The new U.S.-Canada border crossing station at Massena, NY, as seen from the Canadian side. Photo by Michael Moran.
The graphic designer Michael Bierut, a partner working in the New York office of the firm Pentagram, designed a 21-foot sign for the new U.S.-Canada border crossing at Massena, New York. The sign, as well as the building, which was designed by architects
Smith-Miller & Hawkinson, has received substantial praise as a bold and
daring piece of federal design. Too daring, perhaps. The sign is being
dismantled by the Customs and Border Protection Agency for fear that it will be
a target for terrorists. I asked Bierut about how the sign came to be and why
it's coming down.
EL: I was
excited to see a piece of graphic design on the front page of the New York Times Arts
section recently,
but then I was disappointed to learn that the sign is being dismantled. Does
graphic design only get covered when it has been deemed a failure?
MB: It's a
pity, but maybe it's inevitable that graphic design only gets mainstream
attention when there's some kind of problem with it. Look at the recent debacle
with Pepsi's Tropicana packaging, or, for that matter, the design of the 2000
Palm Beach County "butterfly" ballot. When graphic design works well,
it tends to just become a part of everyday life, which is really all we wanted
with our sign in Massena.
EL: Describe
the design process that resulted in the sign. How does the sign interact with
the architecture? What were you trying to achieve?
MB: When our
team was working with the architects, the wonderful Laurie Hawkinson and Henry
Smith-Miller, we all agreed that it would be great to have some kind of
large-scale, figurative element on the building. The building itself is
beautiful, amazingly efficient and incredibly functional. And of course cost
was at the top of everyone's mind throughout the process. There was no budget
for decoration or art. The only applied figurative element on the building were
the functional signs to guide travelers around. So we thought a big sign would
create a kind of ceremonial moment to mark the significance of the building.
Public buildings have had inscriptions for years: every New Yorker knows that
long passage about "Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night" that
appears on the main post office building on Eighth Avenue. In a way, this sign
was meant to be a 21st-century version of that.
Most of my
vacations as a child were car trips, and long car trips can be boring for kids.
The most dramatic moments always came as you crossed a border, even if it was
just that first glimpse of the big OHIO sign on I-80 when you enter the state
from Western Pennsylvania. So we thought it would be great to create a similar
moment with a big UNITED STATES sign.
EL: The
Customs and Border Protection Agency is dismantling the sign because they see
it as a security threat. The words "United States" rendered in such
large letters could invite terrorist attacks. Was there any discussion during
the design process or more recently about using a less provocative message,
such as "Hello," "Good Bye," or "E-ZPass"?
MB: We did
talk about what the message should be, but both the design team and the client
team thought, at the time, that there could be nothing more neutral than simply
the name of the country you're entering. Other messages might raise language
issues, or seem overtly provocative. Being provocative was the last thing on our
minds. By the way, if you're looking for potentially provocative messages that
our country shoves in people's faces at border crossings, I'd call your
attention to one of my least favorite recent designs, the design of the new U.S.
passport. It's filled with eagles, flags, passages from historic documents and
aphorisms that may be heartfelt statements of patriotism, but they are
absolutely anything but neutral.
EL: Pentagram
partner Paula Scher titled a book about her work Make It Bigger,
referring to the fact that clients often ask graphic designers to use larger
type. Along the road to the Canada border sign, were you ever asked to make it
smaller?
MB: The scale
issue is interesting. When you're up on the Canadian border, 21 feet is
nothing. It's dwarfed by the surrounding landscape. So just creating, say, some
big 21-foot-tall colored light poles wouldn't have seemed dramatic. However,
we're used to reading type that you can measure in inches, or in fractions of
an inch. So a 21-foot-tall letter "U" is enormous. It has a little
bit of the effect of a Claes Oldenberg sculpture, or maybe an Ed Ruscha
painting: Think of the iconic Hollywood sign.
I don't recall
anyone asking us to make the sign smaller.
EL: Do you
think the Statue of Liberty is an inviting target for terrorists?
MB: Of course
the Statue of Liberty, sadly, might be considered a potential terrorist target.
It's really filling the same function as the Massena sign. It was designed to
be the first thing you see as you're about to enter our country. That's why it
was closed to visitors after 9/11. And it was a great moment when it was
reopened this summer. I The reopening seemed to signal that we were taking a
different stand, perhaps a bolder stand, in the face of external threats.
All this
aside, I want to stress that I'm hesitant to second guess any of our officers
who've been charged with keeping us safe. I learned my own lesson about this.
