D e s i g n I n q u i r y

D e s i g n I n q u i r y
2005: Motive, method, medium.
June 11 — June 17, Portland, Maine

DesignInquiry is a working symposium; in a series of short lectures, discussions and studio workshops, participants will explore the aesthetics and ethics of graphic design: through Motive, method and medium. Join Elliott Earls, Peter Hall, Melle Hammer, Ellen Lupton, Marlene McCarty, Douglass Scott, Matt Soar, Louise Sandhaus, Nancy Skolos + Thomas Wedell, Lucille Tenazas, Rick Valicenti, Lorraine Wild, and more check back often in this evolved Maine Summer Institute in Graphic Design at Maine College of Art. DesignInquiry is in partnership with AIGA.

Come for a week to Portland, Maine, to engage with outstanding design professionals, advanced students and educators. DesignInquiry frames the questions, participants explore the answers. REGISTER NOW.

See the work of DesignInquiry'05
See the work of DesignInquiry'04
"Surfing or special effects? Design Inquiry" by Peter Hall, EYE 55

>INTRODUCTION >'04 RECAP >WHO'S COMING >DAILY SCHEDULE >WORDS ON THE TOPIC >APPLICATION >COST >CREDIT >HOUSING >SPONSORS >DESIGNINQUIRY&MSIGD ARCHIVE >CONTACT US

Introduction to the Week

To answer the question: "what will we do there", or, "why should I come", take a look at the DesignInquiry'04 recap. In a less visual nutshell version: DesignInquiry sets the stage for us to see, discuss and make work connected to questions presented through the topic Motive, method, medium in a 6-day intensive. Here we make work, discuss, play, complain, and focus on questions the topic inspires; the core of our practice, the connection to audience, why and for whom we do it, how we do it, and what is similar or different in the mediums we do.

When you get to Portland, you will be joined by fellow designers, educators and inspiring students to work with studio mentor faculty. These faculty-mentors begin the small-group workshopsby assigning a method of investigation in response to their own research and connection to the topic. Throughout the week presentations and mini "shift" workshops will inform and motivate alternate points of view to bring back to the studio to practice and test (workshops & daily schedule will be posted as we get closer). At DesignInquiry we will not look at portfolio presentations, we will not concentrate on form, but on the content side of our work as it relates to Motive, method, medium. Participants have 24/7 dedicated studio space, and many stay at MECA's residence's, a short walk to the studios.

At conferences the most significant moments of inspiration and connection come in the hallways or in the bars. Consider DesignInquiry as that hallway, that bar, those meetings we'll sustain for the week, shoulder to shoulder, working on projects, doing, questioning our work, in effort to hold significance, inspiration, or connection to our contemporary design practice. Read the registration section then download the PDF. Also, take a look at this movie made from DesignInquiry'04.

DESIGNINQUIRY…an anecdote
by Margo Halverson
When the Maine Summer Institute in Graphic Design was over two years ago, I found myself questioning the effect of the teacher-student relationship...read more about why and how DesignInquiry began.

>INTRODUCTION >'04 RECAP >WHO'S COMING >DAILY SCHEDULE >WORDS ON THE TOPIC >APPLICATION >COST >CREDIT >HOUSING >SPONSORS >DESIGNINQUIRY&MSIGD ARCHIVE >CONTACT US

Who's coming

Elliott Earls
contribution: week-long workshop:
Finding one's intrinsic motivation while actively rejecting extrinsic motivation through exploring the anti-method-method in (m)any medium. [ society can define your career/life path, or you can. Make a choice. ]

Elliott Earls was appointed Designer-in Residence and Head of the Graduate Graphic Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in July 2001. Earls recieved his M.F.A. from Cranbrook in 1993. Upon Graduation from Cranbrook Earls' experimentation with nonlinear digital video, spoken word poetry, music composition and design led him to form the Apollo Program. The Apollo Program's commercial clients include Elektra Entertainment, Nonesuch Records, Scribner Publishing C., Elemond Casabella (Itlay), The Cartoon Network (U.K.), Imaginary Forces, Polygram Classics and Jazz, The Voyager Company and Janus Films. His commercial work includes two television commercials for the Cartoon Network in the United Kingdom as well as an interactive documentary on the work of Frank Gehry for Casabella in Italy. As a typographer, his original type design is distributed worldwide by Emigre Inc. Earls's
posters entitled "The Conversion of Saint Paul", "Throwing Apples at the Sun,""The Temptation of Saint Wolfgang" and "She a Capulet" are part of the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Earls's latest enhanced CD/poster package was recently added to the Cooper-Hewitt's research file.

In May of 2002, Earls in association with Emigre Inc. released "Catfish," a 55 minute film on DVD. "Catfish" traces Earls work from the lab to the stage in a highly manipulated digital film incorporating, animation, stop motion photography, drawing, typography and live action into a seamless performance documentary. Earls was profiled in 2002 by Eye, Print and Punk Planet Magazines. As a performance artist, Earls was awarded an Emerging Artist grant by Manhattan's prestigous Wooster Group. He was a features performer at the Wooster Group's Performing Garage from July 5-12, 1999. Elliott has performed at the Cretiel Theatre Festival in France, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minesota; The Oak Street Theatre in Portland, Maine; at Experimenta 99, Lisbon, Portugal; Opera Totale in Metrre/Venice; Typo 2000 in Berlin; and Living Surfaces in Park City Utah. Elliott also performed for six months at HERE in Soho , New York City. In addition, he was a feature performer during the 1999 and 2000 Culture Mart Festivals in Soho. On May 16, 1999 "Eye Sling Shot Lions" was also shown at Plazzo Della Triennale di Milano during Tratto di Continnuo; at Nightwave in Rimini, Italy, during the "Remaking History" symposium at The American Center for Design, at Fabrica Treviso, Italy; and at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, California. Earls's first release "Throwing Apples at the Sun" has been reviewed in Emigre, ID magazine, Urb, Heckler, Creative Review, Creativity, and EYE magazines. It was featured in May 1996 in Venice, Italy, during Digital Zuppe. It also won numerous awards and was included in ID Magazine's 1996 Annual Design Review, The 1996 American Center for Design 100 Show, and the 1996 New York Art Director's Club Show. Earl's work has been featured in the books The Graphic Edge, Cool Type, Faces on the Edge, Type in the Digital Age, One and Two Color Graphics, and Cutting Edge Typography. Earls's essay, "WD40: A Tool kit in a Can; Or, The Importance of David Holzman's Diary" appeared in Emigre No. 35, And his essay entitled "Bone Fragments and Bits of Teeth" was published in the American Center for Design's Statements.

