2016–17 Public Seminar Series: Charles Adler

 
UIC School of Design 2016–17 public seminar series

Design operations: A conversation
with Charles Adler

Charles Adler co-founded Kickstarter, the online platform for individuals to fund creative projects, with friends Perry Chen and Yancey Stricker in 2009. As former Head of Design at Kickstarter, Adler drew inspiration from product designers Henry Dreyfus, Don Norman, and Dieter Rams. He considers design for the web a field that’s still nascent; one in which things can be made up as one goes — drawing from related disciplines including architecture, book design, and industrial design. User experience design, for Adler, is closely tied to ergonomics and human-factors design; a field that facilitates a community's co-existence with a virtual built environment. Adler’s most recent project is Lost Arts, which he describes as “a blend of laboratory, workshop, atelier, incubator and playground rooted in a legacy of interdisciplinary spaces like the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College.”

Adler will visit CADA to discuss his work with Kickstarter and Lost Arts, as well as to consider the broader conditions within which designers work today and to explore ways in which designers can productively engage those conditions to define and advance their own programs, agendas, and objectives.

The UIC School of Design public seminar series serves as a research platform for the school’s Master of Design (MDes) program, stimulating broad intellectual inquiry about the values guiding the designer by promoting discourse across industrial and graphic design.

Thursday, January 19
6:00–7:30 pm
Second floor design atrium
Architecture and Design Studios
845 West Harrison Street, Chicago

Free and open to the public

 


UIC School of Design 2016–17 public seminar series:
Design operations

This series of seminars proposes to examine the diverse constraints within which designers work today and to explore ways in which designers can productively engage those constraints to define and advance their own programmes, agendas, and objectives. Much of contemporary design discourse emphasizes the power and autonomy of designers and aims to articulate the deep foundations and wide scope of their reach. Similarly, celebrated works of design are widely regarded as transformative agents that single-handedly overturn established systems and routines. From the popular reverence for “genius” designers, whether of the past or the present, to the inclusion of single works of design in museum collections, contemporary discourses of design—disciplinary as well as popular—largely foster a view of design practice that centers on the capacity of designers to see beyond existing norms and conventions, which they then radically reconfigure or even overturn through their work.

Against this view, this seminar proposes a more nuanced engagement with the systems and networks within which designers operate. The premise for this engagement is that those systems and networks constitute the only channels through which designers—and their designs—can act; as such, they serve to instantiate and transmit, even expand and multiply, the power of design. Acknowledgment of these conditions—simultaneously integral to but outside of design itself—does not diminish the authority of the designer. Instead, from this perspective, success in design is most often the product of designers effectively examining and turning to their own purposes the operations of existing systems and networks rather than working rejecting and overturning those operations altogether. “Design operations” then refers on the one hand to the maneuvers designers undertake to advance their own disciplinary ambitions and, on the other, to the workings of the social, political, economic, and technical systems and networks of power that configure the channels of design even before designers can act.