Why I Write. Design Council 3rd June 2009

Only a few days away and months in the making, Wed 3rd 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