Earls spent September 2000-May 2001 as a Designer-in-Residence at Fabrica, Benetton's studio/research center in Treviso, Italy. He has taught typography, design and multimedia at the State University of New York at Purchase. His serial examination of "spiritual gangsters" has been published by Emigre. Earls also has spent time at numerous American universities, and he has given workshops on design, culture and new media in Europe and America. In 2001 Earls was a finalist for the Chrysler National Design Award in New Media.

read also General Incompetence
Elliott Earls’ General Incompetence
Written by Steven Heller
Published on January 25, 2005.
Filed in Voice: AIGA Journal of Design

Peter Hall
contribution: week-long journalist-instigator-questioner
Roving Moderator
Providing daily reflections on the goings-on of the week, facilitating interaction between workshops, and introducing subjects and speakers(while trying to avoid that TV-age tendency to sum up everything with a neat punchline.) Organizing lunchtime discussion of readings related to the "mmm" theme, which I'll send out in advance (to be decided), plus film clip screenings, and mmmotivating beach soccer outings.

Peter Hall is a writer and design critic based in New York. He is a contributing writer for Metropolis and has written widely about design in its various forms, including elevators, TV graphics, bridges, neon lights and spaceships for magazines such as Print, I.D. Magazine and the recently published books Up, Down and Across: Elevators, Escalators and Moving Sidewalks and Designed by Peter Saville . He wrote and co-edited the best selling monographs on Tibor Kalman and Stefan Sagmeister and co-authored a book on motion graphics, Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics. He currently teaches a seminar on design theory at Yale University, and plays bass guitar in the Latin Lounge band The Moonrats. At the Design Institute he edits the Knowledge Circuit and an upcoming book on mapping, ELSE/WHERE. Peter was at DesignInquiry'04, check out his reading seminar & notes in the after-publication.

Melle Hammer
contribution: co-founder, workshop & week-long glue to the topic:
Motive, method, medium.ethics the aesthetics of contemporary design // question mark

//// fudoni black 24/36, + 90 //// ... tattoo left arm

design is a radical, urgent topic.

it doesn't start with the designer or with the other actors in the field:

design is a part of everyday life.

the designer can't pretend he is alone in making the decisions: it is a diffuse, combined action. the result always in direct relation to its environment.

underlying motives, available knowledge, accessible tools, more

Melle Hammer 17-3-1956 it’s a boy! Habit: Amsterdam
Together with Margo Halverson he 'refounded' the summer program of Maine College of Art. Typographer. Designer. Teacher. Lingering between art, design and advertising. Easily seduced to design a table, a chair or a stage set. Every now and then: a movie or a poem comes out. Always: questioning ‘the spot’. On and on surprised, outraged or in love. Lost? Found!
www.mellehammer.nl

Ellen Lupton
contribution: Lecture:
Going Public: Taking Graphic Design to the People

Why do we do what we do, and who is it for? I believe that the next great task of the graphic design discipline is to spread our ideas outward, putting the tools of communicating into the hands of people who have the need and urge to communicate. Learning to build a Web site, or edit a movie,or publish a book, enables people to author their own content and also become more critical readers of the media they see and read every day. Grassroots design resources are likely to feed, rather than suffocate,desire for more powerful tools and in-depth collaborations with full-time designers. Just as desktop publishing failed to obliterate the design profession in the 1980s, the do-it-yourself movement that is on the rise today will not wipe out the need for professional designers or high-end commercial software.

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the MFA program in graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art(MICA) in Baltimore. She also is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, where she has organized numerous exhibitions, each accompanied by a major publication,including the National Design Triennial series (2000 and 2003), Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002), Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age(1999), Mixing Messages (1996), and Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993). With J. Abbott Miller she co-authored Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design (1996). Her most recent book is Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors and Students (2004).

www.designwritingresearch.org
www.thinkingwithtype.com

Marlene McCarty
contribution: week-long workshop:
NOW WHAT?
i envision a participant :
1. identifying an issue they are passionate about. an issue that is to
them a primary experience NOT something only read about or seen on
television. ( i will ask the participants to come with potential
theme's and have them already in place more

After moving from Kentucky to Basel, Switzerland where Marlene McCarty studied design at the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule then to New York City's East Village in the 1980s, Marlene McCarty fueled dual careers as an artist and designer. She began working at MoMA and then with Tibor Kalman at the famed M&Co. In the late 80's McCarty was a member of Gran Fury, the AIDS activist collective which grew out of ACT UP. McCarty participated in the 1990 Venice Biennial with Gran Fury. In 1989, she founded Bureau, a company which used commercial graphic design as a framework for its mandate to produce art, politically engaged work, and commercial work. Bureau's corporate clients have included Calvin Klein, Clinique, Comme des Garcons, MTV, Elektra Records and The Sundance Channel. McCarty/Bureau also designed campaigns for the ACLU, United Nations Population Fund, GMHC, and Doctors Without Borders. McCarty has designed film titles for Far from Heaven, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, American Psycho, Velvet Goldmine, The Ice Storm, and I Shot Andy Warhol, among many others. In 2000 Bureau became a virtual studio.

In the early 1990's McCarty's explorations of sexuality and obscenity via textual renderings on canvas were shown in the United States and Europe. For the last decade she has assembled and drawn portraits of teenaged girls involved in murderous crimes. Six large-scale “murals,” of this subject matter were exhibited in the 2003 Istanbul Biennial. The drawings, painstakingly completed in graphite and ballpoint pen, continue McCarty's exploration of sexuality and identity.

Based on the same thematic Bad Blood Stage One is an interactive video piece that was shown in Basel in June 2004. It will be installed at the American Museum of the Moving Image later in 2005.

From 1990 to the present McCarty has shown with Metro Pictures, American Fine Arts and Bronwyn Keenan Galleries in New York. She is presently represented by the Brent Sikkema Gallery. The Reina Sophia (Spain), Neue Gesellschft feur Bildende Kunst (Germany), Vienna Succession (Austria), Neue Kunsthalle St. Gallen and [plug in] Basel (Switzerland) are among various venues that have exhibited her work in Europe. McCarty was a 2002-2003 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. McCarty has been a visiting artist or adjunct professor at many institutions including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, New York University and Rhode Island School of Design. She is presently an adjunct professor at Cooper Union.

www.vbureau.com (don't miss the pilgrims on this site)
http://welcome.weallplugin.org/projects/project.03102618
www.lacan.com/frameXX7.htm
www.k9000.ch/archiv_cartyhani_e.html

Louise Sandhaus and Rick Valicenti
contribution: week-long workshop with Rick
Profound Connections
Profound Connections offers a playful investigation of the deep connections between ourselves, others, our lives as designers, and our work. How can links between these different facets of our lives integrate to make communication (more) compelling? useful? fulfilling? Can the connections be used to make sense of life's day-to-day experiences?more

Louise Sandhaus is Director of the Graphic Design Program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and partner in Durfee Regn Sandhaus, a design collective that collaboratively synthesizes architecture, media design, graphic design, and technology to realize complex interpretive exhibitions, including the recent web-based exhibition, "Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s -1970s”.