Ten years ago, we got an assignment to create a wayfinding system for lower
Manhattan. One of the elements in the system we designed was a 4-sided sign,
small, about six feet tall, to provide information about nearby destinations.
When we were picking locations for the signs, I was told that none of these
4-sided ones would be allowed on the World Trade Center site. When we asked
why, we were told that the security people there, still on alert after the 1993
bombing, were concerned that the signs could be used to conceal some kind of
explosive device. I remember thinking privately that they were being overly
paranoid. All the rest of our signs were installed by the summer of 2001. Then
came September 11, and I remember thinking that maybe it was impossible to be
too paranoid, even about something as seemingly harmless as signs.
Ellen
Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA
program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). An
author and illustrator of numerous books, articles, and blogs on
design, she is populist critic, frequent lecturer, and 2007 AIGA Gold
Medalist. Now working on Cooper-Hewitt's 2010 National Design
Triennial, Lupton also co-curated the museum's current sustainability
exhibition, Design for a Living World. Ellen Lupton's latest book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (2009), is co-authored with her twin sister, Julia; and her books Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008) and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself
(2006) are co-authored with her MFA students. Baltimore-based Lupton
and husband Abbott Miller, a partner in the design firm Pentagram, met
as students at The Cooper Union and collaborate on books, exhibitions,
and their kids Jay and Ruby.
How you deal with time is part of your identity. Are you a morning person or a night person? Are you always late or always early? Do you have a strong sense of each minute passing or do you lose yourself in activities--walking, talking, sleeping, shopping--and forget what day or hour it is? The answers are personal, but the behavior is social. When you're running late, it's often for an engagement involving other people: getting to work, meeting a client, picking up your kids from camp.
I didn't start wearing a watch until I was almost thirty, but I was rarely late because I always knew where clocks were stationed in delis, banks, and coffee shops. For centuries, church bells have signaled the passing of time; the bells are still tolling where I live in Baltimore, reminding the neighborhood every 15 minutes that time is, indeed, marching on. I recently hung an outdoor clock on my shingled garage as a civic offering to the countless morning dog-walkers who frequent our quiet street. Marking time is a social act.
Outdoor clock
Today, many people have decided to keep time with cell phones or PDAs instead of wristwatches. Most of these devices need to be woken up before you can check the time--a clumsier and more obvious action than glancing at your watch during a sleep-inducing seminar or sales pitch. The same people who use their iPhones as clocks are also likely to check their email during a dreary meeting or dull dinner date. The posture of someone "secretly" texting from under the table has become an indelible icon of distraction. We can't hear it, but we can certainly see it.
Onomatopoeia wristwatch, designed by M&Co, 1984
Some of us remain addicted to analog. Ruth Patkin, founder of NYC communications company Cowgirl Media, wears her Onomatopoeia wristwatch to work every day as an ever-present icon of creative possibility. Designed by M&Co, the watch substitutes tiny drawings for some of its numbers: a tree for three, a hand for five, a cat for nine, an egg for twelve. Patkin calls the watch a "magic talisman to call forth the genius of Maira Kalman [the M in M&Co] and ward off evil, uninspired thinking." The concrete, visual character of analog time-keeping helps keep her on schedule. "It's easier when I can actually see the hands moving around the circle, the minutes passing before my eyes." She also appreciates the low-tech visibility of printed wall calendars and her vintage black leather Filofax.
Green Sand hourglasses, CB2
Hourglasses are making a come-back as design objects. This one from CB2 does away with old-fashioned framing elements--it's all clear glass and green sand, styled after a chemistry lab beaker. In the latest Harry Potter movie, there's an hourglass that slows down when the conversation is interesting and speeds up when it starts to drone. Try programming that into your Blackberry. In short, time is always running out. Here are some slogans and sayings for making the most of the time we've got left.
Better never than late. This reversal of a familiar maxim comes from my friend Edward Bottone, a chef and food writer who cultivates old-school manners in our increasingly coarse and brutal age. Another friend (who will go unnamed) says that you aren't really late until ten minutes past the appointed time. Such staggered beginnings quickly get absorbed into a business culture (especially if it's the boss who is always late).
Life is long. The slogan "life is short" is a reminder to try new things and put mistakes behind you. My friend Claudia Matzko prefers the phrase "life is long." This successful artist and mother of four switched careers when she was in her late 40s, going to law school and starting a new life. (She also divorced her husband and found a fabulous new mate at age 51.) While some of us obsess about leaving youth behind, others are working on a long, productive Chapter Two.
