The Letters in Your Neighborhood

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the letters in your neighborhood

MARCH 8 · The Studio Art Faculty exhibit at Clark University, Form + Content + Context, featured work from 14 artists, including this typographic installation by Jane. Her work began as a sort-of scavenger hunt—just she and her camera, capturing letterforms on street signs & storefronts, manhole covers & newspaper boxes in the vicinity of the gallery. Here’s an excerpt from the statement which accompanied the piece: Typography is designed to be silent; invisible. We see right through it to the declaration underneath the form. But typography also coveys feeling and style—it speaks in its own voice. So in a city we know well, we sometimes need to pull these forms out in order to see them more clearly. When we do, we find they’re as beautiful as calligraphy, full of personality and presence. These letterforms are just a small selection of the millions that make up the face of this city, and this particular neighborhood. If you’re looking carefully enough, you’ll find them somewhere between the corner of Main & Hammond Streets. This is the route I drive to campus everyday. On a recent morning, I walked this route for the first time. It feels entirely different to me now, just for going more slowly, for looking with more curiosity, for letting myself be a traveler in a familiar place.

Cooking School of Design

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the cooking school of design

OCTOBER 18 · It’s our opinion, that you can learn a lot about design through cooking. So when we were invited to be part of RISD’s Visiting Designer Series, our “studio” was a fully-equipped kitchen. Our three-day workshop centered around a simple prompt. Students were asked to swap family recipes—ones which had stories as rich as their ingredients—and to prepare those dishes, together. Their exchange mimicked a client relationship, so attentive listening and carefully considered questions were key. When you’re making (someone else’s) Mom’s chicken wings, you better get it right! Kitchens are a natural place for conversation. Ours centered around storytelling & narrative, our individual habits as designers (good & bad), and the importance of clear communication in the design process. Thanks to all the students who participated, and to visiting food critic Douglas Scott, for an amazing workshop. Bon appetite!

Better World by Design

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Better World by Design

OCTOBER 1 · For the past two years, we’ve participated in BWxD—a three-day internationally-acclaimed conference that connects students, professionals, and individuals from a variety of disciplines to “build a global community of socially conscious & passionate innovators.” Most recently, we were invited to speak as part of a panel on Persuasive Communication with sculptor Richard Fishman, type designer Cyrus Highsmith, & Amy Sanaman, Executive Director of The Groundswell Mural Project. Never ones to adhere strictly to a given topic, we spoke about the importance of conscious communication through an illustrated presentation about our recent work for New Urban Arts. The booklets above, we produced as handouts to introduce perspectives we believe are important to the conversation around design & social change.

RISD Workshop

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RISD workshop

APRIL 4 · Open, generous, and careful listening is essential for designers, but rarely discussed directly. We offered this day-long workshop, by invitation of Tom Okerse, for the course Relational Design—in which students were embarking on design ethnography project. Our public talk offered inspiration from listeners as divergent as Naomi Shihab Nye and Paul Rand; and as varied in their approach as Andy Goldsworthy and Thomas Starr. We followed it up with a workshop which included silent meditation and a sequence of guided prompts that helped spark conversation around the role of listening in the design process.

Thank you to the students (all 60 of you!) who made this such a fun day.

FSU Workshop

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FSU workshop

MARCH 15 · We visited advanced-level graphic design students at Framingham State University recently, for a workshop on collaboration & community-based design. The students were working with city officials on a very real project—to revitalize Farm Pond, an underutilized natural resource right in the heart of their city. We talked briefly about our own experiences, shared projects by other designers & community-based practitioners, and talked through the particular challenges they were facing. We brought out the Tinker Toys for an activity which highlighted the complexities of a collaborative design process. Our goal for this workshop, as in others, was to bring a greater level of consciousness to the way we communicate as designers.