Louise's work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Biblioteque Nationale de France, Paris. Her work and writing have appeared in numerous publications including Eye, Metropolis, Émigré and her work has been recognized by AIGA 365, The Art Directors Club, American Center for Design, among many others.

Her current projects include the book, "Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires and Riots: California and Graphic Design" and the exhibition she co-curated "Earthquakes and Aftershocks: Posters from the CalArts Graphic Design Program, 1986-2004" opening February 2005 at the Museé de Publicité, Paris. This spring "Schools of Thoughts II: Poised toward the Future of Graphic Design Educator," a conference for design educators will take place in Los Angeles. (see AIGA website).

Profound Connections
What is this workshop about?
Profound Connections offers a playful investigation of the deep connections between ourselves, others, our lives as designers, and our work. How can links between these different facets of our lives integrate to make communication (more) compelling? useful? fulfilling? Can the connections be used to make sense of life's day-to-day experiences? more

Rick Valicenti Founder/ Design Director, Thirst
Thirst is a firm devoted to art with function. Rick Valicenti's passion for design and embrace of new technologies make for a dynamic marriage of imagery and inspiration. Thirst’s strategic and creative versatility continues to lead the discourse and pursue the elusive ideals of intelligence and real human presence within today’s culture of commerce.

Rick is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) and has served as President of the Society of Typographic Art (later known as the American Center for Design); board member on the AIGA Chicago chapter, jurored the President’s Design Awards (Bush and Clinton), National Endowment for the Arts; been nominated twice for the prestigious Chrysler Design Awards; and selected to the first ID Magazine 40 top designers. Thirst works have garnered recognition in the form of lots of awards. Publication stores include Eye.06(London), Émigré (twice) and Idea (Tokyo). Recent book publications include Phaidon’s Area, Graphic Radicals by Katherine McCoy and Typography One by Rick Poyner. A 356-page monograph on the Thirst work is being published by the Monacelli Press in 2005 titled Emotion as Promotion.

The GGG and DDD Galleries in Osaka and Tokyo, respectively, have held Thirst's one-person exhibitions. Selected Thirst works have also been included in the permanent collections including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Recent Exhibitions include, The Seoul Typographic Biennial 2002.

Rick has lectured on four continents. In 1991 Rick was a primary speaker for the AIGA National Conference and the keynote speaker for the 2003 Adobe Design Awards. This year ID Magazine has selected one designer from all design disciplines to represent each state in their Jan/Feb 2004 issue. ID recognized Rick as the Illinois designer for their ID50. On June 23, 2004 The AIGA/Chicago recognized Rick Valicenti with a lifetime achievement award and Fellow status.

For the past decade, Rick has contributed his time and energies to college and high school students in the form of workshops, personal critiques and conversation about design and professional practice. These visits are scheduled monthly on average.

Douglass Scott
contribution: week-long workshop
Influence/Inspiration/Intent
This workhop, in which each participant will build and record her/his spheres of influence,
will help create a better understanding of:
• why we do what we do
• how we go about our work and life
• what means we choose to express ourselves more

Douglass Scott teaches design, typography, and design history at the Rhode Island School of Design (since 1980) and Yale University (since 1984). He has also taught at the Boston Architectural Center, Harvard University, Maine College of Art, and at both RISD and Maine Summer Institutes of Graphic Design Studies.

His teaching emphasizes the integration of: conceptual thinking, pragmatic problem solving, information organization, form-making, typography, and cultural/historical influences. Since 1989, he has been actively constructing and exhibiting paper collages and assemblages.

Scott is Design Director at the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston, a producer and broadcaster of public television and radio programs, where he has worked since 1974. He is also consulting Art Director of Davis Publications, for whom he designs art textbook programs and other educational materials.

He has designed books for many publishers, including Little, Brown; Houghton Mif?in; and Addison-Wesley. Other clients include John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston Design Museum, Harvard University, Abt Associates, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, Nebraska State Historical Society, and the National Park Service.

Since 1978, Scott has given over 150 lectures on the history of design. He was a curator of the History of American Typography section of the 1989 exhibition Graphic Design In America, organized by the Walker Art Center. Scott also curated and designed The Roots of Modern American Graphic Design exhibition at the Art Institute of Boston which included 400 works by American designers from 1930s–50s. He has been a visiting critic at over 35 colleges and art schools, and is currently writing a design history book.

Scott’s design work has won awards from many organizations. he holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Nebraska, a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, and studied the history of graphic design with Louis Danziger at Harvard University.

Nancy Skolos + Thomas Wedell
contribution: presentation & participation
Inspiration from Collage: Transactions between surface and object
The lecture will include historic examples and influences as well as studio work around the theme of letting go of a deliberate process and looking at what can be discovered by the fluid recombining, recontextualizing and reconfiguring of collage.

Principals of Skolos/ Wedell an interdisciplinary design and photography studio. Husband and wife, designer and photographer, the two work to diminish the boundaries between graphic design and photography-creating collaged three-dimensional images influenced by modern painting, technology and architecture.. With a home/studio halfway between Boston, and Providence they balance their commitments to professional practice and teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design where Nancy is Head of the Department of Graphic Design.