Under an hour. Why are so many meetings scheduled for a full hour? You can have meaningful exchanges in twenty minutes, or twelve minutes, or even four-and-a-half. It's commonplace to start an hour-long meeting ten minutes late and let it run ten minutes over--and yet you could have finished the whole thing in the time spent waiting for everyone to show up. When meetings are necessary at all, try scheduling them for 2:20 instead of 2:00. People take specificity more seriously.
Don't do lunch. Chronic lunch meetings (even without the three martinis) are a source of permanent time loss. The so-called working lunch is padded with small talk and menu chatter. Often people ask to meet for lunch because they have a favor to ask, and they hope that the Chicken Caesar will soften the blow. Suggest tea instead, or just a phone call.
Love your deadlines. On a recent international flight, I met an Egyptian woman who was traveling from Cairo to a conference in D.C. for romance writers. Under the pen name Olivia Gates, she writes three to six Harlequin romances a year. Gates loves working against the clock, and she said that much as she loves to write, she would never give up her day job because creativity thrives in close spaces. (Her other career? Opthalmic surgeon.) Whatever you might think of her literary product, you've got to admire her discipline.
I'll close with a final word about one of my favorite activities: procrastination. Everyone does it, and it's a common source of shame and anxiety. Think about it this way: as soon as you begin fretting about not facing up to a dreaded task, you have actually begun working on it. You're gathering ideas, forming a strategy, sharpening your weapons. Delay is inevitable, so make the most of it. Procrastination won't hurt you as long as you start early.
This week, Ellen Lupton is exploring the Visibility Principle.
Whether you manage a big office or run your own show from home, you can
use it to enhance your productivity.
Ellen
Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA
program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). An
author and illustrator of numerous books, articles, and blogs on
design, she is populist critic, frequent lecturer, and 2007 AIGA Gold
Medalist. Now working on Cooper-Hewitt's 2010 National Design
Triennial, Lupton also co-curated the museum's current sustainability
exhibition, Design for a Living World. Ellen Lupton's latest book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (2009), is co-authored with her twin sister, Julia; and her books Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008) and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself
(2006) are co-authored with her MFA students. Baltimore-based Lupton
and husband Abbott Miller, a partner in the design firm Pentagram, met
as students at The Cooper Union and collaborate on books, exhibitions,
and their kids Jay and Ruby.
Desk of Christy MacLear, Executive Director, Philip Johnson Glass House Museum
Piles: Everyone gets them, and some of us admit it openly--and seek treatment. Christy MacLear, executive director of the Philip Johnson Glass House Museum in New Canaan, Connecticut, spent two years looking for an office desk that augments--rather than disguises--her piling ways. She describes her work style as "managing through piles." MacLear assigns each project its own stack of papers. "If I don't see them (they are in a cabinet) then the project might as well be in cold storage," she says. Many productivity experts agree that documents should stay more or less visible until you are finished using them. At that point, most papers can either be recycled or banished to closed filing cabinets.
Piles don't tend to be pretty. They eat up space on your desktop, sprawling out across every available surface like a ravenous suburb. And as piles grower deeper and taller, they stop being useful. Even when we defend our piles as essential outgrowths of our fast-moving minds, we know in our hearts that sooner or later, our piles will bury us alive if we don't control them. Confronting her problem head-on, MacLear commissioned industrial designer Leon Ransmeier to design a desk that acknowledges her stacking habit, yet gives it shape and structure.
Leon Ransmeier, desk for Christy MacLear, 2009
Submerged piles. Ransmeier created storage surfaces that slide out like drawers but have open sides like shelves. These roomy stacking trays are attached to runners along just one edge, providing more visibility and easier access than a full-fledged drawer. Ransmeier explains, "The contents of the desk remain in sight to a certain extent and so are never really 'gone.' The horizontal format is retained, preserving any inherent chronology, but the piles are suspended below the work surface, freeing up desk space." Will MacClear's papers be visible enough? Will she really keep the top of her new desk free and open, or will its surface remain an irresistible draw for stacks of stuff? Ransmeier is producing a limited number of desks for Richard Wright's contemporary commissions program, so a few lucky paper pilers will have a chance to try out the system for themselves.
