I’ve taken over the sample page: since folks seem hesitant to try to post, I’ve gone and remembered the Kerning Game: http://type.method.ac/

Following up on our discussion from last week of type, typeface, page design, and design, the movies Helvetica, Objectified, and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, this is just a great low-key way to introduce yourself to the nearly lost art of kerning. Take a shot, and post your response to it.

The other part, the more serious part, of the discussion that got lost in the shuffle of OkGo, memes, neural marketing, and Superbowl ads is the distinction between design and Design. That is, Margolin lays out an argument for Design as an emergent field of study in its own right, distinct from illustration or art history or industrial design, etc. It seems akin to rhetoric’s (sorry…) Rhetoric’s move away from being only seen as part of writing (…and composition) to a place and center of its own: Rhetoric.

This is a theme and idea that will stay with us for the rest of the semester, so I’m not so much seeking an answer to a question as proposing a way of thinking about design, and about the responsibilities of those who would purport to design social spaces. That is, what responsibilities do rhetors have in the design of the environments for communication they (we) create? Objectified made clear what they thought the ethical and social limitations and challenges were for design: sustainability and access. We have similar concerns in designing spaces that support the kind of interaction we (Makers?) want to encourage, and discourage others.

As we look towards our first discussions of data sets on Tuesday–Valentine’s day of all days–my thoughts continue to be about the relationship between design and Design, rhetoric and Rhetoric, and the responsibilities of creating not just documents but the conditions for the produciton of documents.

Design/Rhetoric, and the rhetoric of design. Your thoughts?

-M