The studio's work has received numerous awards and has been widely exhibited. Awards include the Silver Prize, Lahti Poster Biennale and the Bronze Prize, International Triennial of Posters Toyama, Japan. Group exhibits include: "30 Posters on the Environment and Development," Rio de Janeiro; "The Modern Poster," The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Festival d'Affiches de Chaumont. Skolos/Wedell's posters are included in the graphic design collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich, Switzerland. Nancy is an AGI member.

check this site again, it is regularly updated

Matt Soar(Montreal)
contribution: week-long workshop
Thinking through Design(Towards a quasiworkshop/graphicpitstop/speedstudio on logos, branding and signage)
We are always unavoidably surrounded by logos and brands in ads, on clothes, as signage on tall buildings, even as tattoos or imprints on the beach. And - of course - in the design studio, via our clients, and in the form of computer software and hardware. One way to get under the skin more

Matt Soar www.mattsoar.org is available in at least two flavors: although he initially worked in construction and then in advertising, these days he is a media studies teacher and a graphic designer. He has written about, for example: why Theory is useful; the limits to culture jamming; the importance/impotence of the First Things First manifesto; alternative histories of film title design; and, most recently, the history/ubiquity of the typeface Mistral. Some of this work has appeared in the AIGA journal, in Looking Closer 4, and in Eye magazine. Matt is currently doing some research into the ways in which logos and branding devices infiltrate ever corner of contemporary life, for example in movies (through product placement) and in cities (through signs on rooftops and logos on skyscrapers). At the last DesignInquiry he wondered aloud if graphic design really matters, which clearly makes it an ideal place to keep on wondering (and designing).

Identity. Excerpt from Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture by Ellen
Lupton. Mixing Messages design exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National
Design Museum (1996-1997).
Graphic Design in an Age of Anxiety. Essay by David Crowley
No Logo. Website based on the book by Naomi Klein
No Logo. Excerpt from the critical video featuring Naomi Klein
Adbusters.
Shawn Wolfe. Illustrator and designer of Beatkit (TM).
Public Lettering. Documentation of lettering and signage in London by
Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon
Typocity. Visual record and analysis of lettering and signage in
Mumbai, India
Twin: A typeface for the Twin Cities. LettError's award-winning type
design for Minneapolis and St Paul changes with the weather.
Mistral in Montreal: A log of one typeface in one city (Matt Soar)
Enormicom.com. Satirical website about the branding process.

Lucille Tenazas
contribution: lecture
title: Relevance: Description coming soon.

Lucille Tenazas is the founder and principal of Tenazas Design, a communication graphics and design firm based in San Francisco, working on publishing projects, identity and marketing systems for cultural, educational and non-profit organizations. Her design reflect an interest in the complexity of language and the overlapping relationship of meaning,form, and content.

She was the Founding Chair and currently CoChair of the MFA Program in Design at California College of the Arts, formerly CCAC, with an emphasis on form-giving, teaching and leadership. As an educator, she has conducted workshops with professionals and students both here and abroad, among them RISD, CalArts, Maine Summer Institute for Graphic Design, Kingston University (UK) and Wellington Polytechnic (New Zealand). Educated in Manila, the Philippines, Lucille studied at the CCAC and received her MFA in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 1995, she was honored as one ofthe I.D. Forty, I.D. magazine's third annual selection of 40 of America's leading design innovators. She was the national president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1996-98, representing the first presidential appointment made outside of New York in the organization's 80-year history. In 2002, Lucille was the recipient of the National Design Award in the Communications Design category by the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Professional Highlights
Received the National Design Award in Communications Design by the Smithsonian Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum, 2002

National President of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) representing the first presidential appointment made outside of New York in the organization's 80-year history, 1996-98

Member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), joining a select few designers invited to represent the United States, 1998

Lucille Tenazas, Selections from the Permanent Collection of Architecture and Design, one-person exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996

I.D. Forty, Featured in I.D. magazine's third annual selection of 40 of America's leading design innovators, 1995

Founding Chair of the MFA Program in Design at California College of the Arts, (formerly CCAC) with an emphasis on form-giving, teaching and leadership, 2000, currently Co-Chair

Author and designer of monograph, Lucille Tenazas: Designer First, published by Princeton Architectural Press, for release in 2006

Lorraine Wild
contribution: lecture
details coming
Lorraine Wild is a designer and educator living and working in Los Angeles. She has been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts since 1985 (she was the director of the Program in Graphic Design from 1985 to 1991) and served as a project tutor at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, The Netherlands in the '90s. Wild established her own design practice in 1996 to focus on collaborations with architects, curators and publishers. Recent projects include the design of books for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Also, she is a partner in Greybull Press, the Los Angeles-based publisher of unique photographic books. Her work has been published in Emigre, Eye, I.D., Print, and in the anthologies The Graphic Edge, Typography Now and Typography Now: Two. Her writing has appeared in numerous periodicals and books, including Graphic Design in America, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, Looking Closer, Looking Closer 2, and Looking Closer 4.

In 2003, Wild's work was included in the Smithsonian / Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's National Design Triennial exhibition. In 2001, she was a finalist for the Communication Design Award of the National Design Awards sponsored by the same institution; she was awarded a Gold Medal by the New York Art Director's Club that same year. Wild has received numerous awards from The American Center for Design, The American Institute of Graphic Arts (her books have been chosen for the AIGA's '50 Best books of the Year' twelve times as of 2003), and the American Institute of Architects, among others. Wild received a bfa from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a mfa from Yale University.

Who Else is Coming
check this site again, it is regularly updated

Ron Botting
contribution: SHIFT workshop:
Page to the stage.
MOTIVE
My need, continuously developed throughout life, to express my self, for you to hear me and I you.

Ron Botting is an Actor and Affiliate Artist at Portland Stage Company where his wife, Set and Costume Designer Anita Stewart, is Artistic Director.

Ron lived in New York for 18 years and joined Actors Equity Association in 1979 after his first Off-Broadway show. The N.Y. Times said “Ron Botting’s assurance as a singer is reflected in the excellent singing ensemble he has created as the show’s Musical Director.” He acted at HERE Arts Center, Theatre for a New Audience, Primary Stages, Naked Angels and the The Westside Theatre.

Ron is also a member of United Scenic Artists having worked on such movies as John Hughes’s Baby’s Day Out, Edward Norton’s Keeping the Faith, and Beeban Kidron’s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. Other production work in NYC for Conway & Pratt (http://www.conwayandprattprojects.org/company.html) and New York Theatre Workshop (http://www.nytw.org/about.asp) among others.

An actor and teacher for Shakespeare & Co., Ron also Production Managed several month long Intensive Professional Actor Training Workshops for Director of Training & Master Teacher of Voice Kristin Linklater.

Ron dances with Choreographer Susan Dibble of Brandeis University's Theater Arts Department performing The Man and The Angel at the Mobius performance space in Boston, at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA. and featured annually at Shakespeare & Company.

