STATION Not-The-Schedule
JUNE 23-29, 2013
Vinalhaven, Maine
Sunday evening (hello)
Peter Hall / Putting stations on the map / PR
Emily Luce / mission
Margo Halverson / context
Denise Gonzales Crisp / setting the stage
Anita Cooney / all things are visible
Monday (constellations)
Rachele Riley / Stations of Pause / OG+Intro
Patricio Davila & Dan McCafferty / Constellation / OG+Intro
Margo Halverson / True North / WS+Intro
Brooke Chornyak & Matthew Spahr / Cooking Stations / OG+Intro
Laura Schlifer / Site specific toolkit / OG+Intro
Monday Evening
Sean Wilkinson / The DesignInquiry universe / OG+Intro
Anita Cooney / Subway Stations & drawings / PR
Tuesday (bridges)
Lincoln Hancock / Sites of Station production / PR
Garreth Blackwell / Station as medium / PR
Erin Hauber / Connecting/conversing: mandates / PR
Christopher Fox / Object narratives, place experiences / WS+Intro
Debra Riley Parr / Scent station; mapping scents / WS+Intro
Tuesday Evening
Debra Riley Parr / Prompt Workshop / WS
Charles Melcher / Knots as entanglements / WS+Intro+OG
Wednesday (sites)
Liz Craig / Object connections / WS+Intro
Kimberly Long Loken / Storyboards of routine or special journeys / WS+Intro
Emily Luce / (@ the)Poor Farm as station; miniature representations / WS+Intro
Wednesday Evening
Charles Melcher / Proprioceptive writing as listening station / WS+Intro
Thursday (flows)
Amy Campos / Nomadic/disposable interior series / WS+Intro
Denise Gonzales Crisp / Video: approach/groove/depart / WS+Intro
Cat Normoyle / Disjunction between place & activity / PR
Mary-Anne McTrowe / Station as production / WS+Intro
Inquirers / Collaboration-calibration-preparation for evening discussion*
Thursday Evening
*what will occur on Friday and Saturday
Friday (stations)
(Board members Gabrielle Esperdy, Gail Swanlund, and Ben Van Dyke will be joining us.)
Friday Evening
Lobstah Party / DI-ers and invited guests
Saturday
STATION clean up then 1:00 ferry
Peter Hall
Currently living in Brisbane, Australia, previously in Texas, New York & London. Writing & thinking about design, and teaching. I’m the head of the Design department at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.
Why you are coming:
I’d like to pop into DI 2013 because I am in the neighborhood and I really miss “my people” and I think the topic is right on. Sadly I can only come for 1 night (Sunday) as I’m en route from Australia to Canada to London.
What are your interests in the topic STATION:
I am interested in the idea that the station connotes fixity and movement. This is useful because my research is in mapping and visualisation.
Proposal
A short talk on the opening night, if there’s time/room, called (tentatively)
“Putting Stations on the Map”
Maps are notoriously reliant on abstract space, intent on fixing places in time and space with definitive boundaries, nodes, and paths. Yet space as it is produced, experienced and lived is far from fixed–to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre, space is in a constant state of becoming. How then can we go about mapping our stations of work, interactions and play and their interconnections? This presentation will look at the problems of representation that arise when it comes to visualizing the nodes of a network society, and will pose some possible conceptual leaps required to move beyond network and cartographic maps. Along the way, I’ll endeavor to expand the notion of mapping and make a case for it as a process of production and reflection.
BACK TO MONDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Charles Melcher
Designer / Associate Professor Graphic Design
Alice Design Communication/Maine College of Art
I live in Portland Maine and I came from Cape Cod and a family of artists and sailors. I am a designer, photographer, carpenter, bread maker, cook, sailor, and teacher. I am coming to DI to bake bread daily and make connections between the the various topics, the people, and to tie and untie knots, listening for connections.
Proposal
1. Knot tying at Station. [Latin nodus , ‘knot’]
I would like to lead a workshop in knot tying. Knots, sailors knots in particular, are designed to hold fast and to untie quickly in case of emergency or unforeseen changes of circumstance. Knots secure belongings from moving or drifting away. Knowing how to tie knots correctly comes in quite handy when moving anything on top of a vehicle (station wagon), boat, or car. I will construct a “knot tying station” where instruction and practice could take place throughout the week. This station is made of two parallel bars with lines(rope) fixed at specific intervals for tying specific knots in place. I will provide extra line for tying and practice. Introduction to knots tying could be a one hour experience or a number of smaller 15 minute experiences, with on going practice times left up to interested participants. I imagine this to be a breather amidst the intellectual stimulus of the week, a chance to learn a practical skill with a common material that is designed to keep things stationary. I also link this to Vinalhaven’s history which is connected with life at sea.
Knots can also be seen as the connectors or entanglements. Carefully constructed knots are used to create solid points of intersection or relationships between points. My interest in introducing the fundamentals of knot tying are based in a practical and useful skill. I am not completely sure why I feel this relates to “Station” yet. I thought I would I find this out in the process of experiencing week.
2. Proprioceptive Writing (PW) at Station…thinking as an act of imagination and reflection as an inquiry into that act.
If possible I would also like to offer an evening workshop in Proprioceptive Writing: a technique for listening through writing that is useful for unraveling knots of understanding. This needs about and hour to one and a half hours and preferably not too late in the evening, but after supper.
In my constantly moving life, having a technique to touch base is important for re-evaluating my goals and focus. PW is a self guided ritual of listening, through writing, that provides space between me and my thinking. This writing helps navigate those stations that comprise my life and which are ever changing and reconnecting. It provides a moment of reflection and inquiry.
Proprioceptive Writing® is a meditational discipline. It is a method of listening to thoughts and feelings, a method of reflection. In this process, we can slow down, notice details, and give ourselves permission to experience emotions as they arise. Over time, the writer is able to reflect more clearly. As chatter dissipates, stories emerge and the relationship with the inner self becomes more familiar and more intimate. The self emerges more frequently from burdens of stress, current concerns and questions of everyday existence. This workshop utilizes the Metcalf/Simon Method of Proprioceptive Writing®, which anyone can begin to use immediately. I have taught and practiced this form of meditation for over 30 years.
BACK TO TUESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
BACK TO WEDNESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Garreth C. Blackwell
Virginia Commonwealth University, Wide Open Air Consulting & Design
garrethblackwell.com (personal) wideopenair.com (professional)
garreth.blackwell@gmail.com (personal) blackwellgc@vcu.edu (school)
I have a hard time saying where I’m from when people ask. I spent my childhood and teenage years moving from state to state, and I’ve recently uprooted to move to Virginia to pursue an interdisciplinary PhD in the arts, English, and mass communications. After Master’s work I lived in my car for a summer and travelled the United States hoping to become uncomfortable and remind myself that I do not understand the place I call home all that well. I also knew that I live far too comfortably most days to see truly unique answers to important questions.
As a doctoral student, I like avoiding answers to questions by making the question messier. I enjoy disassembling the parts to find better questions; questions that engage the true nature of what it is we seek. I like the beginnings of knowledge that we often forget about and glance over because we think we know what the driving forces and foundations of our thoughts actually are.
I believe in passive thought and its place in daily life. I also believe that the best way to see the world is through strange places with people who you are not familiar. By removing the controllable parts of our everyday lives, we become more able to see viewpoints and perspectives that usually aren’t apparent to us in our routines. Vinalhaven seems to fit this idea perfectly. By spending a week in intensive thought and discussion about topics we wrongly assume are cut-and-dry, my passive (and active) thoughts that emerge in the
following months can be informed and driven to new places; places that I may not know exist yet.
Background/Context
We do a good job putting our worlds into boxes for our convenience. One box may be our job, another may be our friends or families, but it all gets compartmentalized into these STATIONS this program will be focused on. These STATIONS interact, they inform, and they enlighten our actions and reactions with each other. While the individual STATIONS are interesting in their own respects and intricacies, what is of more interest to me is the threshold that marks the boundary between each of them. The threshold is both wholly within and without the bounds of the STATION. It is a strange place of inclusion and exclusion as Giorgio Agamben talks about. It becomes a separate area that has no true bounds. So, how do we understand these thresholds or connecting paths? How is our behavior dictated in these spaces, and how does our behavior dictate the space itself? Which STATION is given precedence in this in-between land? Is the behavior of the artist affected by his or her location within the threshold of this space? How do the individual STATIONS contribute to the space between each? There are so many questions that help us consider the travel that takes us from STATION to STATION.
STATIONS are everywhere when we begin to think of this concept with an wide open mind. These STATIONS create connections within the larger network of societies, communities, and experiences. The thresholds between the distinct STATIONS are ripe for exploration. These areas provide passage and change between STATIONS and allow new looks at the changing exteriors of each STATION as we move toward and away from them. The stops are fascinating in and of themselves, but there must also be an eye on the areas in between. What a city means or embodies changes as we physically approach or retreat from the geographical location, and all STATIONS likewise behave in this manner. My original ideas for the gathering moved toward the same concept and prompted me to ask a series of hard questions.
1) Medium as STATION: Everything communicates and tells us explicit and implicit information. Some of this is done by the content— what is seen, what is written, what is shown by color—and some of it is done by the medium itself. This medium, as Marshall McLuhan reminded us, is also embedded within the message. But does this have to be so? Are there factors that can be communicated regardless of the STATION or medium that is invoked? Can we avoid original mediums and still find suitable new STATIONS for communication to occur? If we think of STATION as a medium how can we examine the changes, the benefits, and the losses that occur and are present as one STATION-cum-medium is converted into a new one, or through the employment of knowledge and experience gained from additional STATIONS that the individual finds (un)comfortable or engaging.
