Zerofee. Good Thinking:

Why I Write. Design Coun­cil 3^rd June 2009

Only a few days away and months in the mak­ing, Wed 3^rd June, 7pm brings a smor­gas­bord of design writ­ing tal­ent together in one room at Design Coun­cil thanks to the School of Graphic Design, London Col­lege of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and spon­sor­ship from Rep­re­sent.

MA Design Writ­ing Crit­i­cism stu­dents have invited keynote speak­ers, Vicky Richard­son, Peter Hall and Denise Gon­za­les Crisp, to present on the themes of Dis­cov­er­ies, Con­texts and Mean­ings, respectively.

With Jeremy Myer­son as mod­er­a­tor and a host of known names in the audi­ence, the con­tent should make for an excit­ing explo­ration by our panel and poten­tially shape some inter­est­ing debates in the room and glob­ally, via Twit­ter. Fol­low the event via @whyi­write. We encour­age other atten­dees to tag their related tweets with the #whyi­write hashtag.

Zero­fee has a vested inter­est in this event as one of us is study­ing on the MA Design Writ­ing Crit­i­cism course and played a role in pulling the event together. We feel pas­sion­ately that the design com­mu­nity needs pow­er­ful voices to com­mu­ni­cate about design’s role in soci­ety. The explo­sion in avail­abil­ity of tech­nol­ogy to the masses has helped cre­ate audi­ences who have fine-tuned their design sen­si­bil­i­ties and adapt­ing to that, the role of design writ­ing now needs to step up and jus­tify its posi­tion more than ever before.

With an insight into the speak­ers’ posi­tions the evening has the poten­tial to be another unfor­get­table mile­stone in design writing’s fas­ci­nat­ing history.

Speaker biogra­phies

Vicky Richard­son is edi­tor of Blue­print. Edit­ing Blue­print is Vicky’s dream job. She read the mag­a­zine as a teenager, then went on to study fine art and archi­tec­ture. Real­is­ing she was more inter­ested in pol­i­tics and in the ideas behind design and archi­tec­ture, she stud­ied jour­nal­ism at Napier Uni­ver­sity in Edin­burgh and then got her first job on the glam­orous trade mag­a­zine, Pub­lic Sec­tor Build­ing. Later she was deputy edi­tor of RIBA Jour­nal and pub­lished her first book, New Ver­nac­u­lar Archi­tec­ture in 2002. She is a trustee of the edu­ca­tional char­ity, the Cam­paign for Draw­ing, and sits on the Mayor’s Cul­tural Strat­egy Group. She recently had her 15 min­utes of fame after heck­ling Prince Charles and as a con­se­quence will chair the annual con­fer­ence of the cam­paign­ing organ­i­sa­tion, Repub­lic on 20 June.

Peter Hall is a design critic, and senior lec­turer in design at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin where he teaches design the­ory, his­tory and jour­nal­is­tic meth­ods of research and writ­ing at under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate lev­els. Between 2001 and 2007 he was Senior Edi­tor and Fel­low at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Design Insti­tute, where he co-edited with Jan Abrams the book, Else/Where: Map­ping – New Car­togra­phies of Net­works and Ter­ri­to­ries and orga­nized sev­eral sym­posia and work­shops on map­ping. He has been a con­tribut­ing writer for Metrop­o­lis mag­a­zine since 2000 and has writ­ten widely about design in its var­i­ous forms, includ­ing gam­ing, ele­va­tors, build­ing graph­ics, bridges, neon lights and office chairs, for pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing Print, I.D. Mag­a­zine, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He taught a sem­i­nar class on design the­ory and writ­ing at Yale School of Art between 2000 and 2007. He wrote and co-edited the books Tibor Kalman: Per­verse Opti­mist, Sag­meis­ter: Made You Look and Pause: 59 Min­utes of Motion Graph­ics.

Denise Gon­za­les Crisp Denise Gon­za­les Crisp is a graphic designer and Pro­fes­sor in the Graphic Design depart­ment at North Car­olina State Uni­ver­sity. She chaired the depart­ment from 2002 to 2006. She was Art Cen­ter Col­lege of Design’s senior designer from 1997 to 2002, and prin­ci­pal of her stu­dio Super­Stove! Her design is pub­lished inter­na­tion­ally in pub­li­ca­tions such as KAK (RU), Graphis, Émigré, Metrop­o­lis, and Eye (UK), and was fea­tured in a 2002 Paris exhi­bi­tion East Coast/West Coast Dreams, the 2005 anthol­ogy All Access: The Mak­ing of Thirty Extra­or­di­nary Graphic Design­ers, and a 2009 exhi­bi­tion Dimension+Typography (Chicago). Her essays are pub­lished in Émigré, Design and Cul­ture Jour­nal, Items Mag­a­zine, Design Observer, and sev­eral antholo­gies. Gon­za­les Crisp has been an invited speaker at The Walker Art Cen­ter (Insights design series), GraficEu­rope, Berlin, Royal Mel­bourne Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy, at the ArtC­ity Fes­ti­val, Cal­gary, and numer­ous col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. She is author of *Rela­tional Typography: Systems, Con­text, Form, Mes­sage (Thames & Hud­son, Decem­ber 2009).

Fur­ther information:

Dis­course This! Design­ers and Alter­na­tive Crit­i­cal Writing

Two vol­umes of Emi­gre (1995) devoted to design and writ­ing, edited by Anne Burdick:

Issue 35 

Issue 36