DesignInquiry
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-designers; in previous years these have including an actor, a psychologist, an historian and a dancer.
Now in its fourth 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 renowned professionals were invited to develop work and research a given topic with 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, DesignInquiry continues to evolve as a think-tank working symposium where the participants lead the workshops, discussions, projects and direct our attention into corners of the topic that were unthinkable, maybe undoable the day before. Margo Halverson, Melle Hammer, and Peter Hall act as “framers” of the week, nudging the itinerary daily in response to the Inquiry as it unfolds. Join us.
See DesignInquiry ’05.
See DesignInquiry ’04.
Also Read innie or outie? by Peter Hall, Print magazine, March/April 2006.
DesignInquiry FRAMERS:
Margo Halverson
Melle Hammer
Peter Hall
DesignInquiry 2006–2007 BOARD:
Ron Botting: actor
Elliott Earls: performance artist, head of design dept. Cranbrook Academy of Art
Nori Gale: graphic designer
Peter Hall: design critic, University of Minnesota Design Institute senior editor
Margo Halverson: graphic designer, design faculty Maine College of Art
Melle Hammer: typographer, artist, silly man
Natalia Ilyin: critic
Douglass Scott: design director WGBH, design faculty Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University
Paula Volent: vice president for investments Bowdoin college, arts conservator