Peter Hall, “Writing Design History: Problems and Provocations”

http://www.vimeo.com/8721175

Peter Hall, design critic, and senior lecturer in design at the University of Texas at Austin, will discussed the relationship between writing design criticism and writing design history. He teaches design theory, history and journalistic methods of research and writing and his research focuses on mapping as a design process. He has been a contributing writer for Metropolis magazine since 2000 and has written widely about design in its various forms, including gaming, elevators, building graphics, bridges, neon lights and office chairs, for publications including Print, I.D. Magazine, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He wrote and co-edited the books Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, Sagmeister: Made You Look and Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics.

From Alice Twemlow’s introduction to Peter Hall:

The D-Crit Lecture Series complements the students’ curriculum by providing examples of various approaches to criticism as well as insight into different aspects of design practice. Speakers are selected as much the possibilities that their own career paths illuminate, as for the subjects they interrogate.

As our first critic in residence, tonight’s speaker has spent the day in a darkened room responding to the 2^nd-year thesis work-in-progress presentations and has provided thoughtful feedback on topics as diverse as wordplay and typography in the films of Jean Luc Godard and the implications of car sharing programs to the phenomenon of urban exploration as it relates to the contemporary sublime.

Peter was one of the very first people I asked to teach at D-Crit and he was going to, until he decided to move to Austin, Texas where he teaches design theory, history and writing to some very lucky design students at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and co-editor of definitive texts about the two most provocative players in the graphic design arena: Tibor Kalman and Stefan Sagmeister. He is the co-editor of Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, done while he was senior editor and fellow at University of Minnesota Design Institute. Peter was also one of the commissioners of the Big Urban Game that Katie Salen talked about last week.

Peter is a Contributing Editor at Metropolis magazine. Earlier this year they did an issue on “good design.” His introductory essay is about the pervasive nature of this concept— generated by MoMA in the 1950’s—and its increasing irrelevance for today’s design practice. It offers instead a suggestion for a more 21st century paradigm: design as argument.

The piece is typical of Peter’s incisive critique of design practice, his understanding of the larger issues at play and his no-nonsense writing voice that you could listen to all day. Here’s a short quote:

“But the most valuable effect of considering an object as an argument is that it allows us to look under the rhetorical hood and consider it not as an inevitable or neutral invention but as something that embodies a point of view. The iPod may seem like an innocuous music-playing device, but in fact it is an argument about how we should navigate, purchase, download, and listen to sound.”

And you can find the full essay in the Reading Room on the D-Crit Web site.

Another characteristic of Peter’s work is the breadth of his interest. Of late his research is converging more and more around mapping as a design process. In addition to mapping, Peter’s writing addresses topics as diverse as gaming, building graphics, bridges, neon lights, office chairs, and elevators. Searching for Peter’s essay on elevators, which I wanted to reread, led me to discover yet another online meme from years ago that I am only now catching up with: the You Tube collection of videos of various elevator interiors. The one here is entitled “Riding the Schindler Hydraulic Elevator at Peter Hall, at Concordia University in Austin Texas.” It’s actually a video response to the “Sears Elevator at Northridge Mall, “ which has more than 25,000 views.

As the 2^nd-years have learned today, whatever Peter says is brilliant and insightful and unsettling (in a good way). Tonight in looking at the ways design is written into history, he addresses themes close to D-Crit’s heart in ways that may be bracing but will always be fortifying.

(Image: Publicity image for George Nelson’s Storagewall system, from Jeffrey Meikle’s book, Design in the USA (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).