New Views 2

Wednesday 9th July 2008

Opening Remarks

Sir Michael Bichard KCB

Michael Bichard has worked throughout his career in the public sector – twenty years in Local Government and nearly ten in Central Government. He was Chief Executive of Brent and Gloucestershire Local Authorities and in 1990 became Chief Executive of the Government’s Benefits Agency. In 1995 he was appointed Permanent Secretary of the Employment Department and then the Department for Education and Employment. Michael received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 1999. In May 2001 he left the Civil Service and in September 2001 was appointed Rector of The London Institute, the largest Art and Design Institute in Europe, which in May 2004 became University of the Arts London. In January 2004 he was appointed by the Home Office to chair the Soham/Bichard Inquiry and on 1 April 2005 he became Chair of the Legal Services Commission. He was appointed as Chair of the Design Council on 22 September 2007.

Wednesday 9th July 2008

Keynote Speaker

Chris Downs

Chris Downs is a Director and the founding partner of live|work. Established in 2001 live|work is the world’s first service innovation and design company and is responsible for pioneering this new design discipline. Now 26 people, live|work has offices in London, Newcastle and Oslo and their clients include include Sony Ericsson, Experian, Boots, Orange, Norwich Union Insurance, Vodafone, Egg.com, Macmillan Cancer Support as well as a number of public sector clients including the NHS, the Cabinet Office and Kent County Council.

Prior to this Chris was part of the start-up team responsible for the development and implementation of The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, in Italy and is a NESTA Pioneer Programme mentor. Chris has taught and lectured internationally on the subjects of service innovation, design and entrepreneurship.

Chris holds a MA Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art and a BA Product Design from Glasgow School of Art.

Thursday 10th July 2008

Keynote Speaker

Terry Irwin

Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, Terry Irwin was classically trained as a graphic designer and worked in the Los Angeles area for several years before returning to graduate school in 1983. She received an MFA from the Basel School of Design, Switzerland in 1986, and in 1992, along with partners Erik Spiekermann and Bill Hill, Terry opened the San Francisco office of MetaDesign, an international design consultancy with over 300 employees in offices in Berlin, London and Zurich. From 1992 until 2001 Terry served as principle and creative director, traveling extensively between offices and working on a variety of cross-cultural projects that included corporate/strategic design, brand/identity design, information and wayfinding and interaction design for clients such as Sony, Apple Computers, Audi, Nike, The Berlin Transport Authority and Nissan Motors, among others.
Since 1986 Terry has balanced three complementary roles; practitioner/educator/student. She has served as adjunct faculty at Otis Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles (1986-1989) and California College of Arts and Crafts (1989-2003) where she taught courses in Communication Design, Systems Design, Identity/Symbol Design, Interaction Design, Graphic Translation, Color Theory, Letterform Design and for over 20 years—second level Typography. She has lectured and guest-taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels at a variety of schools and Universities in North America and Europe, including Rhode Island School of Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University, Art Center School of Design, ICIS, Denmark and Bolzen-Bolzano Free University, Italy. As a student, Terry has undertaken several diverse programmes of study including drawing and painting, 10 years of energetic healing and a 2-year MBA equivalent program which explored the linguistic and biological roots of human cognition.
Increasingly frustrated with design's implication in social/environmental issues, Terry left MetaDesign in 2001 to fundamentally rethink both her roles as practitioner and educator. In 2003 she moved to Devon, England to study in the masters programme for Holistic Science at Schumacher College, an international centre for ecological studies. The Masters programme combined discoveries in 20th century science such as chaos/complexity and Gaia theories with deep ecology, Goethean Science hermeticism and organismic biology as a basis for a more qualitative approach to understanding natural phenomena and their interrelated/interdependent nature. Terry's master's thesis looked at how principles of holistic science have relevance for traditional design/design process. After completing her degree, she joined the faculty to incorporate design thinking into the master’s curriculum. In 2005 she co-authored a report for DTI, Defra and The Design Council entitled 'Design and Sustainability, A Scoping Report', which looked at the state of sustainable design in the UK among 5 key stakeholder groups.
She is currently a part-time lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art & Design at the University of Dundee and is enrolled as a part time PhD researcher with the University's Centre for the Study of Natural Design where her work investigates the components of a holistic/ecological worldview as the basis for more responsible and appropriate design processes and methodologies for traditionally trained designers. She continues to balance her PhD research with teaching, lecturing and freelance design consultation and stresses that she is not an academic—rather a practitioner who likes to study. She lives with her partner in Auchtermuchty, a small village in the Kingdom of Fife, east Scotland.

A Crisis In Perception

In his milestone book, The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra argued that the underlying dynamics of our most pressing social and environmental problems are all the same and result from what he called a 'crisis in perception'; our inability to apply the concepts of an outdated worldview to the globally interconnected and interdependent world that we find ourselves in. These problems—global warming, war and violence, poverty, inflation and the energy shortage, to name but a few—could be termed 'wicked problems', a term coined by designer/theorist Horst Rittel to describe problems that have incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements and whose solutions are difficult to recognize because of their complex interdependencies.

