This seminar aims to provide an intense and entertaining orientation towards reading and writing for practicing designers. In the course of the seminar we will focus on the activity of reading and experiment with different forms of writing and also with the material and social circulation of our discourse (as discussion in the classroom and as texts we produce). We will aim to make a space together to step outside of the constraints of studio work, to build concepts and ask questions and develop positions that may be directed back towards worlds of practice, design and otherwise. Or we’ll just do it for its own sake.

Reading

The seminar will be organized around the close reading of a set of texts taken from different discourses — texts sometimes explicitly about design but more frequently about adjacent and intersecting things like labor, technology, identity, politics, and ecology — to better understand the things that condition design practice and give it its horizon of possibility in the world. This seminar is an experiment in what might happen when “silly” designers closely read and intensely engage with “serious” texts. We may also give attention to writing by contemporary designers who understand their work as theoretical and critical projects, practices that produce theory and writing alongside design. An attendant aim of the course therefore is to get an inkling of what critical positions structure contemporary design practice.

We will be spending most of our time together talking about what we’ve read. It can be a rare experience to read and discuss without the burden of making and producing: we will think about ways we can convivially construct a space for this free activity of discourse, for this amateur hour for critical theory.

Writing

There will be an emphasis on writing and the various generic and experimental forms it can take. We will write each week and play with diverse short forms of exposition — letters, rants, polemics, comics, slogans, reviews, hypertexts, dialogues, and visual essays. We might think of writing as a form that can be understood as a sibling or cousin to design, or as governed by design. And we might also experiment with different softwares, formats, and platforms for the production and circulation of our writing, thinking critically about the constraints each of these imposes on its content. This interest in these specificities of the production and circulation of writing (something we might generally name as *publishing*) relates to the theory / practice link. We are interested in the material and social form that concepts contingently take in the world and how these forms shape their content.

Writing, among other things, can be understood as a technique to engender senses of a “self” or selves. As you work out different styles of writing, as you compose a “voice” or voices in response to our readings, we’ll think about how material, graphic, and aesthetic dimensions of writing can also help constitute this voice or self — a voice or a self that didn’t exist previously — and one that is always in relation with other selves and voices. Can we self-publish for selves that multiple and mutable? Can we write in a collective voice, in plural voices?

Discussion



Each class three students will introduce the week’s reading. These students should be prepared to walk us through the various points of the reading and, especially, to point us towards passages that might open up our discussion. These passages can be ones that especially interest you and/or ones that seemed unclear. Discussion is huge part of this seminar. We are practicing not only how to read and write but how to critically talk about design and about the world.

We will be attentive to making an ethics of discussion —


• Let’s build a dialogue.

• Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

• Listen.

• Be generous and compassionate in your responses.

• Strive for clarity.

• Feel free to talk about something you’re not yet sure of.

• etc.!