Hilary Chapman
contribution: dance workshop:
BODY SPEAK
The body is essential. Everyday we use our bodies to get to where we are going, to sit still and concentrate at work, to function on basic needs, and to communicate with other people.What if our bodies could speak, what would they say to us about how we treat them? more

Hilary M. Chapman is an improvisational dancer. She grew up under the wing of Daniel McCusker and Lisa Hicks studying Cunningham and Lamone among other techniques at the New Dance Studio in Portland Maine. Studying with Sara Rudner at Sarah Lawrence College, she participated in the reconstruction of Trisha Brown’s ‘Sololos’ and ‘Spanish Dance’ which she performed at The New Museum in NYC spring 2003. Hilary was chosen by Meredith Monk to recreate the part of Tone in her 20 year old piece ‘Plateau’ which she performed at Sarah Lawrence College in May 2004. In 2003 Hilary began an independent improv dance groupwhich performs in public spaces at spontaneous times. At home in Maine Hilary is taking a year at MECA to study photography and research collaborative performance between the dancer and the visual artist.

Chris Thompson
contribution: lecture
What happens when nothing happens: history in the hallway
Between two opposing midfielders, the design critic threaded a left-footed pass through to his young Somali teammate. He trapped it mid-stride and turned it into a perfect cross to the middle-aged Russian guy who outlegged this author to send the ball whistling between the pair of shoes that served as our makeshift goal. The Somali kid had been off-side by a few steps. That his team got away with it had nothing to do with the impressive resume of the critic who had started the play, and everything to do with its elegance and with the goodwill of the pick-up soccer game—a kind of quid pro quo that consists in a mutual overlooking of tiny infractions and an unspoken commitment to avoid any serious ones. more

Chris Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Art History Department at the Maine College of Art. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Goldsmiths College, University of London, which examined the 1982 meeting between German artist Joseph Beuys and His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet, and investigated relationships between Fluxus artists and Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. He currently teaches a range of courses in modern and contemporary art, cultural history, critical theory and visual culture.

His articles and essays have appeared or will soon appear in Performance Research, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Radical Philosophy, Domus, Print, Tate International Arts and Culture, The Portland Phoenix, and others. His essay “The Look of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas, Leo Bronstein, and the interhuman intrigue,” will be published in Text and Ethics, Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg Press. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book Ingestation: Consumption and Contemporary Culture.

read also words on the topic by Chris

Margo Halverson
contribution: founder & main/Maine glue
mhalverson@meca.edu: Founder with Melle Hammer in '03, Margo was the Director of the Maine Summer Institute in Graphic Design for all its years. She teaches graphic design at Maine College of Art full-time, designs books and other projects for museums and architects, and is mother and vigilant beholder of Jack and Cora, 9 & 7 with Charles Melcher.

check back often, we update regularly

Add to the issue As you will understand, the summer gathering of DesignInquiry 2004 is continuously under construction: The aim is to organize six and a half loaded days and bring about a kaleidoscopic view on this year’s topic: Motive, method, medium. Please provide Margo with essays, articles, short thoughts (no problem if it’s been published before) or links that could add to the topic.

And: consider coming to this working-symposium

ethics the aesthetics of contemporary design // question mark
Melle Hammer
//// fudoni black 24/36, + 90 //// ... tattoo left arm

design is a radical, urgent topic.

it doesn't start with the designer or with the other actors in the field:

design is a part of everyday life.

the designer can't pretend he is alone in making the decisions: it is a diffuse, combined action. the result always in direct relation to its environment.

underlying motives, available knowledge, accessible tools, as well as the limitations that accompany these parameters within which the designer operates (not to mention preconditions such as time and money) seem the most important coordinates with which a design can be defined.

but even if ... this doesn't guarantee good design ... something else moves across the stage.

as the years pass by it seems to me that graphic designers have become increasingly aware of the importance of the intentions of WHAT (message) is transported HOW.

the choice of medium has an important role, this we know but it would be a mistake to say the medium is the message. compared to the intention, wrapped up in the WHAT, the medium always plays second fiddle.

>>>

therefore to me it is not interesting to compare posters with posters if all constraints imposed on and demarcating each assignment remain out of sight. to me well-designed dog-food packaging can be as much art as trash. (with love) ...and is therefore as politically correct as a poster for a welfare foundation or a gallery.

>>>

consequently the boundaries between art, design and commercial design evaporate.

this (:) or that (>>>).

this or that implicates at the very most the degree to which you are committed to your audience. that is to say: the transfer of the message.

despite all well-intentioned market research and questionnaires, the public remains factor unknown.

'ethics the aesthetics of contemporary design' // question mark

//// fudoni black 24000/36, + 90 //// ... banner around the city centre

when we next realize that it is simply impossible to juggle all the tools needed to implement and execute a design while for every software program a computer-pilot is waiting in the wings the designer is assigned to the role of conductor, coach or assembler.

(yes I know you are reading this but I don’t know who you are.)

Is this new?

Yes. Yes: if (!) if the format, as well as the position of the graphic designer is indeed to be discussed, one could, rather than conceding to current categorizations, initiate a collaborative inquiry into the names for the different attitudes that breaks up our profession.

my proposal is to continue talking about and working around these qualities and qualifiers, and to explore and discuss them during designinquiry 2005: motive, method, medium.

NOW WHAT?
Marlene McCarty
To encourage the growth and strength of CULTURAL PRODUCTION I encourage each and everyone to reach out and take the power. Don't ask. Just take it. Take direct action. Use YOUR particular skills to grow the value of CULTURAL CURRENCY.

WHEN I CAN'T SLEEP AND I THINK ABOUT THE DESIGN INQUIRY PROJECT HERE ARE THINGS I THINK ABOUT (some BROAD-some SPECIFIC-some SLEEP INDUCED):

THE INDIVIDUAL BODY:

Explore performativity as a cultural producer.

Is the highly personal vision effectual or ineffectual in a world of literal corporate dominance?

Is the personal voice subversive or dismissible? Does it matter?

Can subversive energy flows enter the corporate strong hold? If so how?

To what end?

THE FISCAL BODY:

Are we the people of the United States of America commercially dependent on fear?

We are commercially dependent upon entertainment. Can entertainment be anything more?

Is war both commerce and entertainment?

Is our president really a corporation masquerading as a human being?

(thank you Mr. Nadar whom I did NOT vote for.)

Why do we buy empty promises?

What's the deal with fossil fuels? Where's that going?

THE SOCIAL BODY:

Cultural currency vs. fiscal dominance is it worth it?

How does one ever get heard?

The moral agenda: why are some very moral issues considered amoral?

Why is the idea of universal healthcare, which would improve EVERYBODY'S standard of living, not considered of highest moral importance?

What's with family? How/why has the idea of family become so highly politicized? How/why has the idea of family become so highly commercialized?

MEDIUMS:

your body, your family, your enemies your blogs, your videos, your quicktimes, your knitting, your drawing, any well though out intervention.

