Month: August 2020
According to Helen Armstrong, the role design should play in the world today is that it is something that needs to be re-learned in new ways as new generations of designers come forth into this path as their career. According to Bruno Munari, the role design should play in the world today is that design isn’t something that should or can be owned and not all art is for the upper class or anything else considered popular status, the design is freedom and it can be whatever it wants to be by whomever. I understand with the discovery of design and there are a lot of great minds of design like Jaqueline Casey, Walker Evans, and Claude Garamond have all accomplished and represented different styles of design in different ways and as time moves forward, technological advancements are invented and new generations of designers come forth, and the history of the different felids of design lives on and continued to be taught and studied.
What I think distinguishes the fields of design like, graphic designer, photographer or fashion designer, from other occupations is the different ways they were discovered and how they came to be with the way they are today. In this field, the visual presentation is an important aspect to convey information, ideas, and concepts. Designers should concern themselves with theoretical questions because I think that this can help designers become more open-mined to thoughts and ideas that they may not even give a thought about themselves, and along with existing facts they can hypothesize on what may be possible or not. The role technology has played in shaping design professions like for example photography is that it is done easier than when it was first discovered. The Calotype was an old camera from the 1840s and to use it you had to put paper covered with silver iodide, and when exposed by the light it would take hours for the image to appear on paper. Technological enhancements have given us digital cameras some with touch screens, can autofocus, and can print in color.
The role technology plays today in design professions is that technology helps workers in this felid do their work and jobs more efficiently and easily, instead of using old machines. Designers are able to gain the information they need in order to communicate with clients and to keep their companies future-focused and afloat, and perform other necessary tasks. The most urgent problems I think designers face today, I want to say, staying up to pace with technological advancement, because I’ve noticed on social media or TV, that there is always some new model of a technological item that would come out just after 2 or 3 weeks the previous model came out. I can imagine how stressful it may feel to try and finish this one project your struggling with, and when your done your extremely tired but then your boss dumps another assignment on you and wants you to finish it within a short amount of time and the designer is responsible for this kind of problem because they are to gather information and materials, their ability and behavior will matter on how they reflect the company they work for and how they do their job.
Our first reading assignment consists of a couple short pieces, which can be found via the links below. Your response should be 3-4 paragraphs, which may be typed directly into a post or handwritten in your research journal. If you decide to handwrite please just post an image into a new post.
Here are the readings:
Helen Armstrong, “Introduction: Revisiting the Avant-Garde” from Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field (2009): ArmstrongIntro
Bruno Munari, selected chapters from Design as Art (1966): Munari_DesignAsArt
Here are the questions to which you should respond:
According to these authors, what role should design play in the world today? What distinguishes the field, or fields, of design from other creative occupations? Why should designers concern themselves with unsolvable theoretical questions? What role has technology played in shaping design professions? What role does it play today? What are the most urgent problems designers face today? How, and why, is a designer responsible for solving these problems?
Please post your responses before class on the 2nd. And please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or issues. You can send a message through OpenLab or email me: mlange@citytech.cuny.edu
Our first objective for this course, which is sort of just an extension of the first class session, will be to create a short video introduction.
While we are unable to all come together to meet in a single room, we can try to use the resources we do have to create something of that interpersonal experience. The goals for this exercise will be to tell everyone a little bit about yourself, and meet everyone else that you’ll be working with through the semester.
Please record a short video providing the following information:
– The name you prefer to go by
– Where you are filming the video. Be inventive, but wear a mask if done in public.
– How far along you are in school, how long you’ve been attending City Tech, your primary interests in the COMD program
– The best thing that has happened to you since COVID hit NYC. It’s been a very rough year for many of us…let’s hope we can find something positive in it.
– A theory that you have, or have heard recently. This can pertain to anything, and should ideally be impossible to prove. (Mine might be a bad example, you be the judge.)
Video files tend to be large. You’ll probably need to upload to YouTube, Dropbox, Vimeo, etc., then embed the link by clicking the + box, locating video, then selecting “Link”.
Now the most important part of the assignment: Watch all of your peers’ videos! You may need to check back through the next few days if you upload yours right away.
Here is mine. Hope you enjoy:
This is the OpenLab Course site for COMD 3504, Section OL06. We will use this site as our central resource for accessing readings and class materials, and for posting weekly responses. Please familiarize yourself with its contents, bookmark the homepage, and stay tuned for much more to come.
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