Category Archives: Conference

Conference Paper; Design History at the Design Museum, perfect fit or culture clash?

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40 Years On: the Domain of Design History. Looking Back Looking Forward
The Open University
Berrill Lecture Theatre
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
22 May 2015

Here’s an edited and slightly expanded version of the paper that I gave; I’d like to thank Dr. Elizabeth McKellar for organising the event and for inviting me to participate. The images are from my PowerPoint presentation.

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Since 2011 I’ve been working on an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, which partners University of Brighton with London’s Design Museum, so this paper comes out of a larger work-in-progress and started life as a search for mentions of the Design Museum in academic journals.

A bit of background; from thinking that my application for this award was a random act of “career development”, I’ve come to realise how important the Design Museum (“upper case”, meaning this specific institution [capitalized in this text]) has been to my design-focused career spanning teaching, publishing and curating. I started on an Art and Design Foundation Course in 1982, the year in which the first incarnation of the Design Museum, the Boilerhouse, opened in the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum. During my Art History degree at University of Sussex it was exhibitions at the Boilerhouse – on Memphis, Issey Miyake, Handtools and British Youth Culture in particular – which enthralled me to design, from the objects on display, to the installation and display, and even the much-maligned white-tiled gallery. While the Director of the Boilerhouse, Stephen Bayley was considered “very bothersome” within the V&A and aimed to discourage people “wandering in from the V&A” (as he put it), I wandered the other way onto the V&A/RCA History of Design MA. Graduating in 1989 just as the Design Museum opened in its new Thames-side location, my work as a design journalist included reviewing exhibition; not always nice, not always nasty. For the last four years I’ve been: invited to nominate for Designs of the Year; observed the goings on in the café (not that this is a sociology of the Design Museum); talked to staff (on and off the record); enjoyed sporadic access to an “under construction” archive; visited every exhibition; dealt with the contradictions of a Supervisor who is also top of my list of “interviewees” and a very busy museum Director; and witnessed the museum prepare for its next phase.
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Conference; Drawing the Future

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4th International Illustration Symposium
Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH)
Parks Road, Oxford
7-8 November 2013

At this symposium, not only did I hear Johnny Hardstaff deliver a keynote address, which prompted me to request an interview (we talked about imagining a graphic language of the future), but I also delivered a paper. Here’s a summary, and some slides.

“Drawing the Future: Exhibiting Illustration”

In the Spring semester I deliver a series of lectures on the “future” to Graphic Design and Illustration students (Level 5/2nd Year) at University of Brighton, and start with a couple of definitions so as to debunk such notions as, the future isn’t really anything to do with us right now, and, it’s all just science-fiction anyway.

“The ‘Future’ is everything that happens from [beat] now (…as they say in the movies…)” …is my playful opener; then I hit them with Tony Fry’s definition (from Design Futuring: sustainability, ethics and new practice, 2009); “The future is not presented here as an objective reality independent of our existence, but rather, and anthropocentrically, as what divides ‘now’ from our finitude. In other words, we exist in the medium of time as finite beings (individually and as a species) in a finite world; how long we now exist — the event of our being — is determined by either an unexpected cataclysmic event (like our plant being hit by a massive meteorite) or by our finding ways to curb our currently auto-destructive, world-destroying nature and conduct.”
…and that’s how I began this talk too.

I set out to show that perhaps by way of a heightened familiarity with drawn and animated futures peopled with cute and cuddly characters, used to entertain and promote (everything from breakfast cereals to banking services), a more positive, friendly, utopian version of the future is being proliferated. In comparison, the “scary”, sci-fi, dystopia future of apocalyptic blockbuster movies seems worn out; not so much because we can “see the wires”, but because we’ve developed “explosion fatigue”; such gargantuan, special-effects-driven destruction just doesn’t “feel real” anymore.
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From the Archive; Design Criticism in New York

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This post was originally published on Eye Blog. I’m reposting it because I recently added a separate post about Fiona Raby’s talk at this conference, which provides background to the Dunne & Raby exhibition, “United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction”, reviewed here.

Counterpoint
The 2013 D-Crit Conference, School of Visual Arts, New York City
Attended 11 May 2013

Brigette Brown argues that segregation is alive. Drawing by Nina Frankel.

Brigette Brown argues that segregation is alive. Drawing by Nina Frankel.

Monday 12:15am, 24 June 2013
“Sharing the stage…sharing ideas”
by Liz Farrelly
Originally published on Eye Blog

Five D-Crit students team up with experts to make presentations at their graduate symposium

It’s that time of year again, when a host of graduating art and design students prepare to launch themselves upon the world. The degree shows have gone up and this year’s crew are buzzing with anticipation. That’s fine if your work looks good on a wall or in a gallery. But what about the new breed of design critics on Masters courses on both sides of the Atlantic? Just how do writers make their mark?
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Fiona Raby tells it like it could be

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Fiona Raby speaks at Counterpoint
The 2013 D-Crit Conference, School of Visual Arts, New York City
Attended 11 May 2013

View from the stalls.

View from the stalls.

Before hearing Fiona Raby’s talk at this Design Criticism conference in New York City, I had already visited Dunne & Raby’s new exhibition, “United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction”, staged at London’s Design Museum, but the majority of the audience hadn’t. Fiona, however, gave such an insightful explanation of the show that, thanks to my notes from the day, this account of her talk might supplement my previous post about the exhibition, here. Following this is an Archive post from Eye Blog, reporting on the conference.

