Tasks Due

  • Semiotics Terminology Review
  • Representation and Context
  • Stereotype in Advertising Media
  • Research Paper 2 (draft)
  • Submit Week 10 Agenda Checklist

This Week’s Topics

Check-in

After today, only four classes left!

I encourage you to visit the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum to view the exhibit “Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols.”

Our Search for Symbols – Cooper Hewitt

And, an essay relevant to our discussion today about context is SIGNS OF THE TIMES: CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING by Pam Horn.

Freewrite – ART OF NOTICING (10 min)

Last Week’s Prompt – from Jonathan

Be Alone in Public: Eat in a crowded university dining room without the company of schoolwork, laptops or smartphones. Or friends. Make a visit to an art gallery or restuarant or a park bench, alone. It’s not a penalty to spend time alone. It’s an opportunity – to exist totally free of anyone else’s expectations, or your smartphone. What do you notice?

ARt of Noticing

Next Week’s Prompt – from Christina

Find something to complain about. The best way to complain is to make things! What, among everything you encounter, could be made better somehow?

Feedback & Revisions

As we get closer to the end of the semester and your obligations start to pile up, please take some time to review/revise your Learning Plan and get a sense of what you’d like to accomplish in the remaining weeks.

Feedback: Comments for all work posted on time up until Week 8 should have a comment with notes in Hypothesis or Google Docs. If I missed something, or if you have questions, please let me know.

Revisions: If there are any revisions or late work that you have submitted (and I missed), please send me a note, and I’ll try to get to them right away.

Don’t forget to submit your Weekly Agenda Checklist, indicating the tasks you’ve completed. If you are having trouble keeping track of the required work, this should help.

At this point in the semester, in addition to in-class discussions, you should have completed the following.

Research Project Timeline

By today you should have completed the first four milestones. Review the project guidelines and see below for the next milestones.

  • Week 7: Define your research topic/question and submit your Research Project Outline
  • Week 8: Finalize your topic and start collecting supporting media and sources in an annotated bibliography
  • Week 9: Complete your Slideshow/Presentation outline and script based on your research
  • Week 10: Finalize your research, supporting media and sources
  • Week 11/12: Assemble all graphics and text in a slideshow, record first draft of presentation
  • Week 13: Share in-progress slideshow presentation with voiceover, get feedback from peers and professor, finalize annotated bibliography
  • Week 14: Post Presentation to OpenLab site – follow the guidelines
  • Week 14/15: Review Research Project Presentations in class.
  • Week 15: Submit one comment on each of your classmates’ presentations

Peer Review (15 minutes)

With a classmate, determine if you are missing any work. Discuss your learning plan and what you’d like to accomplish during the remaining weeks. Talk about the advertisement with the stereotype advertisement you chose for your Research Essay #2. On a piece of paper write down what grade you expect to achieve in this class and your plan is for the remaining weeks to accomplish it. Submit this after your discussion.

City Tech Writer Deadline

City Tech Writer is a journal of outstanding student writing from ALL disciplines. We’d love to see work in the humanities and STEM alike, representing the full breadth of our students’ stories, research, and ideas.

Submission guidelines for City Tech Writer

If you’d like to submit a piece of writing from this class, please let me know. I will help you with edits to get it ready for submission.

The deadline for submissions is November 25, 2023.

Activities

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

1. Representation, Context & Stereotype Continued (20 minutes)

Picking up where we left off last week…

2. Postmodernism? Style & Subversion (30 minutes)

What the *&%!# is Postmodernism?

Even celebrated design leaders of the Postmodernist era have a hard time describing what the term Postmodernism means in terms of design. And as we shall see, that’s kind of the point. Last week we used Barthes’ and Hall’s Postmodern lens of Structuralism/Post-Structuralism and Cultural Studies, respectively, to explore the idea that meaning is subjective. It can change depending on the viewer and each individual’s life/cultural experience and position of power.