Al Gore's office, illustration by Ellen Lupton from Design Your Life, 2009
Virtual piles. Some of the world's most productive people are pilers. Al Gore, for example, is a busy guy, with mounds of paper to prove it. Not only does Gore's home office harbor vast stacks of books and reports, he also has a triple computer screen. This super-sized virtual desktop allows him to move quickly between open documents and applications. Many creative workers stay productive by keeping their virtual piles spread out and easy to glance at on multiple screens. And many of us heap up our digital desktops with the documents that we want close at hand.
Jennifer Northrop's office, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Vertical piles. Not all piles are ugly. My colleague Jennifer Northrop is director of communications and marketing at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Neatly pinned to her office wall are dozens of printed materials created by the museum. When Northrop is talking on the phone or meeting with colleagues, she can look at physical evidence of the museum's brand, spread out evenly across the wall. Her work is laid out before her, visible to herself and to anyone who visits her office.
Whether sloppy or elegant, piles of paper occupy space. They can fill it up in a gluttonous frenzy or articulate it with clarity and order. Piles represent time as well as space. They don't just happen overnight. Like the strata of civilization exposed in an archaeological dig, piles of paper are the temporal residue of thinking and working. They are relics of projects that were once loved or abandoned, consummated or put to death. Tomorrow's post is about visualizing time, publicly and privately.
This week, Ellen Lupton is exploring the Visibility Principle.
Whether you manage a big office or run your own show from home, you can
use it to enhance your productivity.
Ellen
Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA
program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). An
author and illustrator of numerous books, articles, and blogs on
design, she is populist critic, frequent lecturer, and 2007 AIGA Gold
Medalist. Now working on Cooper-Hewitt's 2010 National Design
Triennial, Lupton also co-curated the museum's current sustainability
exhibition, Design for a Living World. Ellen Lupton's latest book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (2009), is co-authored with her twin sister, Julia; and her books Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008) and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself
(2006) are co-authored with her MFA students. Baltimore-based Lupton
and husband Abbott Miller, a partner in the design firm Pentagram, met
as students at The Cooper Union and collaborate on books, exhibitions,
and their kids Jay and Ruby.
Office in the kitchen, Julia Lupton, Irvine, California
When working at home, would you rather set up camp in the quiet retreat of your bedroom or in the busy, high-traffic zone of the kitchen? It turns out that women are more likely than men to put their laptops in the kitchen. Julia Lupton (my twin sister and co-author of our book Design Your Life) is a university professor who has an active workstation in her open-plan kitchen/family room. Although it may sound counterintuitive to work in a space where four children are buzzing about, Julia's kids demand less from her when they can see where she is than when she shuts herself off behind a closed door. "It's a question of visibility," she says. "They like being able to see me and they like knowing that an adult is around. If they need quick help opening a jar of peanut butter or snapping the head off a Barbie doll, it's no big deal. If I were walled up in a private room, the distractions would be more irritating."
In the lingo of office etiquette, "prairie dogs" are people who pop up over their cubicles to see what's happening on the other side. Prairie dogging is considered bad manners over at the cubicle farm, but here at home it works well for some families. Julia likes knowing that she can peer over her computer station to see what her own prairie pups are doing. (Meanwhile, her husband, who is also a college professor, prefers the protective silence of his upstairs study. Please, leave Dad alone.)
Illustration by Ellen Lupton from Design Your Life, (St. Martin's Griffin, 2009)
Some people who work at home would rather get out of the house altogether. Writing a business plan in your pj's has its charms, but the hum of the fridge can get oppressive. The Regus Group rents temporary office space to telecommuters and business travelers. The Brooklyn Writers Space provides members with a quiet spot (but not too quiet) to work alongside other writers. For a more informal approach, just try Starbucks, which has become a temporary office for work-at-home moms, mobile executives, and self-employed bohemians alike. Libraries are another option, and some will even sell you coffee. Sociologists call these sorts of environments "third places." They are neither home nor work but someplace other. Third places are public--you can go there to see and be seen and yet maintain some level of personal autonomy.
Karen Chekerdjian, temporary hotel workstation, Jordan
Autonomy is just what Karen Chekerdjian was craving when she created a mobile workstation out of wicker. This designer from Lebanon found herself living for an extended time in a hotel in Jordan. Her simple desk and chair unit--equipped with a high back and a place to stash books and papers--gave her a measure of symbolic privacy while she worked amidst the public life of the hotel lobby.
Today's most popular third places may be Facebook and Twitter. Social media offer the promise--and risk--of constant visibility. Skillfully used, social media let you share what you're thinking and doing in a relaxed, non-pushy way. Used poorly, social media are a huge open pit for killing time and an embarrassing outlet for T.M.I. Diarrhea of the keyboard, anyone?
