“The future is there looking back at us.”  — William Gibson

According to a recent Fast Company article, design has “matured from a largely stylistic endeavor to a field tasked with solving thorny technological and social problems.” Designers are no longer relegated to the downstream position of making things look pretty. We now have a seat at the table. No longer makers, we now aspire to be leaders. Design is everywhere, yet is now called upon to respond to constantly changing technological, demographic, and environmental conditions.

In this space between ubiquity and obsolescence, how can designers develop ways of working and collaborating that respond to our contemporary world? Join us for a monthly series of provocations at MAD where practitioners and critics discuss the changing nature of design and visual culture and its impact on the also changing fields of music, education, fashion, and more.

Design Curation

The field of design curation has expanded from one that occupies an object-oriented and art historical position to one that holds a more immaterial and projective orientation. Practitioners working in contemporary visual culture increasingly draw from curatorial practice and design history to inform their work. In this talk we discuss what it means to curate “design” in today’s fragmented, technologically-driven era, and examine the disciplinary exchanges happening between art and design.

Speakers

Micah Lexier is a Canadian artist and curator. As an artist Micah Lexier has worked with a wide range of materials including laser-cut steel, waterjet-cut aluminum, glass, wood, coins, fabric, drawing, photography, neon, printmaking, holography, sound, and letterpress. Micah Lexier has produced numerous bookworks, projects for magazines, and multiples. Micah Lexier is most known for his A Minute of My Time series and his photographic projects A Portrait of David and David Then & Now, produced a dozen public art commissions, and has artwork in numerous private and public collections and also serves as the visual arts editor for Bloom Magazine. Micah Lexier has curated a number of exhibitions including the For Example series for the MSVU Art Gallery in Halifax; Me & Them for the College Building Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan; and the three-person exhibition David Altmejd/Eric Cameron/Renate Anger for Birch Libralato, Toronto.

Tiffany Lambert is a curator, editor, and writer. Since establishing a New York-based office, she has worked as the managing editor of PIN–UP Magazine and curator at the Cooper Hewitt. Her writing is published internationally in Cultured, Disegno, Domus, Surface, TANK, and The New York Times. Recent and forthcoming publications include Beautiful Users (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), Bloomsbury’s Design Encyclopedia (2015), and Milton Glaser (Taschen). Her research on the Japanese designer Sori Yanagi is supported by grants from the Graham Foundation and Design History Society. In addition to teaching at Pratt and serving as a visiting critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, Tiffany lectures and speaks widely on design related panels and talks. Tiffany holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and bachelors’ degrees in art & design and neuroscience from the University of Michigan.