The first speaker up to bat was Laurene Leon Boym. Her speech was more about her product (which seems altogether pointless) than about the ideas behind the conference. She did say two interesting things, one of which was re-iterated to much better effect by a later speaker. First, what is designed today will define our era to civilizations in the distant future. This idea is altogether true - as we find things that were Roman in origin today and piece together their society, millennia from now people will still be finding relics of a bygone age - ours - that will define their perceptions of us. The second idea was that design is becoming more democratic, which she did a poor job explaining but which was picked up later on by someone else who had important things to say.
The inspiration for the title of this post came from a quote by Adam Yarinsky, the second speaker, concerning the properties of a design:
Form transmits ideas through perception.
The idea is that the quality of a design is based on its ability to connect ideas and relationships, and the only way to transmit ideas is through form. I really liked this idea, because it doesn't just apply to physical objects, it also applies to words. In order to properly transmit an idea, that idea must be well-written so that it is easily read. Nobody wants to go through and read a paper that has more grammatical errors in it than the average high school essay - you would spend more time correcting errors than processing ideas! Yarinsky's idea of design was as a process of creation and result, a framework that requires an understanding - an informed intuition - about the constantly-changing reality that is the modern world. In order to properly design, one must engage change, and develop everything relationally, so that the design can change and thereby breed change. The design method must be open and opportunistic, in order to take advantage of everything that is around it in time.
Shane Coen had a great talk on the landscape of society, how it changes, and how it needs to be changed. Usually when I think of landscape architects, I think of the guy who is going to design a brick walkway through a garden for me one of these days, so he did a good job making me realize that his profession is about more than the residential application. Coen had four societal changes that need to happen in order to make our society more sustainable. First, we must properly develop rural land, to save it from becoming urbanized. This hit close to home, because I am from the Upper Peninsula, and we have nothing but rural land. As he said, developers need to learn that profit is still possible with the rural community - it has been ignored for far too long. Second, urban development should be a multidisciplinary team affair. Engineers and designers need to be brought together in order to build an infrastructure that interfaces properly and that is easily modified. Third, there needs to be more work done with leaders to promote development. In general, the city planner is a very weak political position with extremely limited power, but Coen made an argument that it should not be - instead, the city planner should be a leader, as it is in the Netherlands. Finally, education needs to be revamped - the nation is visually illiterate, and our education is miles behind where it should be. There is a need to integrate design into education from an early age, but nobody has stepped up to the plate and done it.
Next up is Ila Berman, who I am going to skip because she cannot be explained without a thousand words of her own, so more on her in another post (likely after I watch her on YouTube and read about half of her work, as well as ask her a few more questions). She is utterly brilliant, and someone needs to put her in a room with our professors and see what crazy brilliant ideas they put together. I'd pay to watch. Everyone after her was difficult to pay attention to, because I was too busy processing everything she said, and nobody said anything more important than she did all day. She, in essence, was the reason to go for the first day of the conference.
Stephen Burks also had a product pitch, but he kept it under control and talked more about the principles of design and used his own designs as examples. To him, authorship is fading, the idea of putting your name on a product will become obsolete as everything becomes more open source, and dialog is the future of design. Collaboration is the next step in the evolution of society, where everyone contributes to everything. He didn't mention Wikipedia, but it is a great example of what he means. The context that a design is produced in changes the idea completely, and culture and design have a very important overlap. He also had the runner-up quote for the title of this post - "Concrete Theory is Technosexual" doesn't quite fit the topic though. Maybe I'll use it later.
Next up was Timur Galen, a Director for Goldman Sachs (which, what?). Though not a designer in any way himself, he had a couple of interesting points. The tools for design have become extraordinarily powerful, and it no longer requires a special spatial mindset to design - you can now produce 3-D drawings instead of producing multiple 2-D drawings and being able to discern the 3-D from them. The rendering is now a nearly-exact representation of reality. Clients are becoming more involved in design, and have a new role - developing design requirements. However, because of this dispersion of technology it is possible that the role of the professional in the design process could be diminished significantly.
Will Bruder showed a lot of interesting architectural designs, but a lot of what he said was common sense. Budget is the driver of creativity; a designer should work because of, not in spite of, his clients; design is about changing lives and improving their quality. I really don't have a whole lot to say on him, but his presentation is worth checking out from an architectural standpoint - the way that architecture mirrors nature in his sketches is phenomenal.
Margaret Stewart had a great talk about how open source design is becoming. It is becoming more important for 'proprietarianism' (my word) to fade into the background and for design to become an open system, which fuels further design based on an initial concept. Our use of Arduino is a perfect example of this. Designers are there to write the book, but in theory leave the final chapter blank for the usage of the idea to write. She had an interesting factoid that I didn't know - Twitter was originally for bike messengers, but has evolved into an internet phenomenon. Great example of the final chapter being left blank. The scarcity of access to information is leading to an abundance of access to information, as society will take off in a design aspect. There is still need for professional designers, but they are becoming more of role models for amateur designers.
Stewart was followed by a few men who didn't really catch my interest at all. Marc Tsurumaki (which sounds strangely Finnish) had one quote, a question: can we embrace paradox as a catalyst for production? The idea that we are getting ahead of ourselves, and we know where we are going to be, and it will catalyze us to get there faster... interesting, but the rest of his talk was not. Nicola Delon didn't really interest me at all, though he had some brilliant designs that his firm did that he showed off. Gary Smith is an MSU alum, which... I listened to his entire speech, and feel like I learned nothing at all. Typical. Also, if you put his powerpoint in a lineup with all the other powerpoints, you could easily pick out which one was made by the MSU alum... he used the 6x6 rule like its a law not a guideline, his diagrams made no sense whatsoever... sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
Sarah Whiting was another extremely interesting speaker. She spoke of science fiction and its counterpart reality - the need to distinguish between 'past future' and 'present future' is huge, because some of the science fiction of the past is the reality of today, and our expectations of the future are constantly changing as technology evolves. One of the major problems with design today is that there is a proliferation of examples, which is stagnating the field. There needs to be more interdisciplinary design, and more thought from all points, as proliferation has replaced directive in design. I will likely have more to say on her when I re-watch her piece as well.
Michael Speaks ended the day with a talk on design as an engine of innovation, not just a product. He also spoke of design as a key to education, and something that needs to be incorporated further, so that design disperses to everyone on the planet. By this point, he was really re-iterating points that others had made earlier in the day. He did point out a book by Peter Rice called 'An Engineer Imagines', which looks like it would be an interesting read.
I will be putting together a post specifically about what Ila Berman had to say, as well as my own thoughts on her topic, at a later date. The design conference was definitely worth the time and effort to go to.
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