SILENCE WILL EVENTUALLY EQUAL DEATH.
Marlene McCarty, New York City 2004.

Profound Connections
Louise Sandhaus
Profound Connections offers a playful investigation of the deep connections between ourselves, others, our lives as designers, and our work.How can links between these different facets of our lives integrate to make communication (more) compelling? useful? fulfilling?Can the connections be used to make sense of life's day-to-day experiences? How might the designer perform and integrate the role of a keen personal and cultural observer? How can these observations be applied in ways that influence both form and content in meaningful and productive ways?

Can we incorporate our lives as designers to forge meaningful messages
from seemingly nothing of value yet yield the treasure of truth? What
form should these types of discoveries/messages reside in and take on?

These questions become the basis for engaging discussions and
enlightening the 'making' process. Days will be organized around
different passionate pursuits in the form of experiments and exercises.
Participants will become their own best teachers as they discover
answers for themselves through our on-going research.

Profound Connections
Rick Valicenti
What is this workshop about?
Profound Connections offers a playful investigation of the deep connections between ourselves, others, our lives as designers, and our work. How can links between these different facets of our lives integrate to make communication (more) compelling? useful? fulfilling? Can the connections be used to make sense of life's day-to-day experiences? How might the designer perform and integrate the role of a keen personal and cultural observer? How can these observations be applied in ways that influence both form and content inmeaningful and productive ways?Can we incorporate our lives as designers to forge meaningful messages from seemingly nothing of value yet yield the treasure of truth? What form should these types of discoveries/messages reside in and take on? What will we do in this workshop? These questions become the basis for engaging discussions and enlightening the 'making' process. Days will be organized around different passionate pursuits in the form of experiments and exercises. Participants will become their own best teachers as they discover
answers for themselves through our on-going research.

Influence/Inspiration/Intent
Doug Scott
This workhop, in which each participant will build and record her/his spheres of influence,
will help create a better understanding of:
• why we do what we do
• how we go about our work and life
• what means we choose to express ourselves

By assembling and documenting our connections, this workshop allows an opportunity to review and clarify where we are and where we would prefer to go.

The exploration includes:
• theories/stategies that guide our work • methods of working • tools and materials we prefer • political and social concerns • influential people • things we collect • what we read • music/drama/dance that we admire • art/architecture/film that affects our work • memories of time and place • the stuff of life • inspiration from unexpected sources • DesignInquiry discussions and presentations

The goal of this workshop is to take the time to review/examine/clarify
in order to reaffirm/refresh/and perhaps, change course.

Thinking through Design
(Towards a quasiworkshop/graphicpitstop/speedstudio on logos, branding and signage)
Matt Soar
We are always unavoidably surrounded by logos and brands in ads, on clothes, as signage on tall buildings, even as tattoos or imprints on the beach. And - of course - in the design studio, via our clients, and in the form of computer software and hardware. One way to get under the skin of something that seems to be as familiar and necessary as the air we breathe is to decontextualize it: to remove it from 'normal' usage and deploy it in ways that were perhaps never intended by its makers. Which leads us to culture jamming and Adbusters, or the invention of phantom brands (eg Shawn Wolfe's Beatkit (TM)). That said, how can we as designers produce fresh personal work in a chosen medium that reflects in thoughtful and surprising ways on the ubiquity of logos? Perhaps we must think hard about what motivates us not only as designers and consumers, but also as living, breathing, desiring humans. Or maybe we need to imagine logos as an integral part of the typographic landscape of the city, along with road markings, directional signs, license plates, store and restaurant signs, etc. Could we also make links between our direct experiences of city streets and city skylines and the ways in which these spaces have been represented in, for example, film and TV title sequences? Method: Through short readings, screenings, discussion, and a whole lot of making, we will try to find fresh ways to think about the logos and branding devices that fill our cultural environment, with a view to making them seem altogether unfamiliar. Potential participants will be asked to do a modest amount of thinking, reading, observing and photographing/sketching prior to arriving in Maine.

If graphic design really matters, it should be able to do more than just provide a polished method for dressing up other people's ideas in a given medium. It must also be a tool for thinking. Indeed, if design is about stripping away extraneous information to get to a core idea, it should be equally capable of teasing out manageable questions from a tangle of complex but interrelated issues - this, at least, is my motive for attending the next DI. I hope that we will be able to 'think through design' in several senses: to address the various stages of the process itself (ie design's method); to use design as a conduit (or medium) of/for critical inquiry; and, to tease out the assumptions and investments that drive us to design in the first place (motive). Whether we leave with good answers - or more questions - doesn't really matter.

download a pdf "Future History" lecture by Matt

Page to the stage.
Ron Botting
MOTIVE
My need, continuously developed throughout life, to express my self, for you to hear me and I you.

METHOD
A natural voice method begins it’s orderly progression with physical awareness. Stretching/sighs. Spine work. Yoga.
Notice tension to be able to release that tension. Discover relaxation. Breathe free. Notice the rhythm of your natural breathing. Take your time.

The solar plexus, center, is the place to find the initial vibration of your voice. The thought of sound. Use Images. Drop a pebble in a pool. Rings/Bubbles/Vibrations. A physical sensation. Don’t listen, feel. Tactile sound. Kinesthetic.

This dynamic experience is amplified as sighs discover vibrations on the lips. Prospering in an atmosphere of relaxation and focus we feel skull vibrations, and in other bones...

This new awareness allows you to assess and clear the Channel. We loosen the jaw, stretch tongue forward, soft palate relax. Learn to keep these out of the way. Then find Resonators. Chest mouth teeth sinus. Nasal to top of skull. The whole range. Then Articulation excersises. Fin.

MEDIUM
Voice is the center of my actor training determining my ability to handle language and to express a wide range of emotions. If in the theatre emotional truth looks like life, I need a transparent Channel through which thoughts and feelings can be expressed.

My Part of the Workshop
Bring a short bit of memorized text that means something to you.
We will do improvisations that explore our emotional and physical connections to words and the actor/audience relationship.

BODY SPEAK
Hilary Chapman
The body is essential. Everyday we use our bodies to get to where we are going, to sit still and concentrate at work, to function on basic needs, and to communicate with other people.What if our bodies could speak, what would they say to us about how we treat them? Would they mention the tortures we put them through just to get by and pass with cultural standards and social fashion? Our bodies say more than we know just by the way that we carry ourselves through the everyday. This workshop is an exploration of how we can increase the awareness of our bodies’ needs. By witnessing our physical habits and applying simple methods of strengthening, we can reach a state of whole expression. We can bring movement awareness, vocal sounding and creative expression into cooperation.

