Control and Chance in Design: or from thought to action

Sometimes the connections we make between different objects or events, in space and across time, seem wholly coincidental and circumstantial. As we move through the world, leaving trails of thoughts behind us, we accumulate a store of memories and loose associations that have emerged through contact with speech and things. Some connections just fall away and are lost forever, submerged under a host of privileged moments and pressing engagements. However other connections are merely dis-placed, sidelined by the same moments and engagements but preserved as a latent memory. The latter is merely put to one side in anticipation of future action, subsumed under the social schedule of work-and-play.

This is the story one such memory, first generated and then laid to rest at the conference Repositioning Graphic Design in October 2005. It was finally remembered – or recuperated - at the exhibition Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World in June 2006.

read the rest of this article

14 comments

Speech, Writing, Print…

Within the context of postmodern theoretical writing, (phonetic) writing is a limiting medium. From Plato to Saussure and onwards to a bevy of structuralist and post-structuralist writers, words are acknowledged to have only an insecure relationship to the objects or concepts they seek to represent. For Jacques Derrida, the Western philosophical tradition has prioritised the spoken word over the written; a conditioning cultural factor he identifies as logocentricism. In the presence of a speaker we hear not only the author but the authority of a statement: written and, even more so, printed texts are denied this authority. However many claims are made in support of handwriting as an authentic representation of an individual, not least the authority invested in an autographic signature, writing, it has been claimed, does not possess the same degree of conviction as the spoken word. The printed word is, therefore, seen to be at yet one further remove from the authority of the speaker.

read the rest of this article

13 comments

Design Politics

It could be argued that the progressive de-politicisation of politics has been mirrored in recent times by a superficial pseudo re-politicisation of art and design - in other words, the transformation of political action into merely symbolic action or pseudo-activity.

read the rest of this article

19 comments