Jonathan Barnbrook spent the weekend with the class and talked a lot about graphic design and social issues. Its clear that he thinks a lot about how ethics and how they can merge with our individual practice. He asked us to create an tabloid size, b/w poster about a multinational company, being sure to take a position.

I chose Walmart as an opportunity to do some research I’d been putting off and to revisit this behemoth. Since 2005 Walmart has introduced some of the most progressive and innovative sustainability strategies on a truly significant scale. To my knowledge, their labor practices still remain questionable at best, but it does appear that they are making surprising progress in terms of energy and waste.

This poster simplifies a concept I’ve been thinking about in regard to the reality of sustainability and consumerism. I can’t expect corporations to be interested in environmental issues simply because its the right thing to do, but to emphasize that sustainability means profits seems like a decent angle to pursue.

The line just below franklin’s name reads “if walmart can do it, you can do it too.”

An essay in response to reading Wendell Berry’s “Solving for Pattern.”

Everything in life is connected and yet somehow we, as a species, have lost sight of this. Through scientific discoveries, examinations, and investigations we have “unlocked” the secrets of nature. Instead of a collective humbling or increased respect for this magnificent system, this process has caused us to become more detached and inclined to control that which we consider “wild”. We have “conquered” the earth’s rhythm in many ways—through the built environment, communications infrastructure, transportation, resource management, energy policy etc. Systematically, we are reconfiguring and reorganizing natural resources to suit our idea of what the world should, or could, be.

Individuals are staking claim to what is rightfully all of ours to share. These are limited resources that will run out, we all know this, and yet relatively little is being done that can truly stop it from happening. Westerners are apparently unable to let go of their habits of consumption. To be sure, the earth will be fine. It will long out live us and witness many other forms of life beyond ours. The problem is, however, that I want my kids, and grand kids, to see snow, and maybe even maple trees before they all end up in Canada having migrated along with the cooler climate.

These changing conditions we are currently witnessing are part of something larger and contain something smaller. There are countless systems making up the world we know from microscopic systems to macroscopic systems all layered in, and on top of, one another. There are biological systems, monetary systems, computer systems, governmental systems, railroad systems, education systems, nervous systems, all nested within larger systems and containing smaller systems to form the intricate ecosystem we experience everyday.

Wendell Berry’s Solving for Pattern expounds upon this idea of interrelated systems and the disconnect man has enabled. It exemplifies how we can work to reconnect with the natural cycle through perhaps one of the easiest to comprehend, sustainable agriculture, by following this very simple logic:
What is good for the water is good for the ground, what is good for the ground is good for the plants, what is good for the plants is good for animals, what is good for animals is good for people, what is good for people is good for the air, what is good for the air is good for the water.

With this in mind, farmers have the potential to embrace this pattern and harmonize their agricultural methods on a variety of scales. Though currently unable to compete with the heavily industrialized farming that produces the majority of the food supply, sustainable agriculture’s true assets are in its local distribution, small scale and diversity of production. If all of the farms that used to dot the countrysides were still around employing this idea, it is not hard to imagine that locally grown food would be just as viable as the industrial methods employed today.

I am captivated by the idea of extending this lesson to some of the other systems we encounter everyday, and more specifically, how this model can apply to the design process. In re-reading this article after almost a year I realized there are several overlapping themes that relate directly to my current thesis investigation.

But we must not forget that those human solutions that we may call organic are not natural. We are talking about organic artifacts, organic only by imitation or analogy. Our ability to make such artifacts depends on virtues that are specifically human: accurate memory, observation, insight, imagination, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity, restraint. Restraint – for us, now – above all: the ability to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to “solve” problems by ignoring them, accepting them as “trade-offs,” or bequeathing them to posterity. A good solution, then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.

For our last visiting designer weekend, Maureen Mooren from the Netherlands had us messing around with each others posters.

We started out by all bringing an image and a single word to our first meeting. We then handed them off to a fellow student to create a poster with. There had to be some sort of connection between the word and image, not just a beautiful composition. We had a limited amount of time to work on each iteration of each poster before we then handed off our creation to another student who would then improve it.

To start, I received an abstract black and white image with the word “beginning”. After some fun with the photocopier I returned to the original image and thought of it as a sort of landscape. This combined with “beginning” I eluded to the idea of a journey with a path (dotted line) branching away from the word and meandering about. During the critique we agreed that the concept would be stronger if there were multiple paths stemming from the same place or if the dotted lines weren’t there at all, indicating that the journey could go in any direction and hadn’t begun yet. That was up to the next student to work on.

