GDES 220: Design Practices

How to define problems, get Ideas, and create form. Explores a variety of techniques ranging from quick, seat-of-the-pants approaches to more formal research methods for stimulating fresh thinking, and arriving at compelling and viable solutions.

This book explores a range of research methods that can be used by graphic designers and visual communicators in the development of clear and purposeful design solutions. The book introduces key terms and theories that underlie design research; examining the importance of visual grammar and design literacy, audience, communication theory and semiotics.

Addresses a range of models and approaches to practice-based research, considering relationships between industry and academia, and explores how students' experiences of undertaking practice-based research has impacted their future design and research practice.

Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book examines how the archive emerged in art writing in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and art-historical conditions and concerns.

This book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive to those whose materials and practices are archival.

This book is dedicated to art practices that mobilize the model of the archive, demonstrating the ways in which such archival artworks probe the possibilities of what art is and what it can do.

Looks at how artists use their collections to make artwork. Presented in gallery-style format, this work allows readers to see what artists collect, and the resulting artwork they make from it. It features the collections and the artwork of 33 major mixed-media artists. It also includes journals, assemblages, altered books, and jewellery pieces.

Exploring more than a dozen personal collections of contemporary artists, this unique and revealing book probes the aesthetic and psychological dimensions of collecting and shows how objects can influence and reflect their owners' work.

All This Stuff breaks new ground in the field of archive theory. It documents the innovative ways in which the arts are challenging the distinctions, processes, and crossovers between artworks and archives. This critical reexamination exemplifies how the field of art archiving is changing theory and practice as well as our understanding of what an archive is, or could begiven into the archival process and the book also explores how archives can be made accessible and the unpredictable ways in which they may be explored and reinterpreted in the future.

The role of designers in communication and visual culture is evolving, from designers serving as commercial 'hired guns' to assuming the more empowering roles of design authorship. The role of the designer can expand to being the author, producer, curator, network facilitator, activist, consultant, entrepreneur ... the list goes on and on.

This book walks us through the process of how artworks eventually get their meaning. Using notions of belonging and membership and applying analytic perspectives, it shows us how curated exhibitions invite audience members to infer an exhibition's narrative threads, giving artworks their contents and discursive sense.

What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities.

An increasing proportion of exhibitions are curated by artists rather than professional curators. This book provides the first critical history of visual artists curating exhibitions.

Intricate collages and drawings created on old library checkout cards, each one representing a book that left an indelible mark on artist Barbara Page.

Critiqued takes you on a journey with designer Christina Beard through an iterative design experiment. With her poster in tow, she meets with leading designers, writers, and curators. At each stop, the participant critiques the poster and talks about his or her own design process. Based on their conversation, Christina redesigns the poster before heading to the next critique — a process similar to the children’s game telephone.