#rob giampietro

[walkerartcenter]

Meme culture. Corporate structures. Typographic artistry. Local vernaculars. Post-truth politics. How do we navigate such disparate realities as designers? How do we create finite structures—small ecosystems—in which these ideas can sit side by side, both dependent on and independent of each other? The five designers featured in this year’s Insights lecture series lead practices that epitomize this challenge. We’ll take you inside the creative team of one of the world’s largest tech companies, through the looking glass with a color-blind illustrator, past the hand-painted signs of Manila, and behind the scenes at one of world’s most anarchic mainstream brands. The lineup features Google Design creative lead Rob Giampietro, illustrator Andy Rementer, social-practice design studio Office of Culture and Design/Hardworking Goodlooking, and editorial designer Richard Turley, currently at Wieden + Kennedy and formerly ofBloomberg Businessweek and MTV. Join us for five unique perspectives on the world through the lens of design. Copresented by the Walker Art Center and AIGA Minnesota.

If you can’t make it in person, please tune in to our live webcast on Facebook Live and participate through Twitter (#Insights2017). For educators, AIGA chapters, and anyone else who might want to throw their own viewing party,have a look at our Viewing Party Kit.

[jarrettfuller]

I really enjoyed this talk from Zach Lieberman from this year's AIGA Design Conference. Zach is an artist, programmer, and co-founder of The School for Poetic Computation1. In the talk, Zach talks about his daily sketches and code as poetry but I think my favorite part was when he talked about his open office hours project, when he spends two to three hours a week holding open offices hours, both in person and online, for people to talk to him about anything. He wrote a bit about it last year:

I decided that in 2016 I would start a policy of “open office hours,” once per week where anyone can come and talk to me in person or online. Last December, I was at the ACT Festival in Korea and I had a conversation with Filip Visnjic, the curator who runs the Creative Applications site. “Most artists,” he said, “don’t have a great understanding of what value they bring to the world.” This idea really stuck with me, and as the year was winding down, I spent a lot of time thinking about it: what do I do of value and how can I bring more of it into the world?

As I pondered this question, I reflected on that fact that I had been teaching for over a decade and one of the things I appreciated most, both as a student and as a teacher is open office hours — where the professor sets a period of time to leave the doors of their office open and spend one on one time with a student to talk through anything.

This reminds me of Robert Irwin's idea of "being available in response." Irwin talks about this at length in the book on his work written by Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees2:

There's an important distinction to be made here, between organizing and proselytizing, on the one hand, and responding to interest on the other. I was and continue to be available in response. I mean, I don't stand on a corner and hand out leaflets. I'm not an evangelist. I'm not trying to sell anything. But on the other hand, if you ask me a question, you're going to get a half-hour answer. It doesn't make any difference whether or not it's a sophisticated question, only that you have a genuine interest in its properties.

I just sort of let it be known that I was available, in a way like I'm saying it to you. I mean, I didn't put out any ads or anything, but word got around. And you could be, let's say, up at UCLA, and you'd say 'Well, let's take advantage of that. We'll have him come up and talk to the students.' And that's what I'd do. Or, 'We'll have him come up and do a piece in the patio.' And I would just come and do that.

I've been thinking about this notion a lot recently as I finished this semester and reflecting on how I could better serve my students. This idea of office hours, of simply being available, I've found to be incredibly powerful.

I was first turned on to this book a few years ago by Rob Giampietro when he also wrote about Irwin on his blog. And his post was recently resurfaced by my friend Sara Hendren, on her blog:

Availability is about being deeply attuned to what’s happening for a group of three, or ten, or twenty-one students, and understanding the differences between those groups so you can calibrate accordingly. It’s broadcasting enough confidence and calm up front that people will trust your intentions, but also the clarity of mind to alter your plans mid-stream and try something else—in response. Plenty of people found it difficult to trust whether Irwin could really pull off something substantive with all of his waiting around, and it takes a tremendous amount of trust for both teachers and students to act together in this way. But availability isn’t disorganization. It’s a quality of attention to the specificities of encounters, this minute, and then this one, and the next.

And to bring it full circle, Sara connects this to the time she spent visiting Lieberman's School for Poetic Computation.