For my second poster, I received an image of an old movie theater and the word “cinerama”. The first version of the poster played with the formal relationship between the image and the word but did not have a conceptual link. Though a gorgeous image, I decided to abandon the movie theater and just work with the word “cinerama”. The technology was introduced in the ’50s and allowed for a movie to be projected in a way that engulfed the viewer, it was a precursor to today’s IMAX movies (the guy who invented the cinerama technology, Fred Waller, also invented water skis.) I was interested in conveying the experience of being in the audience at one of these screenings and working with an image from the first movie made for cinerama, “This is Cinerama” produced in 1952.

My last poster featured an image taken from a television screen along with the word “lens”. The first version of the poster pushed the idea of an old rgb television and the first student brought in a quote with the word “lens” in it. I felt the type could have been better integrated into the image and so I made it look like a subtitle. Much of the quote was cut off but enough of the information came through to get to the heart of the message, ” A whole generation of americans, maybe two, has grown up looking at the world through a lens.”

All told it was a great weekend with Maureen who critiqued us in a very direct and very dutch manner. It was refreshing to hear exactly what was working and what wasn’t to get us to simplify and distill meaning to its core. The goal was to make a good poster and not fuss with the design too much. Many of us were over thinking and our design was improved by freeing up our approach.

Liz Danzico from SVA was just in town for a visiting designer workshop on serendipity. This was quite serendipitous as its one of my primary inspirations in my thesis thinking. Our prompt was to create a digital and physical object or service that would increase the opportunity for chance encounters in Providence. My team (me, jane and marc) got lost in the spirit of the project and came up with a plan that we all hope to develop fully.

Friday, on our way to lunch to discuss the brief we intentionally took a new route to the jewelery district. After seriously considering a random tour of JWU we headed south and found ourselves staring right at the abandoned highway slated to be torn down one of these days. Instead of passing under it as usual we decided to hop on the highway and see what was up there. It was incredible. We were all a bit unsure and discombobulated by the thought that we were walking on a freeway (regardless of the fact that it was closed to traffic). We passed under exit signs, discovered tiny details amongst the cracks and climbed around stacks of construction materials. We saw the city from a totally unfamiliar perspective… the river, the power plant and bridges we know well but not from this height, angle or pace.

The project brief gave us permission to take time and wander the city, free to discover whatever crossed our path. We had no agenda and no place to be. At lunch we were unclear if the highway itself would be our site to create chance encounters, or if it was the abstract inspiration to create an opportunity for others to discover this site for themselves. We opted for the latter and the Urban Explorers Club was born.

We wanted to develop a mechanism giving other urban explorers that same permission we were given to rediscover the city around them. To notice the great signage, little details and moments of chance that abound in the everyday but usually go unnoticed. These can be small (a great logo on the side of a truck) or large (like the walk on the highway or a conversation with a stranger) but either way they cause you to take time out of your routine and ideally, be inspired to share the experience with others.

To encourage this we created a website with twitter feeds providing a large portion of the content along with feature stories and photo essays that cultivate curiosity but leave enough of a mystery for one’s own discovery.

Membership begins by taking the following oath:
I solemnly swear to exemplify a courageous curiosity and a fearless wandering. I will savor serendipity. Neither rain nor snow, nor the fog of daily routine will keep me from meandering. I will take three lefts instead of a right. Google maps is my enemy. I will share what I find with others but will not spoil the adventure for those who follow. The spirit of discovery will guide me.

david reinfurt came to town and had us all slow down. we spent the first day of his visit at the providence athenaeum searching through the collection for a favorite book. we were then instructed to memorize a passage, record the memorization and then perform it the next day.

I chose a french children’s book “21 balloons” which is all about travel and adventure. go figure. for my performance, I lined up 10 balloons filled with helium and used them as props as I moved through the passage.

there are two kinds of travel.

the best way of travel, however, if you aren’t in any hurry at all, if you don’t care where you are going, if you don’t like to use your legs, if you want to see everything quite clearly, if you don’t want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions is in a balloon. in a balloon you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. the rest is left entirely to nature. how fast you will go is left to the winds, it is a wonderful way to travel.