2) Interconnectedness and STATIONS: Sequential art relies heavily on abstraction and resemblance in establishing meaning and narrative structure. This differs from photography because the frames must necessarily be interconnected. Scott McCloud states that “The area between the frames is where the human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.” Thinking about images in series can illuminate the particular STATIONS we inhabit and should cause us to consider how other individuals or creatures in other STATIONS may consider the world we often times take for granted. Barthes, Derrida, and other post/structuralists say that the author is dead and the reader is supreme. But this assumes the author writes in such a way that opens up the text: (in whatever form it takes) to a more encompassing reading and rewriting. So does this interconnectedness of STATIONS make the work smaller or larger? Does it increase or decrease potential for individualized readings? Does it hinder or promote shared experiences and commonalities with others? Can McCloud and Barthes both be correct?
Proposal
I would like to present how several theorists have informed my approach to STATION; a kind of dérive through the urban landscape of theory. To set the framework for what this would look like, let me start with my personal working definition for STATION. A STATION is a defined area used as a point of collection for a specific purpose or reason governed by explicit or implicit guidelines. Simply stated, it is a way for individuals to order the world in which they live, or as Barthes may have said, the way in which we understand our experience is built upon a tissue or fabric of STATIONS.
In this definition, a STATION can mask itself as other terms: discipline, art, medium, etc; it becomes a box that holds things together. And just like a box, a STATION has an inside and an outside, it contains some things and excludes others, and it has different uses for different individuals.
The main interest for me is the boundary, that area that separates that is inside and outside of the STATION. Any STATION must have a boundary. While the boundaries are up for debate, for a STATION to be, it must at least include an idea of what it intends to not be. These boundaries are seen differently by different people, but the boundary still exists.
If we examine this idea through a literal bus or train station we see the idea of boundary easily. The walls provide a boundary for the STATION in the eyes of some; but to others, the parking lots surrounding the STATION may be the boundary. Still to others, it may be the roads that surround it even further. Whatever the case may be, the boundary exists on some level. It would be a special case who would argue the hardware store next door fell within the boundary of the STATION.
Kant talked about this in a very matter-of-fact way in Critique of Judgment when he argued for the intrinsic nature of the work of art. In turn, Derrida refuted the claim entirely. In “The Parergon” published in The Truth in Painting, he looks at the frame surrounding the work of art to show that such boundaries are not easily upheld upon deeper scrutiny. The frame is, simultaneously at any given time, a part and apart from the work of art.
The boundary is important, even to Derrida who would argue it may not exist. The concept is still necessary in understanding where we position ourselves with different STATIONS. Agamben explored the idea of boundary in State of Exception by way of the threshold, and Scott McCloud argues the comic arts and sequential imaging cannot occur without the boundary that clearly marks the conclusion of one frame and the beginning of another. While each of these theorists are looking at boundary in a very different way, they all show through their work that the definition of the term is necessary.
By way of Agamben, Barthes, Derrida, Kant, McCloud, and McLuhan all had their boxes in which they ordered their world and made sense of their existence. They each provide insight into ways I may (consciously or otherwise) do the same. By exploring the ways in which each of these theorists understood boundaries, the concept of STATION can be enriched. By knowing the edges, I can move toward a better understanding of the interior.
Post-script: I love the idea of creating a STATION vocabulary by way of Raymond Williams…as long as some of the definitions can be images. 🙂
What would you contribute after the event?
I enjoy writing, and I enjoy doing so in a way that allows for visual description as well as written description. As a Doctoral student at VCU, I am actively involved in the School of the Arts, especially the Graphic Design Department. The same ideas I have discussed above are the basic ideas that drive my research interests and my dissertation. I seek to write papers and articles that discuss the topic of interconnectedness and the threshold as it relates to graphic design as well as use these themes in my creative work.
As a hopeful future professor, I also know the value of considering parts of the question that can be forgotten or pushed to the side. Due to the nature of academic bureaucracy, it can be easily forgotten that design questions provide educators the opportunity to explore unique and interesting answers. While some programs may focus heavily on the technical skills necessary for graphic design employment, it cannot be forgotten that an increase in depth of thought and consideration will always increase the possible outcomes of design thinking.
I hope to use the insights gained at the workshop this summer to become a better teacher, but I also want to offer my willingness to help in crafting papers or presentations that can be used to present our findings and ideas to larger audiences at conferences around the country and world. I am eager to learn more and make it relevant to my field. But even more so, I am eager to become a voice in an active conversation that advances the place we consider design to occupy.
BACK TO TUESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Lincoln Hancock
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design
William Peace University
Raleigh, NC
Investigating the topic STATION, for me, is: 1. a way to assess the practical and conceptual opportunities/challenges of working in these related yet distinct arenas (art, design, and music); 2. as a lens through which to consider my own geographical station as an artist in the south (far from the epicenters of national/international cultural conversation); and 3. as a possible antidote to “present shock” — an intentional foregrounding of the moment and situation at hand. STATION seems to regard both psychic space and physical place.
Proposal
I would like to engage the idea of STATION in a way that acknowledges its layered complexity, but also appreciates the intentional choice we, as DesignInquiry participants, are making to “station” ourselves on Vinalhaven for a week. I envision collaboratively developing a project over course of the week, culminating in a site-specific installation that will celebrate and reflect DesignInquiry Vinalhaven as a “station.”
The investigation will commence with an introduction and discussion of Rushkoff’s idea of “present shock.” We will then consider ways in which the work of select contemporary artists might be seen to be part of a project of reclaiming “station” in face of the disorienting technocultural diffusion of the moment.
With this discussion as background, we will brainstorm possible approaches to documenting, interpreting and reconfiguring artifacts of our experience on Vinalhaven as it unfolds through the week. I will bring some lightweight video and audio recording devices, some compact projection and sound gear, and other miscellaneous stuff that might be of use.
Individual participants may contribute in different ways. We might edit and compose audio and video montages. We might consider sculptural or interactive means. My hope is that the outcome of the work brings us closer to our Vinalhaven “station” by invoking expression that is poetic, reflective and nonlinear.
Questions that might arise surrounding the work’s function as art, design, or something else entirely, should fold nicely into the week’s conversation. As practitioners, do distinctions of “station” inherited from our disciplines and from prevailing culture still serve us in meaningful ways? How might we come to a more accommodating, integrative and instructive understanding of contemporary creative work?
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
The broader theme of STATION shares territory with ongoing concerns I address in my art practice. I would envision documenting and writing about the Vinalhaven installation project as it unfolds, and sharing these reflections in public when and where I can.
Additionally, I wrote a series of blog posts in 2010 for Art21 dealing with the question of practicing in the South — these ideas could be expanded in light of the questions generated by the DI week. And I am working in a contributing and advisory role to a new art exposition to open this fall. The expo will be comprised exclusively of site-specific, project-based work by hybrid/dual practitioners (artist/musicians) to be exhibited during the Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh, NC. I think the investigations that occur during STATION will impact my thinking and contributions to that event.
BACK TO TUESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Erin Hauber
Former Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, Master of Graphic Design candidate at NC State
Raleigh NC
erin@cottageindustriesdesign.com
Hello! I’m Erin, and I’ve lived a lot of places—Wisconsin, Iowa, Washington DC, Minneapolis, Connecticut, Los Angeles and Raleigh—all stations where I practiced graphic design for cultural institutions and small business. In Los Angeles I became a design educator, and now in Raleigh I am about to receive my Master of Graphic Design. Attending Design Inquiry (something I’ve been wanting to do for several summers now) would be a reward I could give myself for completing my degree. I see it as an apt transition between the two years of a deep pursuit of knowledge and my return to practice; a means to engage with—and be inspired by—people who make space in their lives to remain curious and to ask themselves new questions.
I also love to cook and I hear the food is great at Design Inquiry. I enjoying sharing meals with people I don’t know and think some of the best conversations happen while “breaking bread.”
Proposal
My contribution to Design Inquiry would be a short talk on my thesis work at NC State on exploring the possibilities for representing closeness more substantially social spaces, whether they are digital or physical. One of the problems with the current design of communication appliances is they were made to address the same goal: connecting (on the go and at a distance). Acquiring new social ties, though, is a very different activity than maintaining and deepening existing close relationships. Few appliances, if any today, acknowledge a wider range of communication goals beyond ease and efficiency: i.e. devoting oneself to a cohesive conversation over a lengthy period of time, being wholly present and attentive during a face-to-face conversation (rather than simultaneously straddling two worlds, the virtual and the actual), or privately cherishing moments shared with a close tie.
I would present the speculative design proposals I developed. The proposals tell stories about what is possible: what could be, or even what should be, in order to inspire new directions for the design of social experiences during times of great change and complexity (such as when a young woman transitions from the inherited social circles of home to new social contexts such as work or college).
The mandates I would present ask designers to imagine possibilities for bridging the emotional gaps communication appliances create, to envision a stranger, more delightful experience. In my thesis work I was inspired to spin tales of “What else?” and “What if?” to entertain what could be, and what should be, when designing experiences where people pay attention to, and even cherish, their most meaningful conversations with the people they feel closest to.
