What is Design Inquiry?

While large-scale design conferences are increasingly common, DesignInquiry styles itself as a small-scale symposium in which participants shape the direction of the event. Rather than simply receiving inspiration from design celebrities in a large auditorium, attendees produce work in a collaborative setting, over an intense week of making, talking, cooking, eating and (if there’s time) sleeping. The week includes several “shift” events led by non-design instructors; in previous years these have including an actor, a psychologist, an historian and a dancer.

Now in its third year, DesignInquiry evolved out of the Maine College of Art Summer Institute in Graphic Design (MSIGD), which for ten years operated as a three-week masterclass workshop in which students and professionals studied for a week under the tutelage of a renowned designer.

Sensing the need for a more open-ended research-based event, program organizer Margo Halverson and design educator Melle Hammer established DesignInquiry, to which 14 renowned professionals were invited to develop work and research a given topic over a week, with a limited number of participants as collaborators.

The program’s history, setting and flat hierarchical set up have succeeded in attracting some of the most influential practitioners in design today, including the heads of four leading design school graduate programs: Rhodes Island School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, Cranbrook Academy of Art and California Institute of the Arts.

See DesignInquiry ’05.

See DesignInquiry ’04.

Also Read innie or outie? by Peter Hall, Print magazine, March/April 2006.

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