While a growing number of workers have official telecommuting relationships with their employers, nearly everyone is doing some kind of "work" at home, whether it's bringing extra tasks back from the office or doing homework, paying bills, or pursuing freelance gigs. In tomorrow's post I'll look at how the Visibility Principle can help you keep track of what's happening on your desk.
This week, Ellen Lupton is exploring the Visibility Principle.
Whether you manage a big office or run your own show from home, you can
use it to enhance your productivity.
Ellen
Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA
program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). An
author and illustrator of numerous books, articles, and blogs on
design, she is populist critic, frequent lecturer, and 2007 AIGA Gold
Medalist. Now working on Cooper-Hewitt's 2010 National Design
Triennial, Lupton also co-curated the museum's current sustainability
exhibition, Design for a Living World. Ellen Lupton's latest book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (2009), is co-authored with her twin sister, Julia; and her books Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008) and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself
(2006) are co-authored with her MFA students. Baltimore-based Lupton
and husband Abbott Miller, a partner in the design firm Pentagram, met
as students at The Cooper Union and collaborate on books, exhibitions,
and their kids Jay and Ruby.
Design studio offices, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2006. Photo by Greg Beckel.
Can chiffon drapes be a productivity tool? At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, private offices for curators and administrators are shielded by glass and shrouded behind translucent curtains in cupcake colors such as lavender, periwinkle, goldenrod, and red. "The drapes are made from inexpensive chiffon--like a prom dress," says Andrew Blauvelt, who is a curator at the Walker as well as the museum's director of design. Blauvelt designed the curtain scheme and chose the open plan furnishings, working with architects HGA and Herzog & de Meuron, who designed the interiors.
"In another part of the building, we tried installing bands of frosted film," explains Blauvelt, "The problem was, people would bend down to look under the bands to see if anyone was in the office." Not cool--like peering under the door of a toilet stall to see if it's occupied. The chiffon curtains allow visibility, but not too much (again, like a prom dress). The office interior is visible through the chiffon when it's viewed head on. Viewed from an angle, the ripple-fold curtains become opaque.
I recently toured the offices at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, a place legendary for its people-friendly facilities. The Google complex provides workers with many places to gather informally. Designers and engineers could meet, say, in a space-age couch shaped like a giant donut, or in a playroom equipped with Legos and homemade building toys. As at the Walker, some Google offices have glass walls, but instead of curtains, they are tinted deep yellow. Perhaps this design provides too much visibility--some workers have taped up large pieces of paper, shielding from view expanses of yellow glass.
Research conducted by Herman Miller, Inc., the modern furniture company based in Zeeland, Michigan, has shown that workers have more social interactions when their workspaces are visible to each other and linked along a central path rather than organized as a maze of small enclosures. Although collaboration is a key to innovation, not all social exchanges are useful or creative. In Japan, most white-collar workers share office space with supervisors and colleagues, an arrangement said to encourage conformity. On the hit comedy The Office, workers endlessly interact but rarely get anything done, spending most of their time teasing and tormenting each other to distraction. A pink chiffon curtain between Jim and Dwight might be just what the doctor ordered.
This week, Ellen Lupton is exploring the Visibility Principle.
Whether you manage a big office or run your own show from home, you can
use it to enhance your productivity.
Ellen
Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA
program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). An
author and illustrator of numerous books, articles, and blogs on
design, she is populist critic, frequent lecturer, and 2007 AIGA Gold
Medalist. Now working on Cooper-Hewitt's 2010 National Design
Triennial, Lupton also co-curated the museum's current sustainability
exhibition, Design for a Living World. Ellen Lupton's latest book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (2009), is co-authored with her twin sister, Julia; and her books Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008) and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself
(2006) are co-authored with her MFA students. Baltimore-based Lupton
and husband Abbott Miller, a partner in the design firm Pentagram, met
as students at The Cooper Union and collaborate on books, exhibitions,
and their kids Jay and Ruby.
Shown above is the desk of Alicia Cheng, a graphic designer whose Brooklyn-based firm MGMT creates exhibitions, publications, and identities for cultural clients. Cheng's desk may be cluttered, but it's beautiful. A pile of paper sits next to her keyboard. Books lean against a sorting tray. The wall is covered with calendars, contact sheets, works in progress, and odd bits of inspiration. Cheng's desk is an image of her busy, productive mind. It is a simple, direct manifestation of how designers think.