**I could see (time allowing) the presentation being followed by participants working in small groups to enact additional fictions based on the “mandates” I present if you are looking to add a workshop topic instead of a talk.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
I think the future direction of my research through design would be greatly influenced by sharing my thesis with the attendees and getting their response to the provocation about social space. More importantly though, I am interested in how other people interpret the “Station” prompt, what someone from another discipline for instance might have to say or do about “place.” What would he or she ask of me while I am on the island, and what imprints would our interactions leave on each of us after we part? I know people have also found new collaborators through their Design Inquiry experience; I would welcome that! In addition, I have a blog through which I would share my reflections on the experience directly following. Likely readers would be my former colleagues at Otis, classmates at NC State and former students at NC State and Otis. In addition, when I eventually return to the classroom I could share what I learn with those students.
BACK TO TUESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Anita Cooney
Position Chair of Interior Design, DI Board Member aka Poor Farmer
Pratt Institute
New York, NY
acooney@pratt.edu; accooney@gmail.com, anitacooney@designinquiry.net
I come from NYC, I am an educator and administrator and designer. I live in Manhattan (A) and teach and administer in Brooklyn (B) and spend a lot of time at subways and bust stations getting from point A to B. I am a long time participant in and unabashed champion of the collective that is designinquiry. It has been a productive and provocative spur to creativity for me for over five years now.
Proposal
Technology allows us to never turn off, communicate with our troops from work, our tribe of friends, family and associates and connect with all sorts of various collections of affiliations, any time we want. It is fast and furious and noisy. With all that slippery fluidity, I think place matters all the more and stations, understood as the place(s) where things happen, or get done, are in fact, influenced by the characteristic of those places and the way they choreograph movement or stasis, concentration or distraction.
I would like to test two interests or obsessions that riff on the topic of stations.
1. Stationery/Stationary – this wordplay keeps running through my head: station..ery. station..ary. I have enough notebooks and loose paper to keep me busy for 50 years. Yet, I still covet more notebooks, more beautiful pieces of paper. What is it about the promise of the untouched that seems so appealing? I try to draw everyday with intermittent periods of success. I also imagine writing everyday – with ink on paper; the friction of implement to surface still motivates me and the appeal of the physical artifact, especially the notebook, is that the artifact hangs around as evidence of the effort and a record of the time. The notebook is something of an individual node in the network of activity – a stopped moment, or station, where things gets fixed on the paper. The notebook is the place you return to pick the thread, continue the effort, check the facts recorded. The notebook is a micro workstation.
2. The subway station and the endless ride: to and from work. I spend at least 10 hours a week on the subway. What comes of that time? We read, sleep, listen to music, write e-mails, all in an effort to “use” the time, but also to create a more robust virtual armor between yourself and the stranger who is so intimately close to you, especially on the rush hour train. I would like to set up a work/station/travel exercise to play out for one month and present the results at DI. Everyone is listening, reading, watching, old school or with their phone, pad or kindle, but what if I set up a project to use those hours of commuting time to make a specific project that is only composed during those hours of travel? What is the topic and what is the method? I am intrigued by the idea of making concrete the time spent in travel from station to station, week after week. This is a mobile workstation and I would like to take the micro workstation [notebook] to the mobile workstation [subway] and through focused effort, test the limits of working under such conditions.
I will prepare a presentation of these efforts and accommodations developed to make work in the subway. Why do any of this? The studio is still held dear as the bastion of control and creativity, the space of refuge where there is room and time for work to evolve. The studio as the place where things can slow down, and focus can occur when the distractions and interruptions are limited. But our current technology invites us to work anywhere and at anytime and so we try and we do, with varying degrees of success. By testing out this one particular set of conditions, habitual and nomadic, crowded and connected, challenging circumstances for reflection or creation, I hope to illuminate something about the nature of work and the conditions under which it can happen.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
I would be happy to develop results of efforts presented and made in VH
BACK TO MONDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Liz Craig
Graphic Designer
Stanford University
San Francisco, CA
I have been working in the Office of Development at Stanford University for almost two years. As part of a three-person design team, I create annual reports, books and other collateral that tells the stories of how a donor’s monetary contribution makes possible a student’s education, a professor’s research, or a building’s existence. I attended DesignInquiry Vinalhaven in 2011 and had a great experience. The project I ran (how the nature of Improvisational Theater can inform the design process) went well and encouraged me to continue my research. Also encouraging was the group’s positive response to the improv exercises I led the first day. It turned out that they wanted to start each day with improv exercises. That was an unexpected, good surprise. Also, the type of people who relish in spending a week in a barn on the coast of Maine making things and talking about design are right up my alley. As someone who has split her life between two coasts, the topic of STATION, especially as “place,” is close to my heart. With one foot on the east coast and the other on the west, I often find myself thinking about what constitutes home. What gives place meaning? Is it about the actual place or the qualities of it? Can home be simulated?
Proposal
I propose to run a workshop that explores how we are connected to objects. In this case, an object acts as place, or station. I will ask people to choose an object from our station for the week: in or around the barn. The object chosen must elicit a memory and/or emotion. We will then gather ourselves and our objects and place them in a pile. Each person will share a memory that is triggered by someone else’s object. After sharing that memory, the same person will share the memory that is triggered by the object they chose. My hope is that people will learn something about each other through objects, and that we will witness how objects, representing a place, or station, can hold such meaning for one person and be meaningless to another.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
I would happily contribute to DI’s mission by writing an essay for a publication that came out of the week’s work, much like Maia has done for DI 2011. I would also be happy to help design a publication about the week. I can also imagine taking one of the objects from my workshop and documenting its life throughout the week. Perhaps it takes on new meaning within a week’s time.
BACK TO WEDNESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Margo Halverson
Graphic Designer, Professor, DesignInquiry co-founder
Alice Design Communication, Maine College of Art
Portland, Maine
I currently teach graphic design full time at Maine College of Art and have a studio practice designing artist’s books (my favorite), identity work, and various collateral, and I’m co-founder of DesignInquiry. I’d also say I’m a photographer; BFA, MFA, and making images is like breathing. This year I have been on a sabbatical from teaching. The academic year began with a detailed and zealous plan to fill what appeared to be an inspiring slow expanse of time. A list of projects to initiate, pick-up, and conclude sat next to a CAA article about the meaning of sabbatical; the word, the intent, the history. So the practice of daily to-dos became an evaluation of the needs vs. wants, deadlines vs. household rhythms of two teenagers, a dog, husband, and a garden of four Maine seasons.
Proposal
My main sabbatical project was intended as one of archiving, curating, and collating to edit and examine my body of personal work — transposing completed exhibitions, portfolios of photographs, bits of writing, and film into a new view with an intention of discovering, not dictating forms of resolution that might emerge. The only rule was to use work that still resonates and needs a home to be completed and transported.
Taking a sabbatical also suggested I had time to conclude personal projects not in the category of design or photography: making a will, finding a financial advisor, volunteering in the public schools, going on visiting artist trips, learning to play the banjo, and to knit something more inspired than a large rectangle was also on the list before an unexpected wrinkle became reality. My parents, both deceased, had willed me their small winter home in AZ, I’d also lived in AZ for 17 years before leaving 21 years ago. I’ve been renting out this house with the granite yard for a couple of months each year. This winter the renters offered to buy it before they headed home to MN. — a long unpleasant real estate story made short — I found myself on a shaky attic carport ladder in Mesa, AZ for 3 days in the end of March handing down filthy taped-up bulging boxes I had packed 22 years ago to my sister-in-law who totally stepped it up. Opening about 15 with disintegrating newspaper wrapped around objects I hadn’t remembered I’d owned (though I was happy to find the glass egg timer of Gram’s I’d wanted for banjo practice) together with emptying the house itself of mom and dad’s objects, and furniture, clothes and details, the stack of what I simply didn’t want to transport back into my own life grew larger and larger. While the renters strolled through between their golf games and card parties I felt like I was the star of my own reality show and the clock was ticking over 3 days until I headed back to Maine with only a carry-on bag and one free checked box.
STATION: convergence, traveling through, resting on, concluding, opening-up, weaving in the ends, moving, stopping — fits and starts of investing into what I believed was always intended as a forward motion now includes overlapping side bars and history — non-linear and three dimensional. It is new information for me that the revered collection of milk bottles, glass marbles, carbon-copied hand-written letters, and prom corsages dipped in paraffin wax hold no interest. Without fanfare I quickly tossed my mother’s diary away while neighbors offered me their trash cans to fill too.
For STATION 2013 I would like to introduce an idea and fact of direction. I’ll quickly introduce the history of the most simple and common type of magnetic compass. I’ll review how to read a (real) compass before leading a quick session of orienteering.
Orienteering is a navigational competitive sport that uses a map and a compass. The winner completes a preset course with particular points in the shortest amount of time. (One attic box held a certificate of my second-place orienteering race in Norway from 1973. I remember nothing about what must have been an important new skill. Another forgotten sidebar.)
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
I’d like to collect a story from each participant (written or maybe video interviews, TBD June 23-29) where everyone tells me about an experience wherein having a direction to follow introduced the unplanned. (I’ll work on this prompt…) Next I’ll collate, edit, and see where this project takes me in the same vein of beginning with a direction, but traveling to the form the project needs without knowing when we begin. In the best case scenario, I will publish these stories of navigation which may also include visuals of the converging, traveling through, resting on, concluding, opening-up, weaving in the ends, moving, stopping, and the fits and starts of what we each believed might have been True North. I’m also curious to gather, possibly collaborate (TBD) in visuals that parallel these experiences.
