Revision, Expression
& Portfolio Design
Schedule
Syllabus
Investigations
at home
in class
Tutorials
Cartoon Set
A portfolio is a designed object. Whether it is printed or digital, the portfolio is a formatted interface that communicates to an audience via images, text, and perhaps hyperlinks to external files. A “cartoon set” allows you to explore the sequence of images and consider their relation in advance of finalizing or developing them. This exercise allows you to consider the narrative flow of images to determine what elements of the story each image should convey.
Joseph Muller-Brockmann, Grid Systems in Graphic Design, 1961.
These cartoon sets help you gather your work into a format that can be reviewed and discussed, and to identify existing images that might need to be reworked or new images the might need to be developed. In this way, the cartoon set is also a way to organize work to be completed, and assists you with scheduling your effort over the course of the quarter.
Folio Cartoon Set
- Who is the intended audience for this document?
Is it for you? What is your interest? For example, are you using this as a feedback loop to take stock of your own work and see if any themes emerge?
Is it for an outside audience? For example, are you using the folio to support an application to a graduate school, to a professional practice or office, to a gallerist, for a grant, for a conference?
- Given the audience, what messages are the priority. For example, what content is necessary to establish the minimum viable prototype for feedback from that audience.
- Collect all of your previous work.
- How many projects should you include? Is there work you are including or excluding, and what is your criteria?
- Choose a format. e.g. ISO A3, ISO A4, ISO A5, 7x7, 5x5, 16:10, etc.
- In that format, sketch the sequence, size, and relation between images of each project. These sketches can be schematic -- i.e. they can be frames containing notes about content or techniques, schematics, or representative images if you have them. This can be done by sketching on paper, by printing and collaging and pasting onto paper, or using software like InDesign.
Project Cartoon Set(s)
The arrangement of images and text can establish visual relationships between various strands of information or processes of development. In that way a project’s layout can have an implied or explicit narrative structure that creates relationships between different viewpoints, different scales, different temporal frames, or different modes of thought or design. For example it can relate:
- Why?
What observations (via documentation) informed your motivation for the project. Was there a philosophical, pedagogical, ecological, humanitarian, aesthetic or other series of questions that inspired your approach to the project. Did you establish criteria to evaluate the work? Are there diagrams or other conceptual drawings that communicate this?
- What?
What are the “active ingredients” of the project? What mediums, objects, materials, etc. give the form of the project its agency. Is the work intended to be complete and self-contained? Is it intended to be resolved, experimental, a didactic model, or an open framework for you or others to engage?
- How?
How have you (or might you) developed the project’s active ingredients, independently and in relation, to accomplish something? What tactics, processes, permutations, iterations, controls, techniques or technologies have you engaged or created to assist with development? What images, drawings, or other objects of development should you include to communicate the way the project has been conceived?
Formats
21 Words / 2 Images
Prior to our first session, I would like to collect some raw material to support in-person introductions, discussions, and some quick workshops. This should take only a few minutes of your time. I’ve prepared a Google Presentation to make it easy to collect your responses, here. Also, to facilitate you may simply copy and paste the three template slides I created and edit them with your content.
Twenty-One (21) Words
For each of the following three (3) questions, respond with seven (7) words or short phrases.
For the sake of the workshop, your response should be anonymous.
- Why?
What interests motivate your practice, activities or work?
For example, would you say you are interested in or motivated by political, ecological, pedagogical, ethical, humanitarian, professional, philosophical, aesthetic, or other aims, actions, or interests ? Even if these interests don’t intuitively align with work you’ve made so far, it is helpful to know what motivates you to engage or act.
- What ?
What disciplines, or disciplinary forms have you engaged, or would like to engage?
For example, these could be disciplines or mediums, like architecture, drawing, urbanism, music, painting, sculpture, policy, law, photography, fiction, stand-up comedy, improv, psychogeography, cinematography, etc. (OR) a form/format within that discipline or medium, e.g. building sections, perspectival projections, villanelles, graphic narratives, short films, fugues, cartographic mapping, etc....
- How ?
What techniques, or approaches have you developed, engaged, or interest you?
For example, these could be techniques that you enjoy within a medium, like collage, color field painting, etching, slide guitar, sound recordings of walks, inflatable sculptures, origami, (OR) a strategy, tactic, or trope like, serial repetition, subversion, humor, irony, paradoxy, sabotage, writing instructions, etc.
Two (2) Images
- An image of something you’ve made that fulfilled your interests or expectations.
- An image of something you’ve made that has a lot of potential but that you’d really like to revisit, re-work, or develop more deeply.
Development Workshop
Overview:
What drawings and/or models or other constructions are crucial to develop and refine the project?What techniques of drawing or modeling allow you to deeply understand the physical qualities of materials and/or systems and gain control over a process of composing with them ?
For next week make a serious attempt to produce those process drawings or models.
Instructions:
Today we will identify these crucial developmental platforms and their potential in rounds of 20 min exchanges.
