NCSU Biennial Graphic Design Graduate Symposium…

Every two years, NC State's graduate graphic design class develops, plans, orchestrates and hosts a graduate student symposium. This past weekend marked the culmination of five months of planning by 18 grad students and a few brave faculty members. We began brainstorming in the last sweltering days of August, in several white-board/post-it sessions that looked like this:





Over the months we refined our ideas, developed materials to request proposals and participation, booked facilities and catering, built a website from scratch, developed programming for the weekend, and invited several keynote speakers to come and share their insights into our topic: Design, Community and the Rhetoric of Authenticity.

Over 100 attendees gathered at the college of design on Friday afternoon from schools including: California College of the Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Herron School of Art and Design, Otis College of Art and Design, Savannah College of Art and Design, and York University (Toronto, Canada). Our keynote speakers on Friday night were Elliott Earls from Cranbrook, and Brenda Laurel from CCA—they offered two different points of view in their twenty-minute presentations, and then, together, obliged us with a half-hour discussion moderated by Denise Gonzales Crisp. Saturday started with another keynote presentation by Jon Sueda from CCA, followed by several other presentations and panel discussions, lunch, and 12 breakout sessions.

The weekend was also peppered with 7 video interstitials, created by a small group of us over Christmas break (Caroline Maxcy Prietz, Dan McCafferty, Laura Rodriguez, Kelly Bailey and myself). The five of us carefully selected and contacted designers from all over the world, wrote pointed questions relating to both our symposium topic and the particular designer's work, and conducted interviews via Skype, capturing the discussion as a digital video. These videos were then edited and compiled, and played at intervals during the main stage events.







We had the opportunity to talk to Johanna Drucker, Dori Tunstall, Adrian Shaughnessey, Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen from Post Typography, Howard Rheingold, Rick Valicenti, and Jessica Helfand. Each Skype discussion lasted approximately thirty-minutes, and this material was then edited down to smaller nuggets to present during the event. Each interstitial consisted of an animated introduction and then two or three questions and answers.

These interstitial videos added seven additional voices (from seven very different places in the design world, in both geographic and philosophical terms) to the discussion. We hope to make these videos available to all the symposium participants (as well as the extended discussion with each interviewee) via the internet in the coming months.

Finally, I wanted to share a video I have created of the weekend. This should give you a brief overview of what happened here, at NCSU's College of Design, on a cold and rainy weekend in late January. The video includes music by one of Merge Records' artists, Spoon. Merge Records' own Maggie Fost sat on one of the symposium discussion panels (exploring how music industry design relates to authenticity), and gave a wonderful presentation of her company's work, philosophy and hopes for the future.

NCSU Graphic Design Graduate Symposium: January 2010 from Liese Zahabi on Vimeo.

thesis: sketching search path shapes...

Based on this quote:



I started thinking about user search paths, and what shapes those might take online. Here are some sketches in that vein:




Attempting to visualize these search paths begins to illuminate the fact that there are many different kinds of users using search tools, and that their experiences can be very different, depending on individual skill level, context for the search at hand, and how hard the information online is to sift through. I'm not completely sure how these sketches will inform my visual studies in the next few weeks, but it has been useful to start thinking about this in a more visual way.

thesis: thoughts on interface…

The feeling of satisfaction when it comes to interface is really important to me. But, how do you parse that out? What are the elements, the bits and pieces that shape an interface that is satisfying to use? It has to be how the entire system acts, reacts, looks and sounds—but it is also in every single minute detail as well.

It could be really interesting/freeing/fun/challenging to conduct some experiments in form and structure in a physical way for my interface. Capturing that with stop motion or a video camera would allow for quicker prototyping and ease of production.
- could use paper
- could use kitchen items
- could use food
- what about body parts/systems to convey the idea of parts to a whole
(in an abstract non-gross way)

Should also do some serious research about online searching. I’m sure there’s a lot of information out there and research being done. A framework or methodology to start from may prove very useful.

thesis: thoughts on triage…

Triage is also about the distillation of elements or processes to what is most essential, as well as most pressing. It is an ultimate act of focus—against even human nature for compassion—to deal with the immediate task at hand for the greater good.

thesis: loose thoughts and ideas…

This is interesting because it directly links to information anxiety in general. Not only are people overwhelmed by all the information online, but they are also overwhelmed by all the information (often very confusing and/or conflicting) regarding nutrition.

thesis: loose thoughts and ideas…

Could an important aspect of my system include this idea of constant accessibility to an overall goal? Could this goal be displayed/designed to remind a user of what they’re trying to accomplish at all times to cut down on distraction? How could that work?

Or, is this more about helping keep users on task at any given time. Is it more important to keep the system completely flexible at all times, or to create a logical system that allows users to see what they need and gives them a logical system to move through? Or, could I create a place where these things can live side by side?

thesis: loose thoughts and ideas…

A THOUGHT—on triage…if medical triage is about maximizing the number of survivors—treating those most likely to recover or eventually be healthy—then what is info-triage attempting to do? “Save” the most useful or pertinent information? I think while this is a useful and applicable metaphor, that it can only go so far in its strict medical definition. My use, for information and making decisions, has to be inherently more flexible and mutable. Information given up for “dead” could prove to later be crucial—and perhaps would need to be “resurrected.” My system has to have a way of abandoning information for dead, but still allowing for its retrieval if it later proves necessary.

But how to do that? How can you organize something and give it a useful design if it’s infinitely reconfigurable? This is very much Weinberger’s “pile of leaves.” So how to rake those into a comprehensible shape?

thesis: loose thoughts and ideas…

The above is essential to ponder further. If this new order of order is limited by the use of geography and mapping and giving it/things a shape—design can step in and create systems for reshuffling information into unlimited shapes. We still need the shapes because that’s how we cognitively make sense of the world—we constantly sort/sift/categorize/re-categorize and cluster everything around us. We need the maps—this top-down view—BUT we are able to intuitively and seamlessly reconfigure our clustering as perceptions and related knowledge changes.

fall 2009 final review: thesis proposal...

My task for final review this semester was to sum up the origins and directions of my thesis, and to encapsulate my thesis proposal to date: my researchable question, sub-questions, working definitions, directions for exploration, justification, and bibliography. I wanted to post my presentation file here, for your consideration.

Thesis Proposal Presentation: Shown at final review fall 2009 from Liese Zahabi on Vimeo.

(Please note this video includes sound).