Crossing the Line: The 2010 D-Crit Conference

On April 30, 2010, the D-Crit program culminates in an annual public conference, conceived and organized by graduating students, in which they present papers based on their theses, alongside professional design critics and thinkers. Students’ topics range from the design of personal memorial objects to the use of smell as a communicative tool in design and architecture and from design and visual language in the films of Jean-Luc Godard to the applications and implications of car sharing.

The conference will be a fast-paced day-long event, moderated by author and NPR’s “Studio 360″ host Kurt Andersen. Keynote speaker John Thackara will speak to different facets of contemporary critical practice, while the 15 graduating students will each give very short presentations on their thesis topic

Kurt Andersen is the co-creator and host of the Peabody Award-winning “Studio 360,” WNYC and Public Radio International’s radio program about arts and culture. His most recent book is Reset (Random House, 2009). He is the author of the best-selling novels Heyday (Random House, 2007), winner of the Langum Prize for Historical Fiction, andTurn of the Century (Random House, 1999). He has also created network television programs, and written screenplays and stage plays. As an editor, he co-founded Spy, Inside.com and Very Short List, and served as editor-in-chief of New York magazine and editorial director for Colors. He has been a columnist for New York and The New Yorker, as well asTime’s architecture and design critic, and is a contributing editor toVanity Fair. He sits on the boards of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Pratt Institute, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, served last year as Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design and holds an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design.

John Thackara studied philosophy, and trained as a journalist, before working for ten years as a book and magazine editor. John was the first Director (1993-1999) of the Netherlands Design Institute. He was programme director in 2007 of Designs of the time (Dott 07) a new biennial in North East England. In 2008 he was commissioner of City Eco Lab at Cite du Design in St Etienne, the most important French design biennial. John is a an Associate of The Young Foundation, UK; senior advisor on sustainability to the UK Design Council; and an advisor on sustainability indicators to Agence France Presse. His most recent book is In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press).

The conference is partly a débutante event for the students—to give them an opportunity to show their work to potential employers, collaborators and publishers—partly an exercise in conference organization, since students are charged with curating the conference themselves, and partly an event for a wider public interested in new developments in design discourse.

Student Thesis Topics:

Hala Abdul Malak, “Al-Kafiye: A Potent Symbol Uncovered”

Amelia Black, “Design Smells; Odorous Rhetoric for Embodied Experience”

John Cantwell, “Car Sharing: Applications and Implications”

Frederico Duarte, “Alvorada: How Social Change Is Shaping Brazilian Design and Creating Brazil’s Own Design Model”

Chappell Ellison, “Design in the Dark: Finding Meaning in the Multiplex”

Laura Forde, “Objects to be Read, Words to be Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard 1959–1967”

Sarah Froelich, “Dansk Designs: Reinventing the American Tabletop, 1954-1985”

Katie Henderson, “Two Decades of Failure, Betrayal & Disaster: The Production Design of Wes Anderson’s Films as it Relates to the Family Dynamic”

Emily Leibin, “Hidden Nature: Elroy Webber’s Connecticut Valley Modern Homes”

William Myers, “Bacteria Building for Sustainability: The Convergence of Design and Biology in the 21st Century”

Mike Neal, “Tabula Rubra: Critical Reflections on the Design of Mars”