Tag Archives: design

China, design

Return for Regrooving

Leave a comment

I am employed as a design professor at NSCAD, a small visual arts university in Halifax, a city that hangs off the edge of eastern North America. The global economic downturn has disrupted, to say the least, many of our dreams and aspirations. In education, this means that belts need to tighten because some schools were using stock market investment income to cover operating budgets. NSCAD University, as a public institution that had not kept up with endowment giving, did not fall into this trap. Our problem is that the construction (and shortcuts taken at that time) of the Port Campus several years ago has resulted in a serious budget shortfall.

In April, our President, David P. Smith, established an ad hoc “task force” to look at ways the university could save money with as little impact as possible upon the student experience. I sat in the meetings and while many of the suggestions brought forward were good, and everyone understands the profound difficulties facing us, I could not help but wonder if how different our discussions would be if, instead of try to patch a system that has been running for 122 years (with all its patches, grafts and compromises), we were given a budget and a mandate to start fresh and build a school from scratch?

Shanghai Institute of Visual ArtsLast October, during my swing through China to promote NSCAD and our Master of Design program, I visited the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts (SIVA), with the help of a recent MDes graduate, Feichen Wong. SIVA is a new university affiliated with Fudan University, one of China’s top ten schools. To establish the school, the central government gave Fudan about 60 million dollars for capital infrastructure. The result is three postmodern buildings in suburban Shanghai’s University Park. I met with Zhuang Liang Xiao, Executive Vice-President and Zhang Tong, Dean of School of Spatial and Industrial Design.

Prof. Zhang told me that he enjoyed having the opportunity to re-envision a new school; they tried to design the institution with fresh eyes and with a knowledge that graduates will be faced with 21st century challenges. SIVA is organized into a number of Colleges, Academies, Departments and Institutes: the College of Communication Design, a Digital Media Institute, the College of Space and Industrial Design, the Fashion Institute of Design, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Departments of Performing Arts and Fine Art, a Graphic Information Center, and a Management Training Center. I was not able to determine why one area was an “Institute” and the other an “Academy.”

I left SIVA with a sense of envy, and it made me wonder what it would be like to be given a blank sheet of paper: could I do better? Granted, it’s one thing to rebuild with a $60 million cheque in your pocket, compared to owing a million or more. And I do not for a moment think that the money given to my Chinese collegues is in any way unencumbered; I am not sure which is better, to be rich yet loaded down by thousands of years of educational practice that merits copying over originality, or as NSCAD is, impoverished yet embued with a tradition of spirit of creative optimism—perhaps NSCAD is better off in the long run?

design

A Homage to the Illustrators of Time

Leave a comment

TIME magazine coverWhen I was a boy of 7, Friday was my favourite day of the week for two reasons: first of all, that morning was garbage collection, and for taking in the empty garbage cans, I earned an allowance of a dime, and second, it was the day of the week that the latest edition of TIME magazine was delivered to our house.

I loved looking at the covers, which, in the early 1960’s, were almost always hand illustrated. Some were sombre, some were funny and others were crazy, almost fearsome.

But what I most enjoyed were the maps and visualizations by Jerry Donovan, V. Puglisi and R.M. Chapin, Jr. I saved some of these in a scrapbook, and they are shown below. I’ve not been able to discover much about the three; I’ve managed to find nothing on V. Puglisi. Jerry Donovan is mentioned in an article from the AIGA on “The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway“: Donovan was one of the judges of the 1964 system map competition. That’s pretty much everything I could find about him. There’s more on R.M. Chapin, including an account about how he had created a map of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight from liftoff to landing, without being told where the landing took place…the secretive Soviets kept the location of the landing site to themselves, but Chapin, an experienced cartographer, correctly calculated the spot from the orbit angles, time of the flight and the earth’s rotation during that time.

These maps and visualizations gave me an appetite for science, technology and politics. As a boy, during the summer breaks, I made my own maps and documented them with a narrative from events in my young life. These images have stayed with me and, I’m sure, influenced me in my educational and career choices.

In 1966, a change in advertising regulations forced Time to stop distributing its Canada edition. Not long after that, the subscription lapsed, and that part of my life was over.

In the 1970’s, when I was a fine art student at the University of Guelph, the work of these great illustrators came back into my remembrance when Paul Hess (now an Associate Professor at Emily Carr) mentioned J. Donovan in a conversation in the Printshop in the basement of Zavitz Hall. For an instant I wondered how Paul could have known about him—these names had been internalized in such a way as to make it seem that I had dreamt-up the whole thing.