I got to visit SFPC last summer when I participated in the Triple Canopy Publication Intensive and was completely blown away not only with the work being produced their but the entire community and way of thinking. ↩︎

This is one of my all-time favorite books and Irwin is one of my all-time favorite artists. I've recommended this book to countless friends and students and previously posted about it here. I finally got to see some of his work in person last summer with his retrospective at the Hirshhorn which completely blew me away. ↩︎

[jarrettfuller]

A new exhibition explores the utopian promise of West Coast design

On the Google Design blog, Rob Giampietro talked to Justin McGuirk and Brendan McGetrick, co-curators of the Design Museum's current show, California: Designing Freedom. Here's Mcguirk on the show's curatorial framework:

We have a very clear theme, which is “tools of personal liberation.” The idea is that California has specialized in democratizing technologies, making corporate and military technologies useful and empowering to the individual. It starts with things like LSD and geodesic domes, which are really tools of the hippie movement and the counterculture, but which began life in laboratories and as structural systems that were fairly arcane. LSD frees your perception, it's a tool of consciousness. The geodesic dome becomes this symbol of an alternative, non-hierarchical society.

This then morphs into the hacker culture and the computer culture in the late ’70s and 1980s. The show charts the ways in which the ideology of the counterculture finds a new direction and a new group of people. Some of the earlier utopian impulses take on more technological and capitalistic drives.

I've previously posted about the show here and here. Here's McGuirk again:

There's a lot of very obvious critique of Silicon Valley. People are scared of data and of surveillance, and not necessarily always rationally. You can enjoy these tools and use them to their fullest and still be critical of them. We’ve tried to avoid any kind of critical hypocrisy though. California is, as I've said, somewhere else. It has spawned two great screen cultures. One of them was the silver screen and the other one is the pixelated screens that we use every day. You might say we’re all Californians now in the way we use social media, or photograph ourselves and document things constantly. This culture is global, and it has clear roots and ties to a very particular place. That is its contradiction.

(Semi-related: a few days ago I watched Reyner Banham Loves L.A., a 1972 documentary by the design critic Reyner Banham as he tours Los Angeles. You can watch the entire film here.)

[jarrettfuller]

Digital Strategies in Genre-Defining Magazines is a practice-based research project conducted in 2014 and 2015 by the Master in Art Direction (MAAD), ECAL/Lausanne.

A great new essay from Rob Giampietro over on ECAL:

Below the bridge there is a gap. The bridge covers it. Invisibility and technology have a close relationship. Before the car there was the carriage, and then the horseless carriage, and then the automobile. The driverless car, the self-driving car, the autonomous car, then, finally, just the car again. The magazine, the digital magazine. What’s new matters most while it’s new. That the best technology is invisible is something many technologists have observed — Wired’s Kevin Kelly, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Don Norman wrote a book, The Invisible Computer. What’s behind this? Having put it in the world, we want to remove it again, but leave its functionality in place. Technology mediates our social relations, less of it, some say, would make us more social. We could directly manipulate our environment.

The interface is the gap between the user and the technology — the design of interfaces is to bring them closer and closer to the user’s own body, to clothe the user. The user faces the technology and the technology faces the user. The interface is the space between them. There’s a mouse, there’s a stylus, there’s a finger, there’s the voice, there’s the retina itself. Technology as extension rather than appendage. Closer and closer, woven together, more and more invisible. Clothes are technology. Food is technology. How would we live without it.

[jarrettfuller]

In the first episode of Scratching the Surface, Jarrett talks with designer and writer Rob Giampietro. Rob is currently the Design Lead for Material Design at Google New York. In this conversation, we...

For the first episode of my new podcast, I talked with one of my favorite design writers, Rob Giampietro. As I said in the introduction to the episode, Rob's writing has profoundly influenced my own work and thinking on design and it was a true pleasure to visit him at Google's New York office, where he's a Creative Lead, to talk to him how he thinks about his work and the role that writing has played in his practice and career.

I had never interviewed someone before, let alone with a microphone sitting between us, but Rob was so gracious and accomadating and I think we got into some interesting topics. I hope you get as much out of the conversation as I did.

[jarrettfuller]

Rob Giampietro gave a wonderful talk at the Typographics conference earlier this summer on typography sitting at the intersection of design and typography. Giampietro puts current typographic work in a historic context, drawing connections between historical innovations and his own work. His talk ends with a great look behind the recently redesigned Google Fonts.

For more on Google Fonts, Rob was interviewed on a recent episode of the Responsive Web Design podcast and goes in depth on the technical and design challenges of creating the site. This talk also ties in nicely with my essay from January on typography as software.

[libraryoftheprintedweb]

Span: Conversations about Design and Technology, Rob Giampietro and Amber Bravo, eds., Google Inc., 172 pages, 2015

[libraryoftheprintedweb]

Span: Conversations about Design and Technology, Rob Giampietro and Amber Bravo, eds., Google Inc., 172 pages, 2015