Volume 37

July 8, 2017June 2, 2020 by College of Design Comment Closed

(N)EVERLASTING: IMPERMANENCE IN DESIGN CULTURE Volume 37 Full PDF (2015) Abstract With the arrival of the digital age and a culture dedicated to speed and efficiency, much of contemporary design has lost an old motivation: to create artifacts or experiences of permanence. Not even incredible breakthroughs remain for very long before they become the undiscussed norm or are replaced with new successes and new advances. Often it falls upon the shoulders of the designer to keep up with the perpetual flow of invention and reinvention, today more active and integrated into the flesh of society than ever. The river of progress is merciless and inevitable, and it’s only getting faster: but what does that mean, and how do we address it as consumers and creators? One of the hallmarks of this fast-paced environment is the concept of immutable impermanence: a strict recognition of the fact that not everything will last, and that not everything should last. Impermanence is far from a new idea, but...

Remember by Steven Matijcio

March 22, 2014July 22, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

Remember In his 2009 book What is an Apparatus? Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben characterized his titular inquiry as “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” (1) He goes on to explain that beyond institutions (such as schools, factories and prisons), apparatuses can also include, “the pen, writing, literature, philosophy...computers, cellular telephones, and...language itself.” (2) In this symbiotic realm of object and subject, Agamben implies a fundamental, if enigmatic relationship between people and the materials that shape us, as we shape them. Author Vik- tor Mayer-Schoenberger mines the mnemonic niches of this provocative notion further, tracing a history through what he calls “external memories” crucial to the development of human knowledge, and how humans know. From prehistoric cave paintings and ancient scrolls, all the way to the diary of his stepfather, Mayer-Schoenberger finds a thread less in specific content, and more in how...

The Arrogance of Permanence (or Designs Should Flow like Leaves) by Aly Khalifa

March 22, 2014July 22, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

We are taught in design school that the best designs have a lasting quality. We see beautiful commercial objects in venues like New York’s Museum of Modern Art and are led to think it represents the ultimate achievement of a design project. Designers are then inspired to create solutions that might one day be next to Raymond Loewy’s Studebaker Avanti or Henry Dreyfus’ Bell Model 302 telephone. Design artifacts are important for scholarly work, but by definition, museum pieces have been removed from their context. By preserving them, their existence is isolated from the regenerative processes that dominate the earth and the universe. Yet is a Woolly Mammoth proud to have her bones in a natural history museum? She would have liked it better if she was still using those bones, and more importantly, that her DNA got passed along and her species adapted to this changing world. Establishing a permanent place in history is what so many of us unconsciously strive...

401 Oberlin Road + 520 S Person Street by Erin Sterling Lewis

March 6, 2014July 22, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

Change is constant. It insinuates impermanence and can be exciting or devastating. Living in the fast growing city of Raleigh, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of change since moving here in 2002 - some exciting and some devastating. I practiced architecture for seven years before serving on the Raleigh Planning Commission. I worked on buildings that took at least a year to design and often as much time to build. The design process for each project stole part of my heart and soul, as well as most of my weekends. I did not mind, because I knew I was making places for people – marks on the earth that would last my lifetime and beyond. This is one of the great joys and responsibilities of being an architect. Before my experience with the Planning Commission, I was not familiar with the analysis, discussion, and debate that leads to change in our city, almost none of which directly addresses the value of...

Volume 37 Confirmed Contributors!

March 4, 2014March 6, 2014 by College of DesignNo Comments

We have a great list of contributors for Volume 37, including Lev Manovich, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, Aly Khalifa and more! We're really excited for how this volume is coming together....

An Interview with Dan Gottlieb

March 2, 2014July 22, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

(Dan Gottlieb was interviewed by Shelley Smith, Master of Art + Design student) [SS] I’d like us to just kind of start with a general who you are and how you came to be here. You mentioned that you were a fine artist, so--that’s quite a career path. [DG] Yes, well, in retrospect, it feels like it’s very linear, but it didn’t feel like that along the way, all the time. So, I started out in undergraduate school as a double major, in fact. I was a fine arts major at the University of New York, Buffalo, and I chose that school because it had --one, it had a great art department, but, two, it had a great biology department, and I was totally interested in both at the time. So I was a double major in art and biology for two and a half, three years. That’s an interesting combination. Well, I always thought that it was complementary, and still to this day...