Fiona describes her practice (Dunne & Raby, est. 1994 in partnership with Anthony Dunne) as dealing with emerging technologies and imagined behaviours. She defines design as “a tool for collective imagining” and designers as “making it tangible”, the aim being to broaden our worldview.
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From the Archive; Collecting Digital Art and Design

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I’m reposting these talk-and-conference reviews from 2010, as the issues covered are now to topical. With Louise Shannon recently made Curator of Digital Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, debate continues around what museums might collect from the field of digital art and design, and how it should be conserved (MoMA’s Architecture and Design Department set the pace with its Video Games acquisitions, which I spent a fun afternoon playing on my last visit). Louise co-curated the seminal show, Decode: Digital Design Sensations, staged in the Porter Gallery, and hearing one of the co-curators of the latest show to open there, “Sky Arts Ignition: Memory Palace”, on BBC Radio 4’s “Start the Week” (17/6/13), made me think about how we might be “reneging on remembering” by relying on digital storage to save our real-life memories. But what happens when digital formats deteriorate and/or become obsolete, and those files are on longer accessible? Check back for my review of Memory Palace, coming soon…

John Maeda in conversation with Alice Rawsthorn
Attended 2 February 2010

Decoding the Digital Conference
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Attended 4-5 February 2010

John Maeda talks at V&A

Monday 7:01pm, 22 February 2010
“Discussing the digital”
by Liz Farrelly
Originally published on Eye Blog

John Maeda on dirt, de-cluttering and the power of art

Even though John Maeda wasn’t speaking at the conference, “Decoding the Digital”, staged alongside the exhibition Decode: Digital Design Sensations, his work and words (from this lecture earlier in the week) were referenced during the proceedings.
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From the Archive; Nostalgic for Ampersand

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Good conferences are a joy to attend, and Ampersand proved to be a pleasant surprise. Last June, at short notice, Eye requested that I cover it. I wasn’t sure what to expect, as I’m neither a web nor graphic designer (core audience), but I got a lot out of it, and more importantly, so did that expectant crowd. This year’s conference is on 28 June 2013; but as there’s nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, so here’s my review from last year.

Ampersand Conference Eye Blog

Ampersand Web Typography Conference, Brighton
Organised by Clearleft and compèred by production director, Richard Rutter
Attended 15 June 2012

Monday 2:36pm, 25 June 2012
“Let’s hear it for the hinting slaves”
by Liz Farrelly
Originally posted on Eye Blog

When keynote speaker Phil Baines asked the full house at the second Ampersand Web Typography Conference, “Who’s a graphic designer? Who’s a web designer / developer?”, a show of hands revealed that three-quarters of the audience were web-based practitioners (up on last year). Ampersand is a two-way street though, a place for print-based, art-school-educated graphic and type designers to discover the special requirements of designing for the web, and for websters to learn about type, how to use it, and what the type foundries are doing to meet their needs.

Ampersand delivered on all fronts. If at times it felt like Type 101 or Web 101 – depending on which camp you were in – a bit of back to basics never hurt anyone. And, as Baines pointed out, “designers need to talk to one another”, so it follows that both camps should propagate a mutual understanding of parlance.
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From the Archive; DIY Design from 2010

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I wrote this review when the DIY phenomena was still new to mainstream design; as St Bride Library is quiet for the summer I thought I’d re-post it. Perhaps DIY was perceived as a trend at the time; the conference broadened and deepened the definition by focusing on diverse projects with a claim to DIY credentials. Now such notions as self-instigated briefs, ad-hoc distribution and hand-making have evolved into a productive modus operandi for designers and creatives working across disciplines and often in collaboration.

St Bride Library Conference 2010 DIY Design
St Bride Library, London
Attended 27-28 May 2010

Tucked away in a narrow alley off Fleet Street (which was once the epicentre of the UK’s newspaper industry but has now been invaded by banks and trading floors), St Bride Library inhabits a labyrinthine Victorian building, alongside a theatre, classrooms and at one time a swimming pool, installed by the philanthropic founders for the improvement of the local workers. The newspaper presses have left the neighbourhood, but its long association with the art and industry of printing and typography remains, as the library boasts an extensive collection of books, manuscripts and archives relating to graphic design, publishing, calligraphy, illustration, and of course, type.
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Conference Session; Design Objects and the Museum

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39th Annual AAH Conference
University of Reading
11 to 13 April 2013

More usually I write up conferences from the vantage point of being an audience member. This time, however, I was a convenor, which entailed defining the theme, sending out our call for papers to networks far and wide, selecting the papers, and chairing the discussion. I’ve written this in partnership with Joanna Weddell.

At the 39th Annual Association of Art Historians Conference, myself and Joanna Weddell (we’re both recipients of AHRC Collaborative Doctorate Awards at the University of Brighton, with the Victoria and Albert Museum and London’s Design Museum, respectively) organised a session titled “Design Objects and the Museum”. Prompted by a quote from Bourdieu and Darbel’s 1969 study of museum visitors (“Maybe there should be museums with modern stuff in them, but it wouldn’t be a proper museum”), the session questioned notions of what could and should be displayed, and where, and how methods of display and interpretation might engage and educate a museum’s public.
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