BACK TO MONDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Cat Normoyle
Designer, Educator
Memphis College of Art
Memphis, TN
My name is Cat Normoyle and I’m a designer and educator in Memphis TN. I moved here from Atlanta, GA last summer to teach in the graphic design department at Memphis College of Art. I really love working in environments both private & public to design experiences, add meaning, and impact social, economic, and environmental issues. I’ve recently become interested in how virtual spaces have changed the format for designing experiences in public or private settings, inspired by my good friend and colleague, Cotter Christian and his most recent work Show House 1: you are t[here]. His work has directly influenced my direction and interest in the topic of STATION.
Proposal
Despite being able to communicate with people instantaneously anywhere around the globe, we are still somehow connected to our surroundings, and our surroundings are important. What seems to be compelling about technology is the disjunction between place and activity. For instance, technology allows us to watch a movie in the park thus our role is simultaneously “park visitor” and “movie-goer.” My hypothesis (if you can call it that) would be that this schizophrenia of roles–or–malalignment of place and activity–causes people to not fully participate in anything. The concept of disjunction of place and activity was discussed by architect Bernard Tschumi who looked at event as a way of finding an architectural project’s program. Artist Danielle Roney has used projections as a means of connecting the narrative of a neighborhood to its physical place. She projects images of people from the neighborhood telling their stories onto abandoned buildings, empty lots, etc. In my thesis, my intention was to look at how our actions could be divorced from space by changing our connection with thought video delay and projection. What I found, however, was a stronger link to the idea of surveillance (and self- surveillance) and what this means for our connection to place. Inevitably, when using webcams and projections, the concept of surveillance must be confronted.
Objective: Add activity into place by means of “virtual experience.” The objectives for attending DI this year are to inform others about research that Christian Cotter (in Atlanta, GA) and myself (in Memphis, TN) are doing, and to open it up to discussion. We feel like there is an opportunity prior to DI for to conduct some experiments on the topic, which I will share.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
Our long-term goal is to publish.
BACK TO THURSDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Debra Riley Parr
Chair, Fashion Studies Department
Columbia College Chicago
Chicago, IL
Currently, I am Chair of the Fashion Studies Department at Columbia College Chicago. I am a design historian working on a book manuscript about scent in contemporary art/design practices. As part of my research, I’ve developed a workshop that encourages participants to think about what it means to have a nose and to gather data about smell in the landscape. Most of my research thus far has centered on urban experiences. I am interested in creating a Smell Station on the island of Vinalhaven; this Station would bring together scent samples from the various habitats on Vinalhaven, would extend my research; it would also contribute to the possible interpretations of the term “station” [Middle English stacioun, from Anglo-French estation, statiun, from Latin station-, statio, from stare to stand. First known use: 14th century.], as it might apply to various forms of design inquiry. To situate the activity of inquiry in a place, to produce an intensity peculiar to that place, an intensity that is organizing, and mobile: can the scent of Vinalhaven become nomadic?
Proposal
Scent workshop (and installation) proposal: SCENT STATION
The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account.
The sectors of a city…are decipherable, but the personal meaning they have for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.
Guy Debord
In this workshop participants will locate/expand their sense of smell, map the scents of Vinalhaven, learn how to formulate a scent of their own design and contribute to the creation of a mobile Scent Station.
This scent workshop takes, as its point of departure, Surrealist ideas about walking through the landscape, especially Andre Breton’s Surrealist novel Nadja. For Breton, walking around the city of Paris, seeing, experiencing the ordinary, adopting an anticipatory mode became a method of discovery and transformation. In this workshop participants will take a stroll together, not looking at the island, but noting its smells. Our fieldwork will require openness and attentiveness to olfactory experiences. We will gather odor specimens to analyze, extract, and compose.
This excursion through the island’s many habitats will also create an opportunity to experience what the Situationist International (a Surrealist spin-off group in Paris during the 50s and 60s) called a derive. Being mobile in the landscape was, according to the Surrealists and the Situationists, critical to possible transformations, which might occur by chance encounters, events not planned for in advance. The object of desire or repulsion—entirely unknown in advance—is “happened upon” –by chance. Experiencing–really soaking in–the details of the landscape became for them a kind of education and resistance. In our derive, rather than looking at particularities, we will be sniffing the details of the landscapw—to shake our casual—or enforced—routines, extend the capacities of our sense of smell.
The derive—a kind of drifting—is connected to an earlier, similar kind of walking called “flanerie.” As theorized by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, and German philosopher Walter Benjamin, it was in part a response to the dominant culture of rationalization exemplified by Taylorism—the scientific management of the workforce developed and implemented at the turn of the 20th century. Flanerie was an activity directed against Taylor’s critique of inefficient laborers summed up in his slogan, “Down with dawdling!” Flanerie also became part of the Surrealist sense of revolt. This sort of walking might happen in a department store, a series of shops, a flea market, in unlikely places of all sorts. The Situationist International theories of the derive and psychogeography take up the practice of flanerie as a practice of critique. The derive is intended to unify two different types of “ambiance” that determine the values of the landscape: the soft ambiance – light, sound, time, smell, the association of ideas – with the hard, actual physical/constructions –rock formations, flora, water, beach, trails, streets, buildings, sidewalks, cafes. The Situationists hoped for a combination of the two realms of opposing ambiances, where the play of the soft ambiance was actively considered in the softening of the hard. The new space emerging from this dialectic would create a possibility for activity not formerly discerned or imagined by citizens or flaneurs simply passing through.
Supplies Needed:
Notebook and pen to record observations, sketch maps
Ziplock plastic bags to collect specimens
Grapeseed oil
Vodka or other distilled alcohol
coffee filters
cheesecloth
3 small glass jars/per participant
strips of paper
hot plate
Bunsen burner
Tweezers
Droppers
Twine
Introduction to the workshop
Olfactory exercise: participants sample smells, including commercial perfumes, cleansers, deodorants, spices, herbs, roots, raw materials used in the formation of perfumes, distillations.
Lecture and discussion based on the assignment: What do we smell? How do we smell? What would be the scent of your living space, your neighborhood, differnt parts of Vinalhaven? Is scent an unconscious navigating tool? What happens when we make it a conscious experience?
Field work:
Teams of 3 or 4 participants take a 60 minute walk. This walk should be as aimless as possible. At the same time participants should be as alert as possible to the scents of the island. While walking:
1. Gather 3 materials with very different olfactory properties. Save as evidence.
2. Make a nosegay! Collect several specimens from different moments of the walk. Save this as evidence.
3. Collect 3 items with olfactory qualities that seem in some way similar to each other during the walk. Save as evidence.
4. Bring all evidence back to the workshop for analysis and extraction.
Practice: demonstration of smell extraction
Practice: smell extraction
Participants will work on extracting the smells with alcohol/oil and compose extractions to create a simple perfume.
Presentation of participants’ extractions from the island and the formation of a mobile Scent Station…
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
I would contribute an analysis of the research emerging out of the workshop and an essay on the role of scent in establishing an understanding of place, in extending and challenging the regime of the visual, in amplifying the possibilities of design.
BACK TO TUESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Laura Schlifer
Graduate Student
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
I am currently a first year graphic design graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. My undergraduate background, however, is in architecture (I received my bachelor’s in architecture at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2010). Therefore, I don’t yet have a type of work that I “do”; I think that part of me is still in flux, but I am trying to figure out ways to combine these two very distinct (yet very related!) fields.
My interest in the idea of STATION lies in studying how we act in certain spaces; for example, how our bodies react/interact with objects in spaces like a grocery store vs. workspace vs. gallery space vs. the sidewalk. How does our body language and mood change, and what is it about these spaces that controls those alterations? And how, as a graphic designer, can I study and visualize /expose/explore these patterns to a particular space (or type of space)?
Currently, I am testing out this pattern visualization by creating my own ephemera and placing it in different spaces throughout the city and observing its changes. The ephemera I created is a series of laser-cut “sticks” (long sticks, short sticks, half circles) that make up each letterform of the alphabet. I wanted to create forms that weren’t explicitly letterforms, but could be arranged to form images, patterns, or letters/words.
Taking observational cues from urbanist/profound people-watcher William Whyte (a la The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces), I want to monitor and document the effects the space and it’s inhabitants have on the ephemera. Does it get stolen, removed, broken, kicked? Do people interact intentionally, or unintentionally? How does this interaction change depending on the space it’s placed? How do I anticipate these interactions? And then…what do I do with all this information? Where does it go, what does it do? I hope I will be at this stage in the project by this summer and begin to develop at DesignInquiry.
It would be a dream to participate in DesignInquiry; I feel that it would help me get a foothold into developing my thesis topic (which is still consistently in flux, but at this point it deals with recording and visualizing human interactions with space in different spaces), or at least help drudge up new questions that I can spend my second year in school developing their answers.
Proposal
Equipping each individual/small group with a toolkit, I will ask each person to place parts of their kit in different stations of their choosing throughout the downtown. This kit will be provided by me, and will contain a smaller version of the toolkit I am currently employing in my project at VCU — the series of long sticks, short sticks, and semi-circles. Although placement is up to the participant, there will be an emphasis on placing these items in existing everyday stations, by giving them cues to prompt the choosing of their location, such as: a place “to eat” (could be a grocery store, restaurant, a park bench), a place “to play” (a playground, a coffee shop, the beach), a place “to rest” (a patch of grass, a rock, a bench). The parts in the toolkit would allow for individuals to leave words, images, and/or messages in these spaces. Forcing participants to leave a mark on the space requires them to think, if even for a moment, before they act.