Framing questions:
Why and Who would find this work to be meaningful , significant, impactful, or relevant? Is this project design-based research to build capacities or enable subsequent work? Is it a theoretical or didactic model of an idea or proposition? Is it a proposal for some specific context, client, community or site? What crucial question or hypothesis is at stake? Where is the site of this project, is it literal or imaginary, is it geographical or theoretical?
What are the active physical ingredients of the project. (Site elements, materials, systems, forces, energies, etc.) ?
How do techniques of drawing or modeling help you understand and elaborate on the nuances of those active ingredients and help you to compose with them to generate a range of possible outcomes, effects, aesthetics, etc?
Projective Project
Instructions:
1. Exchange revised Project Statements with a colleague.2. Daydream and Write or Draw
What is the story of the project? What is the motivation? What systems or disciplines does it engage? What techniques or processes does it involve and how do these fulfill the motivation?
From the description, can you imagine what kinds of drawings, images, activities, processes, or other aspects you would see ? Can you extraopolate or interpolate from the description to imagine them? Is the work spare, or lush, minimal or exuberant, messy or precise, forceful or gentle?
Your Dream Project
Why? What? How? Interpretion
Below are three project statements. Read them all and choose one that you prefer.
How does (a) discipline/mediums and (b) techniques of the project fullfill the (c) motivations conveyed ? Can you trace individual connections between these aspects and consolidate that connection within a single sentence? If not immediately clear, can you interpolate or extrapolate those connections? From the project description, can you gain a sense of their overall ambitions in practice, i.e. the concerns that drive them to engage in this discipline or profession, or the reason they prefer certain techniques or strategies over others ?
Example #1
In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, [----] radically reconfigures the typical library layout. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building.
The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert's project.
However beautiful, Albert's campus is windy, cold and empty. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to 'inhabit' it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building.
To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network.
These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then 'urbanized' almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below.
In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario.
Through its scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops.
Example #2
Parliaments, assemblies, or other types of discussion spaces have usually been thought of from an exclusively human point of view. Debates are always led by humans around human issues. But the latest revelations from science, ecology, and climatology studies are calling into question the viability of this anthropocentric policy in favor of other, more plural and diverse cosmovisions.
Crxnolxne tries to echo these new perspectives in the construction of the new auditorium for the FRAC Center – Val de Loire museum, the third collection of modern and contemporary architecture after MoMA and the Center Pompidou. To achieve this, the project is organized through three fundamental design strategies:
1. Multispecies enclosure: The skin that surrounds and defines the scope of the new auditorium is built through a multiplicity of elements against the typically modern homogenization. Flowers, branches, shells, toys, or plastic animals coexist in the exterior enclosure demanding their presence in the debates.
2. Transparency: Debates should not only involve those directly interested. To do this, the exterior enclosure opens through large windows or openings that open the field of vision to those who are outside, literally and symbolically, inviting them to participate while moving away from the closed image characteristic of this type of space.
3. Assembly: In the same way, the classic unidirectional organization of auditoriums, with the focus on a single speaker, makes the emergence of horizontal forms of discussion difficult. The project incorporates as its main furniture a perimeter bench that snakes around the museum structure and enables a multitude of focal points and crossed dialogues in addition to freeing up the central space, thus allowing the incorporation of other forms of representation at specific moments.
Example #3
At least one version of Modernism began with a public greenhouse, a so-called crystal palace with steel painted sky blue. This is aluminum. No paint, although possibly someday. Lighter. Recyclable. Reflective in the right lighting. Easier to carry and put together. Made from a kit of parts. Imbued with Gothic clarity, maybe. Crystalline-ish. Crystal Lite. 290 pieces, bolted connections. Manufactured in a factory. Assembled on site within a week. An instant bubble. An atmosphere. An environment. A totalizing experience. Ol factory. Designed to move, to travel almost anywhere. And plants can visit from anywhere. An instant garden. An instant community. A community greenhouse. An exotic display of difference. A collective. A place for people to visit to restore themselves and unwind and work and meditate and rest. An allotment to grow food, outside of the marketplace, outside of work. An alternate economy. A place to cultivate care. The possibility of something better.
Why? What? How? Description
To facilitate initial development and coordinate discussion, this exercise will take the form of three paragraphs.
Each paragraph should not exceed 150 words.
What observations about the world informed the reason for the work? Were you influenced by any significant references, texts, philosophies, data, research or other materials? What motivated you to act? Was it a commitment to something humanitarian, ecological, social, historical, urbanistic, psychological, aesthetic, political, etc.? Was it a curiosity or interest? Were you motivated by something true, but unexpected?
What discipline, mediums, systems, infrastructures or typologies did you engage and why did you engage it? What agency does that discipline or medium (etc.) have to support or challenge your motivations?
How did you develop strategies and tactics to imbue that medium, material, or actions with agency in fullfillment? How did give order or shape materials, processes, systems, to generate aesthetic, techincal, or practical outcomes in relation to the observations and motivations you described earlier.
Rewrite the Project Statement for next week.
Projective Portfolio
Instructions:
1. Exchange Revised Statements of Practice with a colleague.2. Daydream and Write or Draw
You’re a graphic designer. You’ve received a statement of practice from a potential client and they’d like to commission your help with their portfolio, website, and perhaps a monograph. You’v received only this text but haven’t yet received any images of their work.