The Art of Losing Oneself
Chris Thompson
Between two opposing midfielders, the design critic threaded a left-footed pass through to his young Somali teammate. He trapped it mid-stride and turned it into a perfect cross to the middle-aged Russian guy who outlegged this author to send the ball whistling between the pair of shoes that served as our makeshift goal. The Somali kid had been off-side by a few steps. That his team got away with it had nothing to do with the impressive resume of the critic who had started the play, and everything to do with its elegance and with the goodwill of the pick-up soccer game—a kind of quid pro quo that consists in a mutual overlooking of tiny infractions and an unspoken commitment to avoid any serious ones.

In a diary from the several days he spent as a participant in this summer’s “DesignInquiry: Truth & Message” symposium at the Maine College of Art, design critic and skilled midfielder Peter Hall writes: “Pick-up soccer is like a temporary collaborative project where all class and racial divides become irrelevant. What matters is not who you are or where you’re from but how well you play.”

The players in such a match might never meet again. Their day jobs will have them performing tasks that even the most avowedly interdisciplinary initiative would be hard-pressed to reconcile. But for an hour or two, play by play, they permitted an encounter to unfold that reminded its participants of the satisfaction gained from a meaningful collaboration. If design were practiced as that kind of endeavor in classrooms, forums, and workplaces—at once totally playful and utterly consequential—the practical and the esthetic might reverberate in ways that live with us long after we leave the playing field.

The think-tank and the laboratory have become pertinent models for contemporary design’s collective, collaborative, interdisciplinary imperatives. In light of this, a genuinely pioneering approach to design teaching and practice would be one that asks what it means, and what it takes, to contribute meaningfully and successfully to a collective endeavor. The notion that this process should have to begin and end its efforts by producing something that resembles “design” would be utterly constricting. Or, worse still, uninteresting.
Taking this concept seriously would mean crafting a think-tank for design that could embody the notion that the arts of teaching, learning, and practicing design are not only interrelated activities. They are also, crucially and fundamentally, interpersonal ones. Thus they are based upon the forms of intimacy that are part and parcel of working, in the words of Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor, “alone with others.”

The five-day DesignInquiry symposium attempted to target precisely this space by combining elements of the school, the conference, the design studio, the soccer field, and the café into something more than the sum of their parts.

“At conferences,” says Margo Halverson, who together with Peter Hall, designer Melle Hammer, and critic Natalia Ilyin, organized DesignInquiry, “the most significant moments of inspiration and connection always come in the hallways. So we wanted to present DesignInquiry as that hallway. To try and figure out how we could keep things informal enough to let them take form: We structure the week on the basis of lectures and workshop meetings, where we work shoulder to shoulder with one another, questioning and supporting each other.”

This interplay is something that often derails attempts at collaborative endeavors. Usually, interdisciplinary work fails not because practices are incapable of functioning together, but because the individual practitioners are uneasy with the idea of creating something that won’t belong to them; they’re afraid of the risks taken when working outside of their area of expertise. Print designers don’t want to yield any authority to their counterparts who specialize in Web design. A teacher who seeks to create a classroom democracy risks pedagogical chaos. Yet for an interdisciplinary collaborative project to succeed, intimate—and flexible—working relationships are essential. It’s precisely this aspect of collaboration that needs to be mastered, this ability to balance the best in one’s individual practice with the real possibility that working collectively might require a participant to relinquish “authorship” and still find a way to be fully immersed in the endeavor at hand.

As another of Hall’s entries reminds us, today’s “designer is increasingly called upon to work, as [Lorraine] Wild noted back in 1996, as a team member, with programmers, anthropologists, industrial designers, writers, photographers, sociologists, etc.” What kind of “work” happens when the designer contributes to such a collective initiative? The least interesting answer to this question is the name of the resulting creation. It’s far more intriguing to think about how design could be reconceived in the wake of the interdisciplinary, interpersonal encounters that collaboration requires.

French Fluxus artist and poet Robert Filliou had a term for this way of dealing with life and work: He called it “l’art d’être perdu sanse se perdre,” the art of losing oneself without getting lost.

In an interview published in Filliou’s 1970 book Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, composer John Cage offers a sobering critique of discipline-based learning, a process of accumulating and shoring up expertise that even 30 years later dominates the mindsets of those working in the arts and humanities. “Within five years after you get a Ph.D. from a given American university in a particular field,” he said, “all the things that you learned in the course of your education are no longer of any use to you.”

Cage felt that the only way to redress this situation was to embark on a radical re-imagining of interdisciplinary experimentalism and the intimacies of collaboration. It would be crucial “to give each individual, from childhood, a variety of experiences in which his mind is put to use, not as a memorizer of a transmitted body of information, but rather as a person who is in dialogue.”

We find this theory practiced in designer Audra Buck’s account of her DesignInquiry experience, narrated in a letter she wrote to eminent critic Susan Sontag. Buck sent it a month after the symposium had ended, along with a copy of the limited edition book she had worked on in a group led by designers Bill Drenttel, Jessica Helfland, and Lorraine Wild. The symposium had begun just weeks after the publication of Sontag’s infamous essay on the Abu Ghraib photographs, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” and no less than three of the workshop leaders had brought it to use to kickstart their group projects.

The collaborators started by unweaving the text and choosing various strands that they would translate into visual form. The idea was to do this individually, bring it all back together, and go from there. But there seemed to be no there there: “we quickly realized that the spirit of collaboration was missing” in this approach. “One of my most satisfying moments”, Buck continues, “came when I copied all of my work to a shared computer space. Now anyone could access and incorporate my design elements and vice versa. Over the course of five days—and a few late nights—we worked, sketched, planned, reworked and eventually completed the piece.” In the end, this wearing away of participants’ ego boundaries created a kind of think-tank that could even integrate Sontag herself: “Your physical absence”, Buck told her, “was overcome by the zeal embedded in your text.”

Buck’s words—together with the book she refers to, the symposium that produced it, and the teaching and learning experiences that unfolded in and through it—exemplify what is at work, and at stake, in a practice that could be called an interpersonal intermedia.

Viewed in this way, the activity of design becomes a crucible for a set of procedures, practices, operations, skills, whims, tastes, judgments, gaps in knowledge, hopes, and beliefs that conspire to manage, frame, direct, negotiate, or even enhance the complexity of life’s flows and overflows of information and experience. DesignInquiry’s effort to treat these unpredictable interpersonal encounters not as workplace stresses, but rather as provocations that are integral to the practice’s evolution, makes the program a significant experiment in design pedagogy. The space of the interpersonal encounter might actually be imagined as a medium in its own right, one that, though it is ephemeral, is just as palpable as the curve of a mouse and just as pointed any other tool in the designer’s box.