I would then ask each individual/small group to document with an image and/or a description/drawing of the station (if no cameras are available). Physical location to me is not important in actual mapping, only in my subsequent documenting throughout the week.
After the initial placement: since the pieces can be re-arranged, I wonder how these small compositions/messages made by the Design Inquiry group would be changed by other people (other members, locals) over the span of a week, or even if they will be (there’s no way to predict this, but one can hope). I wonder if a lexicon will be developed for different stations? I am planning to document these changes at a specific time every day to build up a small body of variations throughout the week.
(Note: I would like the initial interventions by the DI group to be word/message-based, because I believe these to be more indicative of the type of station, as evidenced by my first study at VCU. However, I remain open to the types of communication after the initial placement — if the pieces become visual, abstracted, or remain as words, it is all still valid.)
From this, and what I’d like to continue working on after the end of the week: I want to map the type of language used in these spaces we (the participants, both known and anonymous) have deemed playful, restful, (gastronomically) enjoyable, etc., and see if the semantics of these messages relate, reinforce, or contradict these spaces, and vice versa. I think a worthy discussion to have would be to inquire why we, the participants, decided to leave the types of messages we did: was it purely one’s own creation, or was it influenced by the nature of the space?
Concerning the creation of a map: inspired from a passage in The Practice of Everyday Life, I wish to reclaim the visual aspect of the “map” from the structures of power and brought back to the person at street level. de Certeau writes, “Far from being “illustrations,” iconic glosses on the text, these figurations, like fragments of stories, mark on the map the historical operations from which it resulted. Thus the sailing ship painted on the sea indicates the maritime expedition that made it possible to represent the coastlines. But the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonizes space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it…The tour describers have disappeared.” In this, “station” becomes a key element in the development of this map, as it provides the framing elements in a space for this map to latch onto.
BACK TO MONDAY //////////////////////////////////
Denise Gonzales Crisp
designer, educator, writer
Professor, College of Design, North Carolina State University
denisegonzalescrisp@designinquiry.net
Until June 20: Raleigh, NC
July 5 to Aug 15: Los Angeles, CA
I am “bi-located” between Raleigh, NC–where I am a professor of graphic design during the academic year–and Los Angeles, CA–where I usually spend summers pursuing various projects. In addition to teaching and making things, I do a little writing and curating. I joined the board of DesignInquiry in 2012, and have participated in three Vinalhaven events, (Fail Again, Design Less, and Fast Forward), and one DesignCities event (Montreal).
I am one of the framers this year. I wanted to help frame the topic in part because STATION implicates personal technologies–and now “cloud” technologies–as an integrated system of stations. I have had a long-term love affair with the devices that initially freed me from the limitations of physical tools and production services (i.e. paper and pen, typesetters); and later, the mobile devices that eliminated the need for a permanent physical workspace to pursue creative production. These technological realities essentially liberated me from being tied to a singular place.
Curiously, I have been unwilling to give up my home in Los Angeles. Prior to moving to Raleigh, I had considered myself somewhat root-less, or at very least, emotionally unattached to a particular location. Yet I have lived most of my life in Los Angeles, and today, the thought of not being somehow present in my hometown fills me with a sense of disconnectedness.
In my mind, though, I am a nomad, living in a somewhat “multi-settled” way. I am by nature a bit schizophrenic, comfortable with multi-mindsets. I sometimes wonder if my primary “location” isn’t within the digital space of my screen(s), activated at various points in time. It’s there (or here) where I write, design, plan, communicate, contemplate, learn, and connect with others who point me to all sorts of things. It’s there (or here) where I rehearse my own production and communication by revisiting a vast archive of my own making: emails sent, documents drafted, photos snapped, music anthologized, design iterated, website content excavated and eternally interwoven. All these places, people, and things are like an eternal stream that exists in time; any given moment is significant, as a momentary station, by virtue of my pausing within it. So then, what if all these moments represent more of a condition than a place?
Proposal
I want to try and explore station as a time-based, continuous condition, rather than a place or a node of activity. A contiguous set of stations?
I would like to prompt a workshop where participants create a very short video or stop-action movie, not unlike “micro-fiction,” or “flash fiction:” meaning, a lot in a little. These videos might represent the flow from one moment to the next. I would like to use the medium to explore the meanings of Station as a time-based condition. For now, the prompt is “approach, groove, depart.”
Participants might use phone or tablet video software, such as Vine, Frameographer, (download before arriving to the island), and iMovie, or a digital still camera. I will supply a variety of drum grooves to use as audio. It would be ideal if participants could collaborate by pairing up to write and make the video.
I will also be bringing parts of my drum kit–snare, floor tom, high hat–and some sticks, because I’m learning and need to practice, but mostly because my proposal is rooted in an emerging consciousness inspired by the drums. We might record sound/music/beats for the videos too.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
Compile a reel of the movies to create one continuous stream: a station. I would submit this work for possible publication on the DI website.
BACK TO THURSDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Emily Luce
artist + designer / president, board of directors, DesignInquiry
emilyluce.net / searchandresearch.net
Lethbridge, AB & Port Alberni, BC
I was born in Massachusetts and live in Western Canada. This year I changed careers, leaving academia to pursue a more responsive, productive practice en plein air. I’m an artist and designer now. I also serve on the Board of DesignInquiry.
In January, my partner and over thirty collaborating artists and artisans and I completed the first work in a series of miniaturized but inhabitable art house replicas on wheels, fashioned after the house in Lethbridge, AB owned by Janet Cardiff and George Bures-Miller. The piece is called The Cardiff-Miller House. This moving, living work combines Canadian art history, the tiny house movement, and a dialogue about where the nerve centres of creative practice reside. Because I’ve spent the past several months grappling with the ins and outs of moving a 7,000lb house on wheels around, the topic STATION resonates.
Proposal
I’d like to invite the group to visit the Vinalhaven Poor Farm, explore it, and make miniaturized replicas of this place. (They don’t have to be inhabitable.) What, in the process of representation in a smaller form, stays, and what is discarded? Are these defining aspects, these priorities for representation, stations of the Poor Farm? (Is a priority a station?) Do they occur over and over, or does each replica represent a vastly different perspective? (Is a point of intersection a station?) How can this data set inform our ideas about station(s)?
Maybe we can have lunch over there, too.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
The field trip/project will form immediate outcomes, but they’re also really important in helping me think about how I frame the next houses in my own art house project. The models can easily be quantified and shared in photographs and scans of the material, and as well, physical objects might be put to use in any exhibitions that we have during our gathering.
*Note: I would love to bring the tiny house with me to Vinalhaven (another bed!), however the costs are gut-wrenching, not to mention the drive would be 5-6 days each way.
BACK TO WEDNESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Rachele Riley
Designer, Educator
The University of the Arts
www.racheleriley.com / blog.racheleriley.com
Philadelphia, PA
My name is Rachele Riley. I live and work in Philadelphia, PA. My research is focused on design interpretations of conflict, systems for expressive imaging, and the intersection of mediated data, processes of accumulation, and the dynamics of transformation. In projects that investigate place, activity, and perception, I incorporate mapping and archiving into my creative approach, creating print, video, web-based works, and installations. For the last few years, I have been exploring the macabre, disruption, and accumulated impact of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 to 1992 (‘The Evolution of Silence’). The project has several dimensions, and part one is currently online at: www.evolution-of-silence.net.
I envision ‘Station’ as an opportunity to investigate interaction, engagement, discovery, and growth as it relates to design research, by mapping and archiving the activity of the DI group while on Vinalhaven. I am interested in the directions of our individual and collective research; our creative and intellectual bases, and how we progress in our creative work. How do participants work within the format of the DI workshop? How do we, as participants, develop from our original research positions over the course of the week and how are multiple levels of collaboration best facilitated and captured? Can a series of experiments in collective making inform next stages of working together, and reveal under-emphasized approaches to sharing creative knowledge?
Proposal
I am thinking about the word, station, as an interval along a research path—a pause, or a space in between things or activities. This idea of a pause comes from a personal experience. After a friend of mine moved to California, we developed a project specifically to keep our connection and maintain our day-to-day friendship including the shared moments that build over time and create closeness. Every day we worked on one image that we passed back and forth to one another as a newly saved version. After working on these images for one year, we created a single animation. The animation has no traditional narrative arc but rather represents the pauses we took from our life and work to share a daily activity. Its power lies in its representation of time and interval, and in the accumulating image from our contributions. While the animation also provided a testing ground for our own work, I find that it serves as a model for collaboration as mutual instruction, and for archiving as making.
I propose to lead a series of projects over the week. It is not a workshop that happens in a single block of time, but is rather intervals of pause—stations of moments throughout the day and over the week during which participants would contribute to a project or projects.
From the regular, multi-faceted, and accumulated engagement of the group, two types of projects will be conducted (maybe three):
1. A roving inquiry that selects and gathers contributions from individuals at the spot where they are working. By intervening while they are working, a station of pause is created; something is discussed, shared, submitted, documented. The process continues for the week, and culminates in an archive whose content and form is determined by contributions from participants.
