New Views 2

At the recent NEW VIEWS 2 conference at the London College of Communication in July of this year (2008) there was some heated discussion in the Interdisciplinarity Cluster. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of a cluster, the closest way to describe it would be a dialogue group which met, debated, defined problems and issues and then presented their vision at the final session of the conference. See conference site for more details: http://newviews.co.uk/speakers.html)
One visitor dropped in for a visit after the group had met for several session and attempted to provoke the group (his admitted intention) with the declaration that Design is Dead.
We believe that Design in the old school is dead. What is soon to be outdated is Graphic Design whereby the designer enters at the end of the process and produces a material thing: an object. A poster, a website, a logo.

Interdisciplinarity is a given is design activity. What we can all benefit from is a closer examination of the methods, theories, difficulties and possibilities to form a stronger framework for how to be part of the shift that re-visions the role of the Graphic Designer in the current and next generation. In the Interdisciplinary Cluster we explored how to expand the role of the designer in the process.
We are looking to collect submissions from both designers and those who have or wish to bring a designer into their process for a special issue of MULTI (http://multi.cias.rit.edu/). We welcome submissions that are:
-theoretical
-applied
-pedagogical practice
-are we graphic designers/do we abandon this term?
-evaluation/effectiveness (how do we evaluate?)
-how does design bring together and integrate the views of science? psychology? economy? ecology? politics? etc…
-what are the factors of change? (i.e. social change such as feminist theory, technology…etc.)

Design isn’t dead, but it is at the crossroad of a new direction. Let’s explore the possibilities together as designers and collaborators.

Submission Deadline: February 1, 2009
We encourage any inquiries or letters of intent.
Laura Chessin
lchessin@vcu.edu
or
Alex Bitterman
alex.bitterman@rit.edu

Thanks Miek for doing a smashing job in getting this blog up so quickly!

Our cluster, which was ‘Changing the Real World’ have already begun discussing our next action plan. Some of us are compiling notes from our cluster discussion so that we have that all to start off with. Many of us are very keen on keeping the discussions going so we are still finding the best way to doing this.

Our next plan was to ‘take over’ Design 21 (www.design21sdn.com/design21)  which is a website on design and social responsibility sponsored by UNESCO, and upload our own content and undertake discussions there. Though, once we’ve had a look, we had discovered that this may not be as productive as we were hoping. We are now talking about setting up our own blog and post up our content to generate the discussions from there. Once there are robust and cohesive threads, we could then upload to Design 21 for us to initiate and sustain a presence in the socially-oriented design platform.

So, that’s just an update of where our cluster is at the moment.

Miek and I were talking of how we could network all the conference images and blogs into this site, and here is what we thought. If anyone has images of New Views 2, please upload it onto a flickr website and tag their images with ‘newviews2‘. In that way we can link them all to this website. We also want to have a ‘blog-roll’ with anyone’s blog who has written about New Views 2. In order to do so, please e-mail me (Yoko) with your name and blog address. My e-mail is yoko.akama@rmit.edu.au

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