Introduction
Colin Frazer + Anther Kiley
What is the sum total of three years of a graphic design program?
Not too long ago, graphic design could still be organized, more or less neatly, into a handful of categories according to media. Today, the acceleration of technological change, and the interweaving of once distinct media has made this kind of organization incredibly difficult. Graphic design’s media, its tools, its basic skillset, and even its jurisdiction, are rewritten constantly by changing technology. Against this reality, graphic designers and design teachers are increasingly looking beyond the requirements and opportunities of specific media, to broader questions of approach. Can research, curation, and pedagogy enrich design practice? What is the relationship of designers to content; can designers be authors? What are the critical capacities of graphic design?
Surveying the giant body of work this department has produced over the last three years, we’ve decided that, rather than curate the show’s content around a single concept, we would honor its complexity — and the larger complexity of the field of graphic design — by letting it stand, unedited, as a database. So this printed catalogue, and its web-based counterpart, is intended as a comprehensive and uncurated record of the last three years of graphic design at RISD. In place of a central interpretive narrative for the work, we’ve chosen a handful of concepts, qualities and issues which can act as interpretive and organizational lenses for the material. These ‘tags’ have been assigned to the pieces in the catalogue, encouraging connections and relational associations. Our hope is to avoid didactic conclusions, and instead use particular issues and patterns as waypoints to aid in navigating the landscape of the contemporary field.
The gallery exhibition itself, meanwhile, acts as the index to the catalogue’s database. It presents a small, carefully curated selection of pieces from the database which we believe exemplify, critique, or reinterpret particular tagged concepts. The pieces in the show thus become points of engagement with the concepts and themes threaded through the larger body of work in the catalogue. The show is arranged as a distributed network, a combination of interconnected ideas and themes — much like graphic design itself.
In presenting what’s usually the main content of the show in its catalogue, and by assigning the functions normally served by the catalogue to the show, we are in some ways turning the traditional gallery show inside out. The thematic and conceptual material of the show is what’s on display; the physical manifestation of this material — the work — is a secondary layer. To some extent, we think this inversion reflects the current state of graphic design. Graphic design’s increasingly unstable relationship to its media has forced the field to turn itself inside out, engaging in an increasingly visible way with its core concerns of language and form, and with the surrounding issues of authorship, methodology, and responsibility.
As the program at RISD now embarks on its next three years of exploration, we hope this show will stand as a snapshot of the issues and concerns important to this moment in graphic design. We want the show, the catalog and the website to ask more questions than they answer, to leave us wondering if — right now in graphic design — the medium really is the message.
What is the sum total of three years of a graphic design program?
Not too long ago, graphic design could still be organized, more or less neatly, into a handful of categories according to media. Today, the acceleration of technological change, and the interweaving of once distinct media has made this kind of organization incredibly difficult. Graphic design’s media, its tools, its basic skillset, and even its jurisdiction, are rewritten constantly by changing technology. Against this reality, graphic designers and design teachers are increasingly looking beyond the requirements and opportunities of specific media, to broader questions of approach. Can research, curation, and pedagogy enrich design practice? What is the relationship of designers to content; can designers be authors? What are the critical capacities of graphic design?
Surveying the giant body of work this department has produced over the last three years, we’ve decided that, rather than curate the show’s content around a single concept, we would honor its complexity — and the larger complexity of the field of graphic design — by letting it stand, unedited, as a database. So this printed catalogue, and its web-based counterpart, is intended as a comprehensive and uncurated record of the last three years of graphic design at RISD. In place of a central interpretive narrative for the work, we’ve chosen a handful of concepts, qualities and issues which can act as interpretive and organizational lenses for the material. These ‘tags’ have been assigned to the pieces in the catalogue, encouraging connections and relational associations. Our hope is to avoid didactic conclusions, and instead use particular issues and patterns as waypoints to aid in navigating the landscape of the contemporary field.
The gallery exhibition itself, meanwhile, acts as the index to the catalogue’s database. It presents a small, carefully curated selection of pieces from the database which we believe exemplify, critique, or reinterpret particular tagged concepts. The pieces in the show thus become points of engagement with the concepts and themes threaded through the larger body of work in the catalogue. The show is arranged as a distributed network, a combination of interconnected ideas and themes — much like graphic design itself.
In presenting what’s usually the main content of the show in its catalogue, and by assigning the functions normally served by the catalogue to the show, we are in some ways turning the traditional gallery show inside out. The thematic and conceptual material of the show is what’s on display; the physical manifestation of this material — the work — is a secondary layer. To some extent, we think this inversion reflects the current state of graphic design. Graphic design’s increasingly unstable relationship to its media has forced the field to turn itself inside out, engaging in an increasingly visible way with its core concerns of language and form, and with the surrounding issues of authorship, methodology, and responsibility.
As the program at RISD now embarks on its next three years of exploration, we hope this show will stand as a snapshot of the issues and concerns important to this moment in graphic design. We want the show, the catalog and the website to ask more questions than they answer, to leave us wondering if — right now in graphic design — the medium really is the message.