2. The second project builds upon the first inquiry. Participants will be asked to make a contribution for the purpose of creating an animation. Introducing another pause, participants edit and add to their previous contribution or conversation. The results will be collected and transformed through time-based media. A frame rate can be determined once the number of images is determined. In the project I mentioned above, we created the animation in ‘2’s’—each image had a duration of two frames. I would leave this open until I know what structure would work best.
Sounds, images, quotes, questions, etc., gleaned from the presentations and the activities of the week, will also be used to prompt participants. The variety of people’s response, their knowledge and approach will be solicited and respected, but the results will be cumulative and potentially reveal our creative activity.
I hope that the proposed project might eventually evolve as a way to extend the DI experience after the week’s timeframe—into a digital platform that embraces a non-fixed, evolving ethos and which could provide for sharing post-DI research activity throughout the year(s). It will also inform my own research in interaction, mapping, and open systems; and specifically in dismantling images of accumulated violence to create and reveal a critical experience. In many ways the DI week is a station of time, an interval pause and welcomed change in which we are prompted to work differently. I would like to augment this quality through these projects and create a collective work that builds upon attention, intuition, and growing knowledge; and to investigate what lies at the core of an interaction, multi-faceted engagement, and mapping as a reflective practice.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
After experiencing the DI week, collecting the experiments, and having the chance to reflect upon the results and discuss with other DI participants on their value, I will write about the project and submit a visual documentation of the project to the DesignInquiry publication about Station. I am interested in how the experiments will inform the projects I have been developing, for example recently at DesignCity Berlin: for addressing the concerns of a city (‘Once a Day Berlin’ project) and for interpreting the dynamics of an instant in ‘drawings with hardware’ (‘Expressive Scans’ project).
BACK TO MONDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Christopher Fox
1:Assistant Professor, Interim Director of the Design Center; Western Michigan University 2: Founder, Director; Not Design 3: Education Director, AIGA West Michigan
Western Michigan University, Not Design, AIGA WM
seefoxdesign.com, thinknotdesign.com, facebook.com/pages/Not-Design
Grand Rapids MI
I hail from the Midwest, born and raised in Battle Creek, MI and have lived in Grand Rapids since 1997, where I moved to obtain my BFA in Graphic Design. I completed my MFA at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York in 2012. I am now an Assistant Professor of Design at Western Michigan University, I run my own studio in Grand Rapids called Not Design, which focuses on Curatorial, Educational and Interactive Experiences. We make Letterpress a focal point of our educational and interactive process and experience. My work is focused on Site Specific Interventions, Analog manners of making, (Letterpress), and Spatial Data Visualization.
Proposal
Let me begin by examining the idea of a found object workshop. This concept is intentionally open ended and I think must be, as it relies on participants to interpret their own sense of place or station by examining their surroundings and the meaningful representations around them. I would hope there be a metaphorical selection of objects by each participant that allows them to build a language explaining their own understanding of any of the following: Their station in life (are they 35 and a bread winner, looking to start making lots of money), do they feel inadequate professionally, or do they feel triumphant professionally, how do they feel we are truly connected (by social interaction or personal space sharing) etc etc. I admit that I could make a list of interpretations but I may be reiterating your list back to you.
These responses would be experiences, narratives. They may result in data being analyzed and reiterated base on found objects from the environment. This theory reflects well past Inquires like Design Less, Make Do, and Fast Forward which were (and I paraphrase so forgive me) focused on Reflex not Knowledge. A found object “assignment” becomes intuitive and detached and does not allow for preconceived notions, plans or agendas.
To elaborate briefly by answering a question directly I see the Island as a Station in this context, with the individuals involved relying on the physical surrounding to develop their language to help interpret your thematic questions. The functional process would be design survivalism. Using what is available to You. This theory dovetails into the question about whether or not a Station is physical space or a gathering of useful objects and ideas. I think it can be both or neither, and lets find out!
What I mean is that by examining the physical surrounding participants are left with they will be able to develop a collection, installation or language that will inform and interpret their observations and experiences in a meaningful and individual way.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
I think the concept of “Station” or “placeness” represents a point of view. Documentation, either through collection, imagery or video of these installations would provide for a continuation of this conversation beyond the June event. This would also allow for the conversation to begin with topics many people can relate to, with varying points of view. I really believe in the elimination of the audience in current gallery and educational practice, the classroom is not a podium and art should be owned by those interacting with it (as opposed to observing it).
BACK TO TUESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Kimberly Long Loken
AIA, LEED AP
Lecturer, Registered Architect
University of Wisconsin-Stout
Minneapolis, MN
I was raised along the US-1 corridor in northeastern Maryland; educated in Washington DC and Austin, TX; lived in Brooklyn for eight years and recently moved to Minneapolis via a 10-week, 10,000 mile cross-country road trip ( http://vangabond.com/). Having extended family in midcoast Maine, I know well the contemplative attributes of the landscape and culture around Vinalhaven.
I have ten years of experience practicing architecture and recently began teaching, first at Pratt Institute’s Interior Design program and now at UW-Stout’s School of Art and Design. My professional work spans many program types and includes significant renovation and adaptive re-use projects including conventional stations such as those of the PATH transit system as well as the historic docks complex of the Red Star Line/People on the Move Museum in Antwerp, Belgium. This museum of migration tells stories departure and arrival, upheaval and aspiration, in the late 19th century as well as today; I led the exhibit development (http://www.redstarline.org/).
This exhibit design work drew upon my past experience with production design for film. I bring a strong narrative-as-program approach to all of my work and see DesignInquiry: STATION as an opportunity to address the plot points and settings of a journey. My thesis, which took the whole of the Mississippi River as its site, proposed a kinetic structure that reacts to the physical conditions of the river as well as accommodating a variety of programmatic needs for the communities it floats between.
Background/context
Sizeable or special journeys require the use of conventional stations – lowly gas stations or magnificent transit hubs – but most trips, call them routine journeys, are measured by ritualistic actions, signs or stops along the way. Not unlike the Stations of the Cross that mark the path around a sanctuary, this observation will magnify the markers and places within regular journeys, whether the mundane commute or the ritual family road trip. When driving from Dallas to Austin, who doesn’t pull over at the Czech Stop in West (pop. 2849) for kolaches? How do these markers bring comfort or build anticipation? As a child in the backseat of the car, what were the landmarks on the way to your grandmother’s house and do they still live like a vivid dream in your mind?
Routine journeys: Like the “zone maps” that determine fares in DC taxis, I instinctively sort my routine journeys into zones – thereby ticking off the street names or subway stops or landmarks that mean I am closer to my destination. The zone logic lends itself to diagram.
Special journeys: The monthly drive to my grandmother’s house, the annual vacation pilgrimage – lend themselves to storyboards. To Mommom: The winding ribbon of asphalt that dips low for two bridges, the signs for the Baltimore Bowman’s Club and Anita’s Studio of Dance, the store at the fork in the road where we never stopped for milkshakes, the abandoned whistle-stop of the MA & PA railroad. To Florida: Picking up dad at work, chicken McNugget dinner in Waldorf, overgrown Aqualand sign (what magical ruin lays beyond?), camping at the KOA with the plaster unicorn, midday break at the linen outlets running through the rainbow of shower curtain displays, smell of paper in Georgia, finally seeing Spanish moss and then palm trees, feeling the weighted, wetted, scented air.
Proposal
A discussion/workshop will produce ephemeral diagram maps/storyboards of special &/or routine journeys that examine the power of place as recorded by the senses and in memory. Participants might want to identify these journeys in advance; they might even think about the journey to DesignInquiry itself in this context. While Diagram/Map and Storyboard formats are what I’m thinking about now, a composite format or an entirely different format would also work.
I also see time in a certain way – the months of the years are arrayed in a particular moebius strip in my brain – I can’t not see a date spatially. I’d like others to reveal how their brains naturally and consistently sort and display such information. Would we call this diagrammatic synesthesia?
I see this memory/journey project as a way to extract and communicate the essence of experience. I find that mining some direct experience often gives the students the confidence needed to embark on the critical thinking required in innovative and daring design work. Last year, my students developed “light-and-sensory machines” – optical devices and sculptural installations that transport the visitor into the designer’s memory or dreamscape. Some where inspired by the “stations” of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Whether a journey is special or routine, the mode of transportation is an important factor in how place is recorded in the senses and memory. In my own journeys, I am an epic roadtripper with fond childhood memories of car trips, too. As a regular international business traveler, I became well versed in those rituals and stations of flight, bookended by various other modes of transport. I suspect the less familiar, but surely hypnotic, ocean or river voyage to be compelling as well.
Conventional stations exist due to population density. As such, they mark the landscape at certain intervals. This proposal asks individuals for other markers, at other intervals – the ritual of their unique journeys. Conventional stations host countless emotional, even life-altering, arrivals and departures. This proposal asks individuals about less dramatic, but no less essential, emotions (presumably reassurance and anticipation but perhaps also dread) associated with the ritual.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
My recent shift from practicing to teaching/research/making was precipitated by a simple, strong desire to spend more time talking about ideas: I love to match students to concepts, precedents, people and resources. Unlike a conventional conference, DesignInquiry’s structure – essentially, the magic of summer camp – accelerates those connections that can lead to lifelong dialogue and further collaboration. As per my proposal above, I would like to continue to build a body of short film and graphic work that speaks to alternative, ritualistic stations and their strong sense of place, whether actual or ephemeral.
After DesignInquiry, with more substantial time and resources, the project could evolve into a more sculptural piece (like a very large slide carousel, with images seen in multiple, translucent layers or browsed like LPs) or a film (a dreamy documentary style – the “ephemeral map”).
