Looking for design examples….. they are all over, some really bad.



This is an old argument with a lot of criticism, but I’l re-estate it:



A doctor is a doctor not because he has a course in medicine or because he, once or twice a year has prescribed drugs or has made a diagnosis. You don’t trust your illness to a doctor that does not have a daily practice as a doctor because you know that this casuistic (process) is fundamental for his ability to diagnose and prescribe.

If you have a legal problem you don’t go to a friend that took the law course in the eighties and teaches in a law university. You go to a proper lawyer because you don’t want to end up in jail (unless you’re Roger Stone). You make this choice because you know the “process” has a lot to do with “experience”, “practice”, “know-how + know-why”.

A musician is a musician not because he knows how to play an instrument but because he plays music every day, several hours a day. And playing music is not only playing the instrument; the “process” also implies listening to others people’s music, reading scores, practicing the instrument, read about music, trying new models of his instrument, think about music, discuss music with other musicians, finding gigs, planning tours, rehearsing with groups, collect Money from previous gigs, Spotify, etc. And in the end, the most difficult part… have found - by practicing all this every day – a singular voice that interests some listeners.
If you play in an orchestra you don’t call yourself a musician, you say you’re a player: you can play an instrument really well, follow directions and you like to be in the army. You can be also a producer, a music critic, a music teacher, agente, manager, editor, etc.

Somehow in the case of a designer, it’s seems to held true in this list that you’re a designer because you study design, teach design or because once or twice you made an “experiment” with your students or a logo for your friends bio-gluten-free-fair-trade weed. Not because you get out of bed 5 days a week and you go to a design studio and you work 40 hours a week in it. That’s the process like in other activities: devote your life to it (with no guarantee of success)

Being a designer means you have to practice design it every day. “Process" every day: with companies, institutions or individuals that have a situation that can be improved (also) with/by design. And design is done in context and has constrains you work with constrains imposed by other, by money, by personalities, by contexts. And not everyone that works in the design studios, companies or institutions are designers. And just like a musician, read about design, think about design, talk to other designers, try new technologies, look for interesting examples, draw, listen a podcast about design, Everyday.

A designer is a rare breed (as a doctor or a musician). Most of the people cannot make it, cannot stay in practice for 10 years. Most of the people that is trained has a designer in a university will never be a designer as most of the people trained in literature will never be a writer or a poet.



Best regards and a nice summer to all of you,



Gonçalo





> On 9 Jul 2020, at 19:56, Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> On Jul 9, 2020, at 11:49 AM, Salisbury, Martin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
> quoting Terry:
>>> An obvious example in graphic design is in typesetting where, in a book, the
>>> thousands of interacting design decisions about kerning that used to be
>>> undertaken by humans are now undertaken automatically."
>> 
>> Rather than being an ‘obvious example’, it’s actually a very poor example. I'm wondering whether it might help, and indeed help to inform your other arguments about 'agency', if you could understand the difference between typesetting and designing a book? This kind of confusion seems to be at the root of a great deal of what you write.
> 
> Martin,
> 
> I generally stay out of arguments about what is design and who is a designer for a bunch of reasons including the drift of definitions between contexts and specialties. You and I would make the distinction between (graphic) design and typesetting although, for many years now, typesetting has become an activity that is usually taken on by designers. But the activities that we might separate from “real design” work—say, typesetting and production—are in many ways akin to the activities called design in fields like architecture and engineering.
> 
> I don’t know if Terry would claim your typesetting/design distinction is a remnant of the old days of pasteup but he also argued that he had not been involved in pasteup since the 1970s. If he did print design, he must have lived in a truly advanced civilization: I am fairly sure that a poster I did in 1989 was the first offset litho print job in Los Angeles to be processed direct-to-film, thus no “camera ready art” involved. The earliness of broad involvement of computers in graphic design has been somewhat exaggerated in many histories.
> 
> 
> Gunnar
> 
> Gunnar Swanson
> East Carolina University 
> graphic design program
> 
> http://www.art.ecu.edu
> [log in to unmask]
> 
> Gunnar Swanson Design Office
> 1901 East 6th Street
> Greenville NC 27858
> USA
> 
> http://www.gunnarswanson.com
> [log in to unmask]
> +1 252 258-7006
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Gonçalo Falcão  PhD Design

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Departamento de Design  Department of Design

Faculdade de Arquitetura  Lisbon School of Architecture

Universidade de Lisboa  University of Lisbon

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