Summary: Bierut admits that a lot of work that involve creativity and aesthetics involve a creative leap, all of which are counter to whatever rationale as known as bullshit you'll have to come up with to justify your decisions.
- Professor Frankfurt: "bullshit is not designed primarily to give its audience a false belief about whatever state of affairs may be the topic, but that its primary intention is rather to give its audience a false impression concerning what is going on in the mind of the speaker."
- every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit.
- examples of bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; unprovable claims about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed business goals
- goal: getting your client it to do it the way you like it
- client kept rejecting brochure design, Bierut had no idea what French design looks like but came up with an approach using Empire typeface, his boss presented it as "Ahm-peere"
Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel- Design and Faux Science
Summary: explains what is real science and how design is becoming faux science
- Faux Science is the antithesis of modernism: it’s form awaiting content, or worse, serious form retrofitted with interchangeable content. In today's anything-goes world of relentless self-expression, science has become the designers' safe haven. It's the new "look and feel." And it's an easy one to imitate. We grasp its formal conceits—its systematic language of documentation, its methodical alignments—and parlay them into a visual language that resonates with kick-ass authority.
- Real science: one of the most essential phenomena of the mod age.” It’s hygienic and objective, rational and finite, grounded in numerical certain and cosmological reason. Science is all about clarity and specificity and rationalism, about charting DNA strands and analyzing chemical compounds, about physical density and gravitational pull and a reality that is anything but virtual.
- information design is a faux authority: we buy into the form so unquestioningly, ratified by an alarmingly robust strain of Swiss modernism, ahistorical, unconcerned with earlier sources and ignorant of alternative models, it’s modernism run amok and form masquerading as content.
- Panaceas: organisms in the graphical realm are a visual cure-all (in language of numbers, there is mathematical morphology; in the lexicon of infertility, there is reproductive morphology; in linguistics, morphology is the study of the form and structure of words)
- Documenting: Combine the urge to collect with the inclination to organize, and the resulting activity offers unique assortment of scientific pretensions. In documenting, designers dutifully observe the minutiae of their efforts, recording with a detail-consciousness bordering on the absurd.
- Thesis model of Hegelian dialectics: scientist migrates from observation to analysis to discovery; designer catalogs the everyday, making thick, wordless books with pictures that jump the gutter
- Faux Science is the new vernacular, a methodology that, while highly disciplined in a formal sense, is still all about appropriation.
- "The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones.” In other words, design beyond reach (serious questions about the role of education)
Michael Vanderbyl- Graphic Design Thesis: A Survivor's Guide
Summary: an overview of Graphic design thesis project
- purpose of graphic design thesis: designed to define the complex intersection between personal voice, conceptual understanding, and the ability to conduct and use research effectively in the service of creating a compelling, finely crafted public communication
- thesis proposal: a proposition/ argument which you intend to support through research, it might detail your anticipated investigation/ address the potential implications of your proposition; a clear and well written proposal will direct your research, the form of your project and its design
TIPS: - start with what interests you, make sure you have a point, don't base your proposal on the obvious, shorter is usually better, think through your claims, don't make sweeping statements for dramatic effects, define terms, don't claim you will prove anything, be aware you will revise your proposal as your research and process evolves
- purposes of research: to understand how to evaluate what you see& read; to develop your own opinions& critical frameworks based o informed judgements; to acquire the critical skills to discern reliable/ useful sources from the junk; to evaluate your own work in light of what you learn through research; to develop your own understanding of the relationship of history/ theory to practice; to have the chance to explore a topic that interests you
TIPS: - let your topic dictate the type of research you do& have an idea of what you look for, maintain a level of cynicism, consult with an expert mentor, develop a system for note-taking, footnote sources, avoid reading pseudoscience, interviewing your friends is not research of intellectual merit
- thesis project: a proposition or argument explicated by design and supported by research
TIPS: - do not have preconceived ideas about what form your project will take, create a written outline of your narrative/argument diagramming core and secondary messages, give your audience multiple access points to your content, visual language of your thesis should be appropriate to your subject, make realistic time allowances for the inevitable learning curve, approach the idea of creating an installation with trepidation
- choosing topic strategies: to elucidate an original observation about your topic, to make audience reconsider the topic/see it in a new light, strategy of opposition, using the personal to communicate the universal, examining societal taboos, propose new avenues for design, elevate the little-notices to a place of prominence in the world
- 6 project sequence: research (readings, interviews, observations), analysis (what can i do with this research), design intent (what can i do with this research), methodology (how can i do it), fabrication (how will i make it), documentation (process book)
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