POSTSCRIPT
The gas station. Another topic in its own right – perhaps one that serendipitously fits in later in the week with other collaborators???
My abiding love of roadside vernacular is well-celebrated in gas stations – be they the dainty cottages of the 1920s, the swooping Jet-age canopies of the 1950s, or a towering plaster Sinclair dinosaur literally incarnating the fossil fuels in the pumps she stand guard over. The 100-year arc of gas station design has gone from contextual to aspirational to mundane. And would it be now irresponsible for a designer to improve, to beautify a place which effectively dispenses destruction? Assuming that it is, how could the design reflect negatively on its program instead? Another display on the pump that counts carbon along with gallons and dollars? An under-developed and a heavy-handed idea, but could make for some humorous and hyperbolic dinner party chatter, at least.
BACK TO WEDNESDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Brooke Chornyak
Assistant Professor
Virginia Commonwealth University
richmond va
Since moving from home I’ve never lived in a place for more than 3 years. This has been unsettling, however revealing and formative in a number of ways. Do we all have the desire to be of a place and truly in a place. I’m of the opinion that this transitory american culture is detrimental to the creation of strong communities. And in-order to alleviate isolation and loss of community individuals need to create our own environments where shifts in jobs, locations, landscapes, people are enhanced through establishing and reestablishing shifting and new connections. A significant theme in my research is on create collaborative works with those far away and close. For example, Margin a collaborative print journal was devised by myself and graduate school classmate Tania Allen, with the intention of exploring how and what it means to collaborate in our transient digital environment. The first volume began as an effort to extend our graduate school experience which was genuinely collaborative in nature. Volume 1: “inside_outside” was published May of last year and Volume 2 of Margin ”Design Matchmaking” intends to explore and experiment with the notions of collaboration, especially as we become more disconnected geographically. Using Google Hangout, participant have engage in finishing the unfinished and testing the untested in these new collaborative environments. So not only do we occupy these Nodes or Stations but we as designers or artists are fundamental and integral in the creation them. It’s significant for us to engage in a dialogue and work on the shaping and reshaping and questioning our experiences with stations of work, interaction,
and play.
Matthew Spahr
Adjunct Instructor in sculpture/Foundations Shop Coordinator VCU
http://cargocollective.com/spahrmatt
Richmond VA
I am a sculptor/performance artist from California by way of Alaska currently residing in Richmond VA. My current works central focus is the contextual relationship between elements in a shared environment. In particular I focus heavily on the historical, use and perceived value of individual components of larger compositions. The symbiotic and on going collaboration with Brooke Chornyak stems from a desire to extend contextual relationships into an interactive situation in which ideas, systems, histories and values of the individual are directly scrutinized.
Background/Context
We (Brooke & Matt) are interested in organizing a series of cooking workshops, explored in geographic locations in which place forms and strongly influences culinary practice. In this increasingly nomadic and transitory world our culinary history impacts the place we move into. Often in that change Fusion cuisine, the act of combining various culinary traditions is the result.
The first workshop in the series was held this March at Tasmeem 2013, a biennial design conference in Doha, Qatar. Qatar’s historic relationship to trade routes and nomadic populations, as well as the current massive transplant population make it an ideal place to examine both new and historic forms of fusion food. Maine also has a unique history that is expressed through the blueberry fields of Downeast, the coastal regions fisheries Aroostook County’s potato fields and the bean-hole beans of lumber camps.
A striking comparison can be made between culinary practices and design because both acts are a creative process where methods both tacit and explicit are used. But where cooking and design differ is in the accelerated pace of the cooking process. A meal is created in a number of hours leaving less time to ruminate on decisions and calling for the cook to act intuitively and creatively throughout the entire process. Much of design operates on an intuitive level and the intricacies and interdisciplinarity of the design process begs for a body of explicit knowledge that can be shared. Cooking can act as a quickened microcosm of the design process in which researchers can learn from the intuitive actions and adapt those findings to the design process.
Proposal
STATION: Pause, ponder, play: Where does this phrase exist? At the table. In the kitchen. In the studio and in the lab. This phrase contains a fundamental set of inherently optimistic requests. Explore! Test! Analyze! (and at the table) Enjoy!
We seek to use this year’s DI topic as a means to create stations for cooking that make this very same request. These will be objects or tools made during the week such as a clay oven, a dirt or ground-oven and perhaps a still in order to subject participant’s heirloom recipes to a set of constraints.
We ask DI STATION participants to bring their heirloom recipes before the start of the gathering and will then analyze and modify their materials and practices specific to the cooking stations as well as mentalities and/or histories associated with the region. The co-creation of these cooking tools will be play in it’s raw form, cooking in novel and unconventional means, the challenge of problem solving and then sharing the results. These sets of objects as well as the restrictions of being on an island with limited supplies will generate a set of problems to be solved due to the resources available and conditions of the place.
We hope that through the pairing of the participants and their exposure to new products based on local access the organizers hope to replicate the fusion process and facilitate culinary experimentation as a model for and parallel process to the increasingly interdisciplinary environments of design. The isolating and restrictive effects of island lifestyle will have a direct effect on the development of tools and techniques. In the spirit of Daniel Defoe we will ask participants to problem solve creatively. We will collectively analyze results as well as question the desire to replicate out of nostalgia and memory.
We occupy and often are overwhelmed and controlled by the stations in which we work and play. These nodes or stations are fundamental and integral in the creation of our work and social life experiences. It is significant for creators to construct our experiences and others with stations of work, interaction, and play.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
The essential need to define methods to improve the process and quality of design requires not only a resulting recipe but in our case a method map or historical model in order to better understand the evolution of the recipe itself. Workshop participants will be asked to record their decisions and methods in the form of written process mapping throughout the workshop. The researchers will also be collecting feedback and data on tacit processes through video interviews. The resulting deliverable will be first, new and possibly delicious cuisine, and second new methods for interdisciplinary practice.
Our workshop seeks to create an environment in which an ongoing dialog is present. The isolation of an island seems particularly relevant to current food movements. Access, scarcity, trade, portability, sustainability, necessity and survival and other concerns built into the mindset of an islander have made there way back into popular culture in a big way. The relationship of “Stations” to current trends like local and slow food movements is significant. Questioning the value of local restrictions, nostalgia, convenience and novelty is the bases of our workshop exercise. How we balance local and global is a conversation for the kitchen but not isolated to it.
BACK TO MONDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Amy Campos
Principal of ACA – Amy Campos Architect
Tenure-track Assistant Professor
www.amycampos.com / www.cca.edu/academics/faculty/acampos
San Francisco, CA
amy@amycampos.com / acampos@cca.edu
Positioned in multiple related disciplines and modes of working (interior design, architecture and critical studies), issues of excess, durability, impermanence and our nomadic condition frame the primary interests in my practical, scholarly and pedagogical pursuits. My work operates at the scale of inhabited environments and objects, interior installations, and critical writing. I’m a native Californian with a European family (Britain, France) who spent most of my adult life on the East Coast (Boston, New York) and am now living in San Francisco. I’m a happy hybrid, personally and professionally.
I attended DI Fast Forward in 2012 and had an excellent experience. The ideas presented and discussed resulted in clarity of agenda for the rest of the year. I’m excited to return and continue the conversations started last year.
STATION: Often, the role of the interior resides somewhere between the extremely consumable (and usually disposable) and the exceptionally durable (think heirlooms). Today, as people and, their physical infrastructures migrate with the movement of global economies and opportunities, we see an evolution of the nomadic into an increasingly prolific spatial condition.
An excellent historical example of migration at the scale of the interior is provided by the use of tapestries. Tapestries were prized possessions, taking much skill, time and capital to produce. They typically travelled between estates with the families that owned them wherever they were currently occupying space, and passed between multiple generations. The tapestry is comprised of a system of individual stitches (or pixels) that, in aggregate, compose a meaningful narrative. Their use as insulation, decoration and narrative was designed for migration. The mobility of the tapestries rendered them essentially more permanent, more durable precisely as a result of their transitory quality.
In today’s context, our personal culture and history, identified through the way we produce and inhabit a series of spaces, is marked not only through the items we place in space, but specifically through the production of the spaces themselves. We see a resurgence of craft, particularly in the form of hacking (the modification of a standardized system to individualize its aesthetic, installation or use) in the production of inhabitable space. Crafting variation suggests potential for an infinitely modifiable occupation of our environment – a permanent process of production. Because we now design for a built environment’s durability in terms of fixed, total assembly, we overlook opportunities to think of it in terms of replaceable assemblies of varying durabilities and configurations. Addressing the potential of both specificity (craft and the hack) and impermanence (migration) forces us to consider designed environments that can productively evolve over time.
Proposal
I am currently working on a series of designs for migratory interior environments and have collected an archive of others’ work addressing similar conditions that I would like to include in the presentation along with a brief explanation of my thinking on the tapestry as prototype for the workshop.
