The means by which we find our way; Observations on design

Concept and development

Presented with an opportunity to curate a design exhibition in our school’s gallery provided the chance to explore a bigger picture. As international designers ourselves we had often spoken of the need for our design students to consider how their work fit into a global context; not a means to homogenise their designs into a global generic, but rather as a means to define their own New Zealand design vocabulary. We hypothesised that a designer’s culture or personal motivations would inform and influence decisions they make in regards to design and that designers often experience moments/exchanges that impacted the way they design or that revealed insight about particular aspects of design.

The project, The means by which we find our way was our attempt to test these theories which ultimately became the foundation for not only the project, but the exhibition and book as well.

The Reflections
International design educators were asked to respond to the following topic:
Describe an experience that, due to an unfamiliar language, knowledge, format, timing or environment, led to a greater level of appreciation or understanding of visual communication. The results are over seventy poignant and sometimes anecdotal travel stories, commentary and remembrances that shed new light on typography and design and how they function.

The Imagery
Part one consists of a collection of recontextualised New Zealand urban landscape interpreted by design educators from around the world. The project 'The means by which we find our way' was born from a desire to bring the 'wider design world' to Hamilton, New Zealand within the context of local surroundings. Paring down an original 100+ photographs, twenty-six images were selected that covered local urban locations: some iconic to New Zealand (ie. corner dairy), others common to most cities (ie. library) and a few that held particularly interesting, if not random, words (ie. havoc). By removing the textual component from the imagery, empty canvases were created; brandless city streets that became all the more generic and less location-specific.

After an initial call for interest designers were provided empty, blank-images along with the 'missing text' and encouraged to reintegrate the textual content back into the image by placing the text back into what they thought was the original position: perhaps working it back in as graffiti, generating new meaning by the organisation of the words or by including new graphical elements. If the designers were representing a country with multiple languages or were multi-lingual themselves, they were encouraged to use a translation of the text with or without the English text that was provided.

The Essays
We invited designers to submit essays in that responded to topics which stemmed from the process of realising and developing the Means project: Graphic design operating in a non-commercial function, Designers as writers, Collaborative graphic design projects and Design functioning as research.

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