Hopscotch by Grayson Currin

March 2, 2014July 22, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

Last weekend, people would not stop asking me if I was having a good time. In rock clubs, on city street corners and even at the table at which my wife and I finally sat down to have dinner around 1:30 a.m. on a Friday night: Everywhere I went, there the question (or some variation thereof) was, often presented with a latent yearning that presupposed I wasn’t really enjoying myself. “Are you having fun? “Are you enjoying yourself? “This is different. Do you like it?” “So, how does it feel?” The reason that my wife, Tina, and I didn’t sit for a sandwich until close to closing time is that we had been busy bouncing between the sets of bands and DJs, producers and rappers at the Hopscotch Music Festival, a five-year-old Raleigh institution that brings a few hundred acts and several thousand listeners to the city’s burgeoning downtown. In only the last few hours, I’d seen one musical hero (the...

What Does Planting Tomatoes Have To Do with Fashion? by Natalie Chanin

March 2, 2014July 22, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

This essay is adapted and reprinted with permission from EarthPledge Publishing. The Alabama tomato is truly a wonder. It takes on the color of the deep red soil, and the taste borders on sweet and tart. I grew up eating these tomatoes straight out of my grandparent’s garden in Florence, Alabama, and after having lived in Europe for more than 20 years, I still think Alabama tomatoes are the best in the world. So when I moved back to my hometown in Florence, to a place called Lovelace Crossroads, I was eager to have a garden and grow my own. I quickly realized I could not remember the details of how to plant a tomato, so I consulted Mr. Jay Arnet, an 87-year-old family friend who has the most beautiful kitchen garden. He taught me how to lovingly remove the bottom branches from the seedlings, dig a hole that seemed too big, fill it with compost and water the plants. They...

Terra Incognita: 1000 Cities of the World by Catherine D’Ignazio

March 2, 2014July 22, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

Terra Incognita was a Latin term used on maps from the Age of Discovery to denote unexplored territories. It's a perspectival term. Because, of course, there were people like the Tupinambá actually living in those seemingly unexplored lands on Martin Waldseemüller's map. The places the Tupinambá knew intimately -- where they fished or hunted or celebrated or slept -- were not Terra Incognita to them. But to the Europeans embarking on their voyages each new cove and settlement was a curve or mark to be made on a map. It was a matter of perspective. A matter of technology. Some small matter of hubris. It remains a question of all of these things in the Information Age. The optimism and hubris of Big Data appear to be unrivaled - What don't we know in the age of Big Data? By tapping mystic rhythms with our fingers and staring into squares of light we traverse great oceans of distance. As we...

Blur by Elizabeth Diller, Richard Scofidio and Charles Renfro

March 2, 2014July 22, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

Location: Yverdons-les-Bains, Switzerland Scale: 80,000 sf (7400 sm) Status: Completed 2002 Awards Progressive Architecture - P/A Design Award - 2003 Swiss TV and B. magazine - Golden Rabbit for Best Building of 2002 - 2003 The Guardian - Top Ten Buildings of the Decade - 2009 Summary Blur is an architecture of atmosphere—a fog mass resulting from natural and man-made forces. Water is pumped from Lake Neuchâtel, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through 35 000 high-pressure nozzles. A smart weather system reads the shifting climatic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction and regulates water pressure at a variety of zones. Upon entering Blur, visual and acoustic references are erased. There is only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing nozzles. It is a habitable medium that is formless, featureless, depth-less, scaleless, massless, surface-less, and dimensionless. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for visual fidelity in high-definition with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition. In this exposition pavilion there is nothing to see but our...

Volume 37 Contributor: Lev Manovich

March 2, 2014July 11, 2016 by College of Design Comment Closed

Lev Manovich is a new media theorist and digital culture advocate. He is a professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Software Studies Initiative which works on the analysis and visualization of big cultural data. His work is about creating permanent documents out of seemingly impermanent or unconnected pieces. Manovich will provide insight on the question of the permanence of software and technology, specifically imagery and data....

2014 Team: Advisory Committee

February 9, 2014April 22, 2014 by College of DesignNo Comments

Our team of advisers represent various realms of design and respond to our work with insight from their combined years of experience. Tania Allen Assistant Professor of Art + Design Denise Gonzales Crisp Professor of Graphic Design Russell Flinchum Associate Professor of Art and Design/Industrial Design Jennifer Landin Teaching Assistant Professor of Biology Fernando Magallanes Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Cecilia Mouat Ph.D. in Design. Designer, visual artist and registered architect in Chile Sarah Powers Artist. Executive Director at Visual Art Exchange Sarah Queen Assistant Professor of Architecture Marc Russo Assistant Professor of Art and Design at NC State University Gab Smith CAM Executive Director ...