Design is implicated to varying degrees in most of these problems and therefore has the potential to contribute to their solution. However, more sustainable/appropriate design must arise out of a more holistic/ecological worldview, which implies seeing and solving problems in a new way. As Thomas Kuhn said in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', "what were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards". Systems theorist Donella Meadows believes that sweeping and fundamental change can only happen at the level of paradigm or worldview and although they are a lifetime in the making, under the right conditions, can shift in a moment. And Einstein famously said that problems cannot be solved within the same mindset that created them. Our worldview affects our perception of problems, how we frame them within a context and the way in which we set about solving them.

In her talk, Terry Irwin explores how a 'shift in perception' or worldview at a 'meta' level can inform practice at the micro level of a specialty such as graphic design. This 'new way of seeing'—of connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated issues within much broader contexts—requires designers to seamlessly 'toggle' between the macro and the micro in a more dynamic and effective way than traditional design process requires. This represents new ways of seeing and new ways of working that must be addressed within every specialty, within every discipline.

Friday 11th July 2008

Richard Buchanan

Richard Buchanan is Professor of Design and former Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is also Director of Doctoral Studies. He teaches in the traditional areas of Communication Design and Industrial Design but is also well known for extending design thinking into new areas of application such as Interaction Design and Organization Design. Among his numerous publications are Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, The Idea of Design, and Pluralism in Theory and Practice. He is an editor of Design Issues, an international journal of design history, theory, and criticism published by the M.I.T. Press. He is also a former president of the Design Research Society, an international learned society founded in the United Kingdom and serving a multidisciplinary network of design researchers in 35 countries. Professor Buchanan received his A.B. and Ph.D. from the Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and the Study of Methods at the University of Chicago, where he studied with the distinguished philosopher Richard McKeon.

Drawing Conclusions and Moving Forward

In his talk, Richard Buchanan will round off the symposium by summarising some of the main themes and key issues which have emerged during the two days of round table discussions. He will seek to identify what new challenges might lay ahead for practitioners, academics, industry and the design profession overall. At the same time, Buchanan will provide his own insights into ways we in which we might move our ideas about graphic design forward.

Co-moderator

Teal Triggs

Teal Triggs is Professor of Graphic Design and Head of Research in the School of Graphic Design, London College of Communication. She is also Course Director (designate), MA Design Writing Criticism and, with Professor Phil Baines, co-Director of the University of the Arts London Research Unit for Information Environments (IE). As a graphic design historian, critic and educator her writings have appeared in numerous international design publications. She is co-editor of the academic interdisciplinary journal Visual Communication (Sage Publications) and has edited several special issues including Screens and the Social Landscape (June 2006 with Dr Carey Jewitt), The New Typography (June 2005) and a forthcoming issue on Information Environments (2009). She is author of The Typographic Experiment: Radical Innovations in Contemporary Type Design (2003); co-editor with Roger Sabin of ‘Below Critical Radar’: Fanzines and Alternative Comics From 1976 to Now (2000); and editor of Communicating Design: Essays in Visual Communication (1995). She is currently working on a book on the graphic language of fanzines from punk to present day.

Triggs is co-Principle Instigator with Professor Mike Press, University of Dundee, working with an interdisciplinary team from across seven UK universities on a major UK Research Council (EPSRC) funded project ‘Safer Spaces: Communication Design for Counter Terror’. She is also a Fellow of the International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD), and a co-signature on the First Things First Manifesto 2000. Triggs’ organised the first New Views event - ‘New Views: Repositioning Graphic Design History’ - the focus also of a forthcoming special issue of Design Issues (MIT Press).

Co-moderator

Laurene Vaughan

Laurene Vaughan is the Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University. She is also Research Leader with Professor Harriet Edquist of the Geoplaced Knowledge Program within the newly established RMIT, Design Institute. The Program explores the possibilities of the intersections between Communication Interfaces and Digital Artefacts within diverse contexts.

Originally coming from an art and design education background with a major in sculpture, Laurene has melded a career of practicing artist, designer and educator in Australia and internationally. Since 1995 she has been a lecturer and research supervisor at RMIT for both Masters and PhD students. She has supervised 25 research students to successful completion. In 2001 she co-founded the Master of Design Online program in the School of Applied Communication. This was the first completely online design degree within RMIT that was focused on extending professional design practice for working designers.

Since 2005 Laurene has been a Chief Investigator and Project Leader within the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID). Investigations have included explorations of design methodologies for interactive environments and new methods for working collaboratively in digital studios.

Within her practice Laurene endeavours to explore and present comment on the interactive and situated nature of human experience, particularly creative practice. Her PhD research in this field is entitled ‘Anfractuous: an exploration of creative practice.’ Current projects within this area include The Map of Fashion and the Affective Atlas Project. Laurene has published, presented and exhibited work across these diverse areas, and continues to pursue a trans-disciplinary perspective.