Emerging Design Practice Meets Cutting Edge Curating

This paper considers examples of design practice emerging from higher education and its reception by museums, addressing their different educational philosophies and theories. It will also consider the symbiotic relationship of the designer as ‘avant-garde form giver’ and the museum as ‘arbiter of the avant-garde’ in the sense that some work appears to be created for the purposes of museum endorsement and display. Future-oriented design students constantly reconfigure practice. Established conventions of industrial design, craft work, mass- or one-off production, and even newer fields such as computer-related or interaction design, rapidly seem inadequate terms to map emergent practices which sometimes subjugate the production of objects to the creation of experiences or events. But history-oriented museums privilege objects, are formulated around established taxonomies, and have difficulty assimilating practice that does not conform to existing conventions or contexts. Therefore, in order to gain access to the museological canon, emerging design practices need cutting edge curating. In this context it is also pertinent to ask what types of design practice are not, or never can, be acceptable in the established museum context. The paper will focus on case studies of work by very recent graduates of the RCA. Jen Hui Liao’s Self-Portrait Machine (2009) creates a symbiotic relationship between artist and machine where both parties together create the artist’s self-portrait. Through it we can examine issues of personal identity and self-representation in a mechanized world. Is it a technological commentary, a media device, a sculpture, an example of advanced product design, a robot, or an artistic representation of any or all of these? Is, in fact, the machine itself subordinate to the portraits it makes and where can it be positioned in a museum? Thomas Thwaites’s Toaster Project (2009) comments on the production of high volume, low cost, industrially-made electrical appliances. He determined to replicate a toaster by sourcing and fabricating all his own materials and components, from the iron ore for the metal frame, to the copper for the electrical wiring. The outcome was both a documentary archive of his process, and a barely functional simulacrum of a toaster. Museums collect product design as evidence of industrial development and social life, but where does Thwaites’s commentary fit in this discourse? Both examples address core interests of museums but in themselves are hard to ‘collect’. The paper will argue that parallel activities of events, exhibitions, residencies and responses to permanent collections may bridge the space between emerging design and museums. It will also posit that ultimately the commissioning of such events and practices directly influences the type of design made purposefully for museum display, and that interdependence exists between designers and their curators

Object Language/On Defining Sculpture

Object Language In the current era we in the Western, developed world, have almost universal free and uninhibited access to almost every piece of information in existence. Increasingly, regardless of the source, material presented to us as fact has become increasingly suspect. Together, these two things mean this endless stream of data is useless. The question is how to combat this decline, how to reverse the process of a meaningless, constant data-dump. The answer lies in the language used to communicate information. Language is the means by which we communicate complex ideas and knowledge from person to person. Language is something ubiquitous in our society, we see it, we hear it, it is so constant we do not even consider it as a part of the concepts it is used to convey. Altering language is one of the subtlest ways that information can still be obfuscated. Sculpture has the capability to reframe its own context. This is the great privilege evidenced numerous times by such works as Duchamp’s Fountain and enumerated by prominent art historians. Transforming something into sculpture implies that the purpose of the work is, at least in part, to reframe the subject matter of the piece. Translating language into sculpture is an effort to reframe this system. The process takes that which is recognizable and readily consumable and obfuscates it, putting barriers between us, the reader, and the idea expressed. That which is freely given is valueless, easily discarded, and ignored. By transforming the content into sculpture the idea is elevated, made enigmatic, even esoteric. The ideas in the context of this show are not freely given. They have been rendered inaccessible and there must be effort expended to understand the message. These ideas must be earned. This makes them more valuable and much harder to ignore or discard. Information is the most powerful tool we have, its possession saves us from the mistakes of the past, it is what guides us through our present, and it is what ensures our future. When information becomes valueless it is altogether too easy for it to be taken away; we lose the most important tool we have in self determination. The supplemental images are of the art exhibition entitled Object Language, produced by the artist, that this thesis is a companion to

Why bad ideas are a good idea

What would happen if we wrote an Abstract that was the exact opposite of what the paper described? This is a bad idea, but it makes us think more carefully than usual about properties of Abstracts. This paper describes BadIdeas, a collection of techniques that uses ???bad??? or ???silly??? ideas to inspire creativity, explore design domains and teach critical thinking in interaction design. We describe the approach, some evidence, how it is performed in practice and experience in its use.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Technological parables and iconic illustrations: American technocracy and the rhetoric of the technological fix

This paper traces the role of American technocrats in popularizing the notion later dubbed the “technological fix”. Channeled by their long-term “chief”, Howard Scott, their claim was that technology always provides the most effective solution to modern social, cultural and political problems. The account focuses on the expression of this technological faith, and how it was proselytized, from the era of high industrialism between the World Wars through, and beyond, the nuclear age. I argue that the packaging and promotion of these ideas relied on allegorical technological tales and readily-absorbed graphic imagery. Combined with what Scott called “symbolization”, this seductive discourse preached beliefs about technology to broad audiences. The style and conviction of the messages were echoed by establishment figures such as National Lab director Alvin Weinberg, who employed the techniques to convert mainstream and elite audiences through the end of the twentieth centur

Recent Acquisitions, 2007-2017: Selections from the Gettysburg College Fine Arts Collection

This exhibition reflects the breadth of Gettysburg College’s significant art collection and acknowledges the generosity of its donors. Major acquisitions have been made possible by The Michael J. Birkner \u2772 and Robin Wagner Art and Photography Acquisition Fund, which was established in 2013 to enhance the Gettysburg College curriculum, to offer curatorial opportunities for students, and to provide first-hand access to significant works of art. Purchases made possible by this endowment include works by prominent, internationally renowned artists Kara Walker, Wafaa Bilal, John Biggers, and Michael Scoggins. Other recent donations include important works by Andy Warhol, Glenn Ligon, Leonard Baskin, Raphael Soyer, Marion Greenwood, William Clutz, William Mason Brown, Sally Gall, and Jules Cheret’s Les Maîtres de l\u27Affiche lithographs. The Fine Arts Collection at Gettysburg College is comprised of over 500 museum-quality works, in addition to over 2000 Asian art objects that are featured routinely in Schmucker Art Gallery exhibitions and studied in Gettysburg College courses. The College has acquired over 200 fine art works in the past ten years, and this exhibition marks the first occasion to celebrate and view the scope of the collection. Some of the objects have been featured in recent exhibitions, while others, including large-scale color silkscreens by Andy Warhol and a rare print by MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient Carrie Mae Weems, have not yet been exhibited.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1024/thumbnail.jp

New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke\u27s Films And Japanese Modernism

This essay offers a reading of Kinugasa Teinosuke\u27s independent silent films as responses to the traumatic experience of twentieth-century modernity. Of particular interest are the global and local intertexts in A Page of Madness and Crossways, their connections to the literary criticism of the shinkankakuha, or New Perception school, and the centrality of sensory perception in Kinugasa\u27s work

Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide

This paper explores the design issues of 9 situated play within a museum through the study of a 10 museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We discuss our use of design ethnography in order to situate our interaction and to investigate the liminal and engagement qualities of a museum visit. The paper provides an overview of our case study and analysis of our user evaluation. We discuss the implications including degrees of balance in the experience design of play in interaction; the challenge in developing a discovery-based information model, and the need for a better understanding of the contextual aspects of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). We conclude that learning effectiveness and functionality can be balanced productively with playful interaction through an adaptive audio and TUI if designers balance the engagement between play and the environment, and the space between imagination and interpretation that links the audio content to the artifacts