After reading the statement, would you like to work with them? What about their statement piques your interest? What kind of personality does their statement suggest? Do they seem humorous or serious, gregarious or silent, sarcastic or earnest, light or heavy, etc.?
From the description, can you imagine what their work might look like? Can you extraopolate or interpolate to describe the kinds of images you imagine? Are they spare, or lush, minimal or exuberant, messy or precise, forceful or gentle?
What disciplines or mediums do you imagine they’d engage? What kind of projects do you imagine they’ve completed? What kinds of collaborations or milieu might their work engage?
If you do get to assist with a monograph, do you imagine it will be important to document the act/action of performing the work in addition to the product of work? Can you imagine them at work? What activites might their work involve?
Your Dream Practice
Instructions:
1. Improvised Introduction
Image you will introduce a person to an audience at a conference. You’ve received 21 words and phrases that describe (a) what motivates their work (b) what kind of medium or discipline interests them and (c) what tactics, techniques, or approaches they take to accomplish their goals. Write a 180-210 word introduction.
2. Writing Back
You will be presenting to an audience at a conference. The organizers are very proactive, they’ve sent you a draft of a Practice Statement they plan to use for social media, a publication, and for speakers to introduce you to audiences. They are considerate and have requested your input. You are not entirely satisfed. Rewrite it. It must be no more than 210 words.
4. Language as a Medium of Communication:
Congratulations! Your edits have been accepted and your bio has been published. Perusing the conference materials you are now seeing the practice statements of others. In addition to conveying information, many statements intentionally leverage a narrative voice and tone in explicit or nuanced ways to communicate another layer of information -- e.g about personality, poetics, or emotions. In what ways does voice and tone alter your understanding or impression of their motivation, interests, tactics, and techniques?
Luckily you’ve received another invitation to speak. Rewrite your statement of practice for next week.
Example #1
If given the choice between staring blankly into space or reading architects’ office statements on their website, we choose the first. They all say the same thing: we’re sustainable, responsible with budgets, experienced, award-winning, etc…. The game seems to be how to say nothing in particular and comfort any worries of someone contemplating hiring you. After a few clicks, it’s hard not to think that all this quote-unquote professionalism is very cold at its core. We can’t tell you exactly when [____] started. We like to say it was 2003, sometimes we say 2005, but we were drifting from place to place, we didn’t have an office space then and our name was !@#?, which we quickly found was too difficult to use because 1. you couldn’t pronounce it and 2. you couldn’t get a Web address. In 2008, we were licensed and became a legal entity, but we had already had an office and made some buildings. At some point, we drifted towards [____] – an acronym of our names and reflection of a shared desire to be horizontal and fuzzy, as opposed to tall and shiny. We began around an oversized table, a surface for collecting, gathering, and working through a range of design experiments – a make-believe of architectural fantasies, problems, and thoughts. We are now located in New York, we have grown a little, but remain around a large table, working together on each project through playful experimentation and serious research. We have won some awards. We have written some books. We have built some buildings. We are currently making more. This website indexes that work: housing; schools; houses; cultural institutions; retail; exhibition design; installations; furniture; objects; books; writing; software experiments; and videos.
Example #2
[____] is a team of architects, thinkers, and makers. They gather around their love of people and objects—all things made, unmade, seen, unseen, dismissed. [____] upcycles. [____] makes sustainable, soulful architecture through the transformation of industrial infrastructural objects and systems. They work with the ordinary.
[____] ’s projects range from artists’ installations with artists; through families’ houses families; through communities’ cultural projects, civic institutions, and museums. [____] ’s practice has developed work from their hometown of New York City around the world, from Australia, through China to South Africa.
[____] ’s team is a tight-knit group of designers who bring their diverse voices, sensibilities, and heritages to this common project. [____] ’s founding partners, [____] and [____] , live and work in New York; grew up in Naples, Italy; teach at Columbia University’s GSAPP; and have been practicing together since 1993.
[____] ’s work has been recognized by awards and accolades, from the Architecture League’s Emerging Voices, to The New York American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honor Awards; and is featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. [____] ’s second monograph, in collaboration with Thomas de Monchaux and published by The Monacelli Press, is O+O: Objects + Operations.
Example #3
[____] is a conceptual artist and was born October 9th, 1953 in Paris, France.
Her father was an oncologist as well as an art collector while her mother was a book critic.
[____] studied under Jean Baudrillard instead of going to university and later found her love for photography.
After travelling in her twenties, she was inspired by the work of artist Duane Michals. She began working on photography, with no though or intent to pursue it as a career.
Her first established work, Suite Venitienne (1979), occurred when she followed a random man from Paris to Venice while disguised, secretly photographing him throughout the adventure.
Her work consists of following people around, obsessing over them and their actions, photographing them commonly without them knowing - in their natural habitat.
[____] work is not only of photography, but also literature. [____] is a successful writer with many books published, with her photography incorporated in some as well.
Today she teaches film and photography in Switzerland at the European Graduate School.