“The essential function of our profession [design] in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward an easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time for higher visual and auditory retention of data.”
“For design is about the making of things: things that are memorable and have presence in the world of the mind. It makes demands upon our ability both to consolidate information as knowledge and to deploy it imaginatively to creative purpose in the pursuit of fresh information.”
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”
“To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.”
We traveled over 12,000 miles from June through October, 2011. This timeline documents our visits, the information we gathered, as well as what we learned was still to be explored, and some of our discoveries.
You may step through our travels as we moved through them, or jump to any...
At the invitation of Marion Digel, Dean of Industrial Design at the Folkwang University of the Arts, we began our two-week Find Design tour of Germany in Essen.
Visit: Knoll has been in the process of documenting their archives/historical production for the past year or so with systematic inventorying.A former employee was hired specifically to gather the information, and she designed a great Filemaker database. She used old price...
Visit: We met with their Design Librarian, Mary Catharine Johnsen (who agreed to join our Advisory Board). She had created a visualization of our project, outlining our clients, our sources, and our objectives The...
Visit: We met with Judy Dyki, Library Director (who agreed to join our Advisory Board) and Leslie Edwards, Archivist. Judy talked with us about the library, but the majority of the special materials were located in the Archives.
The archive holdings are documented on...
Visit with old friends Victor and Val Rosenberg. We were all students at the University of Chicago. Vic and Susan were both at the Graduate Library School, in the early days of library automation. Vic wrote programs for Johan as he began using computer generated design for sculpture and wall...
Visit: We visited with the Archivist and Assistant Archivist. The archives site is huge. We received a two page overview of the HM Archival Collections.
We looked at many old catalogs, advertisements, and publications. They gave us a tour of the Archival “vault” room...
Visit: We visited Darrin Alfred, Design Curator. He initially came to the DAM to lead the project to process the AIGA archives, and has subsequently become curator.
They have been processing the AIGA Archives for the past two years, and expect to complete inventory...
Visit: We visited their Registrar, Christopher Herron.
They have about 3300 pieces on view (one-tenth of the collection as a whole). The Museum opened in 2005, and Christopher has been documenting the collection since then.
They use an ArtSystems program...