Tasks Due Today

This Week’s Topics

At the end of this session, students should have an understanding of the following:

  • How to get writing support via WAC Tutors
  • How to define your Research Project Topic / Question
  • The Research Project & Presentation Outline guidelines and due date
  • Guidelines and due date for Reading #5

Check-In & Share

Do you have anything to share from your Research Journal? Add a comment to this post with something you’ve added to your Research Journal recently. Or suggest a track for the playlist on the COMD3504 playlist post.

Suggest a track

Tutoring / Checklists

If you’ve turned in your Research Paper #1 by the deadline, but think it can still be improved, you will have the opportunity to revise it. Challenge yourself to get your paper to a point where it’s ready for submission to the City Tech Writer. The deadline is Nov 15th.

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) tutors are available to you and will provide one-on-one help with your writing for this course. Use this link to schedule an appointment.

Don’t forget to submit your Weekly Agenda Checklist, indicating the tasks you’ve completed. These checklists help you track how well you keeping to your Learning Plan and will help determine your final assessment at the end of the semester.

Activities

Below find the information covered in this session. Complete all of the following activities, videos, and assignments.

1. Research Paper Peer Review (30 min)

Today you should have printed the final version of your Research Paper #1 and the Peer Review Checklist/Rubric provided in the Guidelines. Find a partner, exchange papers, and review your partner’s paper using the Checklist and Rubric. Take 15-20 minutes to review the paper and then 10 minutes to discuss the feedback with your partner. Add notes on an additional page.

*If you didn’t print your paper, share your post/Google doc link with your partner so they may read it digitally.

Turn in your Checklist/Rubric and notes when finished.

2. Define Your Research Topic (40 min)

“Our identity is abstract and ever-changing. The ways in which we’re shaped by our world can evolve as the world around us changes and we encounter new experiences
 With diverse representation comes a wealth of experiences and perspectives that elevate the design industry.”

KALEENA SALES from Extra Bold, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021.

Who are you? What do you care about?

This week we will take a look at the Research Project guidelines again and begin in earnest to define our project topic and outline. Use your Research Project to bring awareness to the issues that matter to you as an individual, as a global citizen, as a designer. In our recent Discussion: Week 4 Manifestos, you shared your own manifesto to define what today’s designer should be thinking about, rebelling against, and acting on. Take another look at what you wrote and reply to someone else’s.

In your Research Journal, you should be collecting your influences, the “stuff” that informs your design aesthetic, and what you believe in. As communication designers, we are always collecting and sampling from the world in which we live.

Nothing is truly original. This video below uses music as its subject to show that we are constantly “sampling” from and influenced by past and present cultures. If you were to collect all your visual, musical, and cultural, “samples” what would your collection look like? This is what your Research Journal should become. Use that collection of influences to help direct your research project topic.

Kirby Ferguson – How Sampling Altered The Universe

If you haven’t seen it yet (and even if you have), watch Abstract: The Art of Design > Paula Scher to learn how a designer’s 40-year career was influenced by her life, her culture, her city, her passion. Take note of the specific historical, social/cultural, and design influences. Paula Scher will be touring the City Tech campus next week.

Abstract: The Art of Design > Paula Scher

3. Research Project & Presentation Outline (2 Hours)

In Week 4 we started looking at Research Project topic ideas. This week you will work in class and during the week to submit your Research Project & Presentation Outline.

Review the Research Project & Presentation guidelines again and create a formal outline/proposal for your research project.

Create your Research Project Outline in Google Docs with the following content:

1. Introduction
In one or two sentences, define your research question or thesis. Then explain in detail the topic you are examining and why it is significant.

2. Background/Review of the Sources

Include a summary of the basic background information on the topic gleaned from your sources/readings review (you can include information from the readings and class, but the bulk should be outside sources).

3. Rationale

A description of the questions you are examining and why you are exploring this topic. Why is it meaningful to you?

4. Method and Design

A description of how you will go about collecting resources/data and how you plan to present the information in your presentation, starting with the introduction and ending with a conclusion.

5. References

List the resources and references you have found so far. Include all references in MLA style.

Create a new post following the guidelines below.

Paste your introduction into the post and add a link to your Research Project Outline in Google Docs.

  • TITLE: Research Project Outline – Your Initials
  • CATEGORY: Research Project
  • TAG: Research Project Outline
  • TAG: Your Name

4. Assignment: Reading #5 (1 Hour)

This week you will be reading and annotating only. No reading response is assigned. But we will be discussing these ideas and reviewing your annotations in class next week.

We’ve looked at the New Typography movement and the Bauhaus of the 1920-1940s and now we will move into the evolution of Swiss Typography and the International Style and the eventual mainstream embrace of European modernism of the 1950’s.

You will be reading and annotating three texts written by Karl Gerstner, Joseph Muller-Brockman, and Margaret Rhodes.

With your classmates in our Hypothesis group, read Karl Gerstner, Designing Programmes pg55-61 and Joseph Muller-Brockman, “Grid and Design Philosophy” pg62-63 of our main text Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field by Helen Armstrong; and Margaret Rhodes, The Swiss Designers Breaking Tradition. To give a perspective of the influence of this style, the latter is a review of a 2016 exhibition featuring young Swiss designers.

Use the Hypothesis tags: International Style and Reading Response 5

Key Themes and Takeaways

Karl Gerstner, “Designing Programmes”

Karl Gerstner’s approach to design embodies the International Typographic Style, aka the Swiss Style, in its systematic methods and formal rigidity. In Designing Programmes, Gerstner describes the quasi-scientific technique of establishing a programme to address design problems. 

  • There is no ‘absolute solution’ for design problems, only ‘programmes for solutions’ 
  • ‘The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection.’
  • Systematic tools such as the ‘morphological box of the typogram’ provide the necessary components for the selection process
  • The grid can be a ‘proportional regulator’ but is not a programme onto itself

Joseph Muller-Brockman, “Grid and Design Philosophy”

Grid Systems is a practical manual for grid-based design solutions, a theoretical treatise, and a brilliant example of the grid system at work. MĂŒller-Brockmann’s strict rule-based methodology anticipates the digital workspaces that would come to dominate design in subsequent years. The short excerpt defines this philosophy.

  • The grid is ‘an expression of a certain mental attitude’
  • The designer’s work should be a ‘contribution to general culture’
  • Design should be ‘objective, committed to the common weal
the basis of democratic behavior’
  • The grid represents a ‘will to systematize, to clarify’

Resources

Week 6 Agenda Checklist

Below are all of the tasks, big and small, for this week. The due date is Wednesday, 11:59 pm before our next Thursday class. Timely completion of these tasks will contribute to your success in this course.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Tasks from the Week 6 Agenda
Name

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