NOTES
-Design is a social activity, designers respond to clients,
audiences, publishers, institutions, and collaborators.
-Designers have their own subculture, connected through
time and space as part of a shared endeavor.
-Each word assembled was created in order to inspire
practice, moving designers to act and experiment with
incisive principles in mind.
Introduction
Revisiting the Avant-Garde
-Through oppositions, designers position and reposition themselves in
relation to the discourse of design and the broader society.
-Technology is changing our culture.
Collective Authorship
-Early examples of design were done anonymously. Objectivity
replaced subjectivity, neutrality replaced emotion
-The swiss extracted ideals from neutrality and objectivity and converted
them to systematic approaches that centered on the grid.
-In contrast to the predominate modern concept of the designer as
neutral transmitter of information, many designers are now producing
their own content, typically for both critical and entrepreneurial purposes.
Universal System of Connection
-Objective detachment was sought to uncover ideal forms to communicate
clearly and cleansing visual language of subjectivity.
-Designers currently create through a series of restrictive protocols.
-Software applications mold individual creative quirks into standardized
tools and palettes.
Social Responsibility
-Designers are active in societies politically and culturally, increasingly
thinking globally inside a tightly interconnected world. As more
designers, enabled by technology, produce both form and content.
-"Actively reshape their societies through design, pruning the chaos
of life into orderly, rational forms." = Making Chaotic Order
-Graphic designers create within the interconnected world to the audience
and are able produce and critique what they have.
-The design field has expanded to include more direct critical engagement
with the world.
Avant-Garde of the New Millennium
-Issues like authorship, universality, and social responsibility,
so key to avant-garde ideology, are crucial to contemporary
and theoretical discussions of the field.
