproduce depending on his personal opinion.

Above: Yu Chung Lim’s book was a catalog of existing experimental architecture projects that she felt pointed a way toward the future of building and urbanization.

Generate a book about the future. This future should not be hundreds of years away, however: I’m interested in what you think about the immediate future, within your own lifetime, no more than 10 to 20 years from now.

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Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

These are slides from the lecture I gave to my publication design students on the first day of class. The first half of the lecture was focused on craft. I basically looked at Case da Abitare, a beautifully redesigned Italian home magazine, and then showed my students how to take it apart. (There is a great interview with the magazine’s creative director Tyler Brûlé, art director Kuchar Swara, and photo director Stephen Ledger-Lomas logged here on our class blog.) I started with a heavily-gridded page, the Index, and reveal the magazine’s basic 12-column structure. I went on to show how lines and rules are applied to the gutters and outer margins of that 12-column grid. Then I showed how the type is sitting on a p3.5 baseline grid which governs the placement of all horizontal elements on the page. Basically, the height of any element on Case da Abitare’s pages is a multiple of p3.5. Then I showed students how to guess at type sizes based on baseline reoccurrance, and finally I showed how all of these templated elements play out across a variety of grid schemes.

The second part of the presentation is a set of “Notes on Magazines.” First, I asked students to consider magazines as a publication form by contrasting them to other types of publications. (For the sake of simplicity, I definited a “publication” as any object with multiple pages made available to the public.) This included newspapers, journals, brochures, books, and blogs. Then we looked at various “toggles” within the magazine form itself. These included timing (or frequency), scope, length, number of authors, quantity of advertising, makeup of audience, and different strategies for distribution. Finally, I sketched a “garden variety” three-act magazine. This is what most lay readers learn as the magazine form proper: front of book, feature well, and back of book, with all the content-driven and stylistic assumptions that come with those sections. —RG

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The last two pages of the 1979 book Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century describe what will happen on earth over the next 120 years. Reproduced below are the authors’ predictions for the first ten of those 120 years, from 1980–1990. Source: Paleo-Future.com

1980–1990

• Satellites in Earth orbit beam educational programmes to many countries in the underdeveloped Third World.
• Wind turbines—modern windmill designs—are developed which can supply electricity economically.
• Domestic computers run household equipment. Electronic chores include keeping accounts, ordering supplies, suggesting menus, cooking meals and keeping a diary for the people living in the house.
• Newspapers supplied to homes either via a computer print-out or in electronic form over the TV screen.
• First domestic robots used as household “slaves” to do simple tasks.
• Terrorists steal nuclear warhead from military base. Threaten to blow up a city unless their demands are met. General realization of the appalling risks of poor security promote measures to keep atomic weapons under proper “lock and key.”

Nuclear fuel detector-satellite placed in orbit to maintain a watchful electronic eye on the world’s supplies of atomic material.

• Good insulation and other energy-saving features built into all new houses.
• Solar panels in general use to heat water in homes. Solar-electric cells used to generate electricity for some uses, such as recharging batteries.
• World tree planting programme begun. Aim is to restore the oxygen-producing capacity of the world’s plant life. Centuries of being chopped down have reduced the world’s forest areas to a fraction of their former size. Other benefits include the production of wood-alcohol to use as a substitute for petrol in cars.

I hope I’m remembering this right, but I think it was one of my favorite teachers, Paul Elliman, who once remarked that some classes start with a program and others start with a provocation. He was often fond of the latter approach, and in the case of teaching this class, so was I. The goal of the class was to introduce students to different kinds of publications, but I chose to focus on artists’ books, catalogs, and magazines. Simply designing these forms in a vacuum, however, wouldn’t do: what makes any publication great is its context and, more importantly, its content.

This conversation continued as we passed content around and began reforming it into other publication types, first as a sales brochure and then as a full-length magazine. Throughout, we had discussions about not only the future, but about the nature of collaboration and about the many publications and periodicals that inspired us to think about what’s coming next. —RG

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I’m interested in Borge Morgenson’s J39 Chair.

In 1927, a No. 7 armed rocking chair designed at a Shaker workshop in Mt. Lebanon, NY somehow arrived in Denmark, where it immediately captivated Kaare Klint, a leading figure in the modern movement there. It was the same kind of chair Brother Robert Wagan’s workshop had been producing since the 1870s, but the Danes had never seen anything like it, nor had they ever heard of the Shakers. Klint ordered a replica and shared it with his students. In 1947, one of those students, Borge Morgenson, designed his J39 chair, which drew heavily on the Shaker sources. The chair quickly became a familiar icon in Denmark and would soon be one of the first modern Scandinavian designs to be marketed in the U.S. by its producer, the Danish Cooperative FDB Mobler.

It might seem like this is a story about influence, and of course it is, but if you look at it that way it’s because you’re seeing things from the causal side, from the side that considers how an object comes to look how it looks and who made it that way.

If you look at this story in terms of effects, the question, I think, is much more interesting. Is the J39 chair a Shaker chair? Is it only possible for Shaker chairs to be made by the Shakers themselves? Put even more simply: what makes a Shaker chair a Shaker chair?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that only the Shakers can make a Shaker chair. This is a tricky argument to make: not even the Shakers considered themselves the “makers” of the things they made. There was only one maker, and it was God. The No. 7 armed rocking chair was a gift from God. It was no more a Shaker chair as it was anyone else’s.

Nonetheless, to support themselves and their communities, the Shakers were among the first in America to try mass production, and they were so successful at it that the Shaker name became synonymous with quality. Mail-order catalogs of Shaker goods were distributed up and down the east coast of the U.S.

So: who really created Shaker chairs if the Shaker’s didn’t? You might argue it was the people that bought the chairs from the Shakers’ catalogs. Shaker chairs became Shaker chairs not because of their designers, but because of their customers. Identification, after all, rests on recognition.

Anyway, one of those chairs ends up on a boat and the boat ends up in Denmark, where no one has heard of the Shakers. To Kaare Klint and his fellow Danish designers it’s just a chair but it’s not just a chair, it’s a very special chair. They copy it. Were the copy to be purchased by someone who recognized it as a Shaker chair, would that make the copy a Shaker chair? And: is it now a Danish chair also?