Many people believe that design is about how things look. Is a laptop, logo, or coffee mug pink or green, classic or contemporary, dumpy or sleek? Designers will tell you that design goes way deeper than appearances. Design is about thinking. It's about strategy and structure and systems.
Yet thinking itself often takes a visible form. Many people do their best thinking with a pen, pencil, or keyboard. By making ideas visible, we make them concrete, giving thought an understandable shape. From quick sketches to detailed blueprints, visualization is an essential tool for thinking. It's also a tool for communicating. A project team creating a new software application might compile a wall of PostIt notes to collaborate and brainstorm. Teachers use chalkboards to explain how a bill becomes a law, and kids learn to add and subtract by drawing pictures of apples and oranges. With that in mind--and in sight--here are four visibility principles for organization.
Show, don't tell. A sign saying "Show, don't tell" hangs in my daughter's fifth-grade classroom. Generations of writers have embraced this slogan, learning to build an argument or tell a story using concrete actions and images rather than disembodied abstractions. ("The dog wagged his tail" trumps "The dog was happy.") Thinking and communicating with examples that people can see--whether through literal pictures or mental ones--works better than trafficking in generalized "objectives," "goals," and other corporate vagaries.
See and be seen. Work is a social activity. Even writers, whose work requires periods of sacred isolation (fifteen minutes is often all we can find), also crave the buzz and jangle of people and public places. Everyone values some degree of privacy, but in today's workspaces, people are increasingly visible to each other, not only through direct contiguity (Sheila's desk is next to Fred's desk) but also through social media and networked devices.
Out of sight, out of mind...for a while. The stuff sitting on Alicia Cheng's desk and hanging on her wall is stuff she wants to keep in mind and find easily. The problem is, many of us post photos and reminders on our bulletin boards and soon stop looking at them. Eventually, even materials staring you in the face become invisible, fading into the background like a pee-stained rug. A vital personal workspace is constantly changing, inspiring you to keep looking.
Make a list. (You're reading one.) Lists are one of the oldest genres of written communication. Long before people wrote down poetry, they were keeping track of flocks of sheep and bales of hay. Freeform and non-linear, lists are quick to make and easy to absorb. The act of writing a list helps you kick-start your memory and ignite new ideas. To-do lists are interactive: we often put things on lists for the sheer pleasure of crossing them out.
This week, Ellen Lupton is exploring the Visibility Principle. Whether you manage a big office or run your own show from home, you can use it to enhance your productivity.
Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). An author and illustrator of numerous books, articles, and blogs on design, she is populist critic, frequent lecturer, and 2007 AIGA Gold Medalist. Now working on Cooper-Hewitt's 2010 National Design Triennial, Lupton also co-curated the museum's current sustainability exhibition, Design for a Living World. Ellen Lupton's latest book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (2009), is co-authored with her twin sister, Julia; and her books Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008) and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006) are co-authored with her MFA students. Baltimore-based Lupton and husband Abbott Miller, a partner in the design firm Pentagram, met as students at The Cooper Union and collaborate on books, exhibitions, and their kids Jay and Ruby.
MB: We did
talk about what the message should be, but both the design team and the client
team thought, at the time, that there could be nothing more neutral than simply
the name of the country you're entering. Other messages might raise language
issues, or seem overtly provocative. Being provocative was the last thing on our
minds. By the way, if you're looking for potentially provocative messages that
our country shoves in people's faces at border crossings, I'd call your
attention to one of my least favorite recent designs, the design of the new U.S.
passport. It's filled with eagles, flags, passages from historic documents and
aphorisms that may be heartfelt statements of patriotism, but they are
absolutely anything but neutral.
All this
aside, I want to stress that I'm hesitant to second guess any of our officers
who've been charged with keeping us safe. I learned my own lesson about this.
Ten years ago, we got an assignment to create a wayfinding system for lower
Manhattan. One of the elements in the system we designed was a 4-sided sign,
small, about six feet tall, to provide information about nearby destinations.
When we were picking locations for the signs, I was told that none of these
4-sided ones would be allowed on the World Trade Center site. When we asked
why, we were told that the security people there, still on alert after the 1993
bombing, were concerned that the signs could be used to conceal some kind of
explosive device. I remember thinking privately that they were being overly
paranoid. All the rest of our signs were installed by the summer of 2001. Then
came September 11, and I remember thinking that maybe it was impossible to be
too paranoid, even about something as seemingly harmless as signs.