Reproduced with the permission of F&W Publications. (PRINT, Nov/Dec 2004)

What happens when nothing happens: history in the hallway
Chris Thompson
This lecture explores a short history of interdisciplinarity, beginning with the 1982 meeting between German artist Joseph Beuys and HH the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet and the chaotic cafe conference that spontaneously took shape in its wake. This was the context out of which the plan for a"Art-of-Peace Biennale" emerged (and took place 3 years later in Hamburg in 1985/6), which itself gave rise to a 1990 conference in Amsterdam entitled "Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy" (which included several dozen artists, scientists, economists, and spiritual leaders), to a follow-up conference in Copenhagen in 1996, and to an ongoing project called "Compassionate Economy". This itself developed out of a whispered conversation between the Dalai Lama and economist Stanislav Menshikov during the 1990 conference. As an aside, the Dalai Lama asked Menshikov if he'd considered the role of compassion in economics; a few years later Menshikov published a book on the subject that has been the catalyst for a growing dialogue amongst economists on the ways in which "economy" could be rethought to include ethical, compassionate, altruistic behavior. What does it mean to trace a history of a project like this one through a series of accidental meetings, spontaneous discussions, cafe-table debates, whispered asides? Given that one way to think of the structure of DI is as a hallway conversation--a site that makes possible the kinds of charged, anarchic meetings that make collective inquiry viable, fertile, exciting--what would it mean to try and take this seriously as a historical model? This talk will try and map a history of these kinds of encounters, and to open up the idea of interdisciplinarity as a question of interpersonal engagement, intimacy, experimentalism...

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To Apply

1 Complete and send us the registration application
2 Complete the following questions in an email:
A can you introduce yourself in a few lines?
(where you come from, what kind of work you do, why you are coming, …)
B what will you contribute to the DesignInquiry while you are here? please propose an experience or exchange to share: (a presentation, writing or other for the web, the after-publication, a debate, an interview, …)
C do you have a preference of workshop? Earls, Hammer, McCarty, Scott, Soar, Sandhaus & Valicanti
D what might you imagine to include in the DesignInquiry after-publication? (print and/or web):
3 Complete a housing application (& deposit) if you wish College dorm housing
(notice this mails to Maine College of Art, info is on the application)

Max. enrollment: 50

Admission

Participation is open to professional designers and educators, graduate students and undergraduate design majors with 1 evidence of eagerness in the topic and 2 participation contribution 3 evidence of talent and capability of working in collaboration, through a 4 registration application

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Cost

895$ AIGA members
995$ non-members

Cancellation policy
A 50% refund is issued Jan. 30 — May 11. No refunds after May 11.

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Credit

Maine College of Art is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. College credit may be awarded for work done in this Inquiry. contact us

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Application for Housing in MECA's freshman dorms

$300 Double occupancy/per person
$500 Single occupancy *

The College has two dorms available for DesignInquiry participants; Holbrock House (MECA's modest freshman dorm) and Portland Hall (USM's modest dorm). Most DesignInquiry participants choose to live together in the College dorms. Both are, yes, modest but accessible, friendly, and easy walking to the studios and the Old Port. (Check out the websites below for other Portland options.)

To Apply for Housing

Complete and send us the housing application

The application also requires a $60 housing deposit, paid directly to MECA.

Confirmation and housing assignment will be sent by mail. Full payment is due with housing application. The room deposit is not refundable to applicants who withdraw after room assignments have been confirmed. Housing through MECA is limited and on first-come, first-served basis. Most all rooms are double occupancy. *Only a couple single occupancy rooms are available and cannot be guaranteed.

Procedures/Policies

• Maine College of Art is the final authority on all room assignments. The College will do its best to place participants according to their wishes.
• The College reserves the right to make changes in residence hall room assignments and the right to change living arrangements when circumstances necessitate such action.
• Rooms are furnished with beds, dressers, lights, desks and chairs. Residents are responsible for bringing their bed linens and towels. Holbrock House offers cooking facilities and supplies, laundry facilities, and common areas. There are no cooking facilities in Portland Hall.
• A Resident Assistant is an occupant of the residence halls and is available for assistance and information.
• Roommates will be of the same sex, though a couple may apply to share a double-occupancy room.
• Upkeep of the rooms is the responsibility of the occupants.
• Residents are liable for the damage to rooms beyond normal wear and tear. Each resident is responsible for the conduct of visitors he or she allows into the residence halls, and assumes full responsibility for any damage.
• The College cannot assume any responsibility for loss or damage to personal property.
• All residents are expected to honor other residents’ rights to privacy and to peaceful and quiet use of the facility.
• The residence halls are non-smoking facilities; no smoking is permitted inside the buildings.

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Contact us

email us your address and we’ll send you a DesignInquiry ’05 poster designed by Melle, and we'll get you on our email list for updates. You can download a postcard also by Melle. Pass it on.

Administration

Margo Halverson, Director of DesignInquiry
Stacy Kim, Assistant to the Director of DesignInquiry, Web person
Catey Draper, Assistant to the Director of Continuing Studies
Greg Murphy, Dean of the College, VP for Academic Affairs

Maine College of Art
97 Spring Street
Portland Maine 04103
207 775-3052

mdi@meca.edu

The Maine College of Art reserves the right to withdraw or modify the DesignInquiry at any time. Changes will be updated on the website.

Maine College of Art does not discriminate against any individual on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, age, handicap, national or ethic origin, or sexual orientation.

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Sponsors

TypeCulture®
A Digital Type Foundry and Academic Resource

email us for ways to contribute.

Summer, Portland

Feed the mussels the last time: put them in the washing water and sprinkle some flour on the surface. The flour will sink. (The mussels like this.) And as they will poop before eating, they’ll clean themselves from the last sand and dirt. Remove the dead and broken animals.

A big splash of olive oil , roughly chopped garlic and a smallchili pepper into a big iron pot. Let it simmer so the taste gets into the oil. Remove garlic and pepper after 5 minutes and turn up the heat to the max without burning the oil. Add the mussels straight from their bath. Temper the fire again and wait until they are open.

Mix spoons of cooking water with creme fraiche, add some fresh garlic and black pepper and fine chopped parsley. You can either use the sauce for some tagliatelle (a small plate) or dip the mussels in it.

Drink Orvieto .

Cheers,

melle