The workshop develops an interior surface system, the “Inhabitable Wall” project I’ve been working on, that would collapse fixed finish and movable furniture into a single product. This piece is part of a larger effort I call the Nomadic/Disposable Interior Series – a grouping of conceptually related products and installations that address issues mentioned in question 1. I’d like to present this work and run a workshop using foam sheets to develop a few details of the system with the participants at DI: Station. Using a set of soft thin foam sheets, each workshop participant will produce a pixel of a larger “Inhabitable Tapestry”. Participants will explore the production of joints (tabs, tucks, pinches) and program space (pockets, bulges, loops). At the end of the week these pixels will form a tapestry system that can be manipulated and adjusted for various prescribed and yet to be discovered uses – in aggregate, producing a process of participation in making – an evolving narrative of use.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
The Nomadic/Disposable Interior Series is currently being developed and I plan to finish the first series of projects over the summer and fall (I’m on sabbatical). Ultimately, I plan for the work to be installed and displayed as a complete interior and will publish the work after exhibition.
BACK TO THURSDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Patricio Davila
Assistant Professor
OCAD University
Toronto, Canada
Where you come from:
Toronto, Canada / OCAD University
What kind of work you do:
Design: visual design, interactive design, information visualization, public installation. Co-founder of Public Design Unit, Toronto/Detroit.
Scholarship: critical and post-critical design, actor-network theory, information visualization, communication studies, cultural studies
Why you are coming:
I attended DI last year (Fast Forward) and found it to be a very interesting and stimulating experience with lots of discussion and connections made with other designers.
What are your interests in the topic STATION:
Estación, in Spanish, means station as well as season. It is a marker of location and duration. The station is constituted by the time we spend together. I would like to see how station (as location and duration) can be experienced/enhanced through various forms of documentation, visualization and production.
Dan McCafferty
Assistant Professor
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan
Where you come from:
Detroit via Winnipeg, Halifax, Raleigh, Toronto.
What kind of work you do:
Graphic design, typography; participatory, social/relational practice. I teach Design at Wayne State University. I also am visiting researcher at Broken City Lab, an artist collective in Windsor and co-founder of Public Design Unit, Toronto/Detroit.
Why you are coming:
I’d like to come to DI 2013 because attending DI 2011 Make Do was a highlight of my year—very inspirational and eye-opening in numerous ways. Many great connections made and many great people met.
What are your interests in the topic STATION:
I am interested in how stations suggest a betweenness of two or more points (places, people, experiences) and so therefore potentially vulnerable and open. I am interested in the potential that this metaphor has for the the role of design(er).
Proposal
Constellations to tell us where we are. Constellations of words and images that re-present the discussions occurring during the design inquiry week; words, phrases, thoughts, images will be gathered during the course of the week and processed by the librarians (Dan and Patricio) to produce an on-going, active and evolving record/entry of the DI dialogue. The librarians will also provide access points and opportunities for DI participants to contribute directly to the archive through various manual, analogue processes.
Why “constellations”? The notion of a constellation is used, notably by Theodor Adorno, as a mental image of how a variety of texts, ideas, utterances, images, and people may be seen as part of common space where some arrangements form clusters and others become far off markers of unexplored territory. The constellation also makes us think in relational terms and not in linear or mechanical terms.
We’ll produce projections, folded maps, and printed books. This re-articulation of the DI experience will help to reveal the territory of Stations, explored by DI participants. We hope the construction of this archive and it’s visualization in ephemeral forms will prompt further reflection on the dynamics of creative action and critical inquiry—the DI dialogue.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
Our hope is that we will contribute to DI’s perception of its own creative dynamics. The residency/workshop/intensive offered by DI promotes conviviality, discussion and collaboration — a model worth describing and recording for others to understand. Beyond disseminating to the wider community, we feel it is vital for DI participants to reflect-in-action, to borrow a term from Donald Schön, with regards to how this convivial design station (duration and location) is possible and potentially transferable to other aspects of his/her practice. Towards this end, we are interested in being involved with DI’ers in other projects that come as a result of our discussions and initial investigations on the island.
BACK TO MONDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Sean Wilkinson
Principal / Creative Director, Might & Main
Portland, Maine
As a resident Mainer determined to continue working as a legitimate designer in the real world, I love seeing people interact with my home state and realizing the power and importance of time and space to retreat, to think, consider, and talk differently about design. Technically, geographically, I could have that space whenever I want it, but I rarely take it. Perhaps it’s because that space isn’t just the Baxter Building, or Vinalhaven (or Berlin or Marfa, etc…) I find that space within unstructured ‘walls’ of DesignInquiry. I’m coming because the thinking and interacting that I will do within the non-confines of DI are essential to refreshing and contextualizing my work as a designer. And this idea of non-station is what I want to explore.
Proposal
While the Station of DI isn’t one bounded by walls or borders, there are some boundaries that we create in order to give the organism shape and realness. Before DI, I would gather information from the organization (quotes, previous mapping project, and the evolving mission statement would be helpful). The initial presentation would be an examination of what some existing boundaries that define DI are, and early looks at how we could map them visually. Things like location, size, duration, and bacon create a crude foundation of shape, but how can we add to that definition of DI as Station?
Then, an invitation for each participant to share thoughts about how DI has overlapped with their life and examining the ways that can create definition. This questioning will provide a wide range of answers, as some people will be first timers, others repeat attendees, and the board taking part will give an interesting view from behind the scenes. What starts taking shape during the week? Does a picture evolve like sonar or infrared imaging? How could DI be mapped into existence, and how can those mapped boundaries define — and fail to define — what DesignInquiry IS.
Throughout the week, I will work with participants to create a new map of DI and think about how to find the shape of DesignInquiry as Station, making a DesignInquiryAmoeba, floating through time and space, affecting lives, absorbing behaviors and properties, a station unbounded by location. I think it’s important to note that I’m imagining these boundaries as fluid and porous, like cell walls, always able to shift and expand and multiply.
What could you imagine contributing after the gathering?
We would hope to capture, by the end of the week, a snapshot of where we are within DI as of right now, 2013. This could be disseminated in various data and info design forms in a publication. But we could also work with all of this data in a way to visualize the future of DI and draw both safe and completely wild conclusions as to what could come next. A more nebulous look at the history and the state of the state of the station than has previously been compiled could be educational for new participants, and could prove to be a valuable tool in shaping (or not shaping) the future of DesignInquiry.
BACK TO MONDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Mary-Anne McTrowe
Position: one of two
The Cedar Tavern Singers AKA Les Phonoréalistes
Lethbridge, Alberta
I live in Lethbridge, Alberta, where I have been based for the last 20 years. Sixteen and a half of those years have been spent in the art department at the University of Lethbridge as first a student, then an instructor, and now a technician. (Talk about “fixity of place”.)
I would describe my artistic practice as having two parts- the first, my solo work, has a conceptual bent that ebbs and flows and tends towards ideas of representation and translation. Lately I have been doing a lot of conceptual crochet- using crochet as a carrier of information as opposed to a solely decorative end. My most recent piece, “50 Songs About Love” uses filet crochet to translate the titles of 50 songs with the word “love” in them into binary code.
The second part of my practice is a collaborative project which has been ongoing since 2006- I am one of the art/music duo The Cedar Tavern Singers AKA Les Phonoréalistes. Although for all intents and purposes we look and act like a band, we will never admit that we are a band. Rather, we are a performance art project that is about art history and pop culture and music and the things that happen when those intersect. Also, we make people sing along when we perform.
I am interested in the Station not so much as a place of production, pause, or play, but the Station as a state of mind inhabited in a state of production, pause, or play. Production and/ or through play as a Status.
Proposal
I am looking at the Station topic from the point of view of a Stationery-to-Stationery workshop; writing materials and interactions with objects and ideas through drawing (or, “drawing”). My workshop (which I would like to propose as a “non-workshop”) will take the form of a series of collaborative (and above all informal) drawing and writing exercises including various Surrealist games (both well and lesser known), games I have learned from other artists, and playful non-objective writing exercises.
BACK TO THURSDAY ///////////////////////////////////
Gabrielle Esperdy
Associate Professor of Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Board Member, DesignInquiry
Editor, SAH Archipedia
gabrielleesperdy@designinquiry.net
I am an architectural historian and critic based in New York. I’ve been involved with DesignInquiry since 2007 when I attended my first gathering in a haze of post-tenure euphoria that prompted me to seek out ways to productively kick over the traces of disciplinary restraint. In the intervening years I’ve continued to revel in and benefit from DI’s heady mix of flat hierarchy methodology, collaborative work, and interdisciplinary discourse. My work looks principally at intersections of architecture, consumerism and modernism in urban and suburban landscapes and I’m currently completing a book called Architecture and Autopia. I’ve also become increasingly interested in the so-called spatial turn in digital humanities and I’m heading up an ambitious (i.e. potentially foolhardy) project to build an authoritative, on-line encyclopedia of the built world (starting with the United States). That this project has the long-term potential to completely upend conventions of scholarly production and peer-review is no small part of its appeal.
Proposal
Though I’m one of the framers of STATION, I’m not able to attend this year’s gathering until the very end of the week. Arriving in time for the presentation of Friday’s “stations,” I propose to serve as a Station Agent for the day. In traditional usage, a station agent is someone who is in charge of a particular stop on a railway line, but it can also be understood (less hierarchically) as someone who simply works at a station.
With my experience as framer providing (I hope) the necessary credentials and qualifications, I will leave it to STATION participants to provide my job description and/or assign specific duties for the day. If none are forthcoming, I will act as a STATION inspector—an informed outsider who arrives to observe the day’s events (both discreetly and as they seem to embody the week) and to report on them as a way of documenting immediate outcomes and prompting continuing STATION research.
Proposal Post-script
For the gathering’s final dinner, I will also contribute Whoopie Pies from Moody’s in Waldoboro.
BACK TO FRIDAY ///////////////////////////////////