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. Or we might just write. 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 generically 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.

We will begin the semester with a series of writing exercises that ask you to produce a piece of writing in accordance with open instructions for response to the week’s reading. From this guided beginning you will find your own direction in terms of how to relate your writing to the reading, and your writing to itself as the series unfolds across the semester. But there is always this principal constraint: the writing must in some sense follow the reading.

Some more constraints:
Each writing exercise should be between 500 and 1000 words.
Each writing exercise should be titled.
Each writing exercise should be printed on a letter-sized sheet

Each week before class, you will print three copies of your writing exercise. You’ll keep one, give one to me, and give the other to another student in the class. In this way we try to get a sense of what our classmates are writing about and establish a dialogue. We will practice writing in relation to each other as a community of readers. Everyone wlll keep an archive of everything they produce and receive.

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?

Publishing

As a final project, we will collect our writing, along with the readings, and edit and design and illustrate and annotate and print and finally circulate these texts as a set of zines.

Discussion

Each class three students will introduce the week’s reading, not by summarizing the whole thing, but by pointing us towards a passage that will open up our discussion. These passages can be ones that especially interest you and/or ones that seem unclear. Introduce the passage and frame it with a question. 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.!