Activity: Take a moment to write down all the qualities of Modernism that you can think of. Think back to the early avant-garde (De Stijl, Constructivists, Bauhaus, New Typography) in the early 20th Century. What were their goals and ideology with regard to Universality in form, truth, society, and meaning? What were they rebelling against? Consider that some of their goals were realized by the mid-1960s when the Swiss/International Style went mainstream.

Aesthetics of Postmodernism (15 min)

From about 1970 to 1990, Postmodernism shattered established ideas about design and art. A brilliant mix of theatrical and theoretical, Postmodernism ranges from the colourful to the ruinous, the luxurious to the ludicrous. It is a visually thrilling multifaceted style which so famously defies definition.

V&A exhibition ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 – 1990‘

As Modernism peaked in the 1960s, a correction in the design field was brewing, influenced by the social unrest and protests of the late 1960s. Mainstream Modernism (universality, simplicity, minimalist, structured, grid-based, corporate, design for all) was rejected in favor of the opposite (complexity, ambiguity, subjectivity, cultural pluralism, personal, experimental). The hippy counter-culture Filmore posters coming out of San Francisco in the late 60s was the very beginning of Postmodernism in design.

Filmore Posters / Psychedelia 1960’s

Now, let’s speed all the way through to the early 1990s anti-consumerist grunge movement in Seattle. In this broad time period with its range of styles, anything goes. The rejection of Modernist minimalism and functionalism and the embrace of personal expression, experimentation, mixed media, layering and remixing styles from other time periods are the hallmarks of Postmodernism.

Postmodernism

On LinkedIn Learning via your Library Card or the low-res YouTube video watch from 1:44:17 – 1:57:58. Pay close attention to the sections on Japanese Design, Punk and New Wave, Low-tech Seattle, and Postmodernism. These were influential trends that we see remnants and revivals today. Note the names of the designers: David Carson, April Greiman, Rick Poynor, Wolfgang Weingart, Katherine McCoy, Rudy VanderLans/Emigre, etc.

Activity: As you watch, write down the words that are used to describe this style/era during the 1970s-1990s. How would you describe the visual approach?

What is Postmodernist Theory? (10 min)

Postmodernism influenced not only design but fashion, architecture, theater, fiction, academic theory, and more. Take note of some of the key ideas that some Postmodernists believe. Does any of this relate to Stuart Hall’s theories from Week 10?

What is Postmodernism?
  • Postmodernists believe that our reality and interpretation/decoding of signs is influenced by our culture. Today, in our media-rich world, we experience a form of self-referential hyperreality (ie: a copy of a copy of a copy…)
  • Postmodernism rejects grand narratives and universality:
    • Grand narratives are ideas that claim to have access to absolute truth, whether that is in the shape of: Culture (art); Religion; Politics (democracy); Economics (Capitalism); Fashion; Science
    • Universality in design relates to the utopian, modernist aim of creating universal systems or models of communication for all
  • Postmodernism embraces subjectivity and pluralism
    • Subjectivity relates to our opinions and experience; Objectivity relates to facts
    • Pluralism is an acknowledgment of additional perspectives that have been suppressed by the dominant hegemony
  • Postmodernists believe objective ideas are reflections of the dominant groups in society, thus all forms of authority are suspect
  • Postmodernists believe all objective ideas are untrue because there is no truth
  • Postmodernists use subversion, humor, and irony to communicate

3. Assignment: Research Essay (10 min)

Choose a historical 19th or 20th-century advertisement that uses obvious and/or documented racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes to sell the product, review the sources below to support your research. Browse the references below to find an advertisement to work with or find your own!

Follow the assignment guidelines and prompts for Research Essay 2

  • First Draft is due Week 11
  • Final Draft is due Week 12

Resources

Work in Class

Based on your Peer Review earlier, tackle whatever you can during the remaining class period, even if that is just making a plan.

Week 11 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 11 Agenda
Name

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