Hi potential participants of my class,
For the past 3 years, I've been teaching a class at Princeton called "Graphic Design: Link." When I sat down to imagine this year's iteration of the class, I thought about the word "link."
"Link" can be understood in multiple ways:
- "link" in terms of conversations
(with others & interviews as generative research) - "link” in terms of hyperlinks
(the world wide web, & screen interfaces) - "link” in terms of creativity
(& connecting unlike things together)
This year, I’ve been in my career now for over 12+ years — working as a designer, artist, writer (of paragraphs & code), & educator. And for 10 of those years I’ve been teaching. But a lot has changed about culture & technology ... and myself ... during the past decade. So, when thinking about this 2023 year’s version of my Princeton class, I asked myself: “What would I most like to explore with my students?”
For me personally, over all this time, what’s helped me feel fulfilled and alive as a creative person, is finding ongoing practices that encourage my curiosity but also work with my everyday life — things like job, teaching, friends, family, etc. One of these practices has been conducting interviews with other people similar but different than me — artists, technologists, writers mostly. Through interviewing people, not only have I been able to learn from them by simply having a conversation, but through publishing my conversations online (either on my own or through an e-publication), I shared my leanings with more people than just me.
One of my favorite things about creativity is emergence. That is, sometimes you’ll collect, do, or make something simply because you “feel like it.” You’re curious about something, and that curiosity fuels you in a fun & mysterious way. And if you follow your curiosity enough times, keep a record of what you do each time, and then find time to review all the things together ... you’ll begin to notice patterns and themes you didn’t originally understand when you first began. Discovering your own emergent themes and patterns, in my opinion, is extremely valuable — figuring out what you’re interested in, why you’re interested in it, and continuing to follow & explore it can be a meaningful lifelong journey.
To be specific — 2017 was the first time I started conducting interviews. I did them in the context of my full-time job at the time. I was working for Kickstarter, the crowdfunding start-up, as creative director of a new project called “The Creative Independent” — “TCI” for short. In the beginning, I designed its website and its identity/logo. You can explore the site here and learn about my spiral thoughts here.
TCI publishes an interview with a creative person each weekday, focusing on the creative process more than anything else. One of my favorite early interviews from TCI is with the poet Ocean Vuong, interviewed by Amy Rose Spiegel, which you can read in full here. I especially like how the interview begins:
What’s your mood when you write?
When I’m lost in the work, I’m curious. I don’t know if curiosity is a balm, because it often gets me in trouble, but it gives me control. It becomes fuel, and it brings me out of myself and into the world, even if I’ve just been sitting at my desk and thinking about spirals, which is what I’ve been thinking about this morning.
The Italian philosopher Vico had this theory that time moves more in a spiral than it does in a line. He believes that’s why we repeat ourselves, including our tragedies, and that if we are more faithful to this movement, we can move away from the epicenter through distance and time, but we have to confront it every time.
It’s a funny coincidence that Ocean talks about spirals, since that’s what I chose as the logo/identity for The Creative Independent. I didn’t know anything about the philosopher Vico and his theories about time, though. Instead, I cited Julia Cameron, the author of The Artists Way, a canonical self-help book for artists. She speaks of the artist’s path like a circular or “spiral” path:
You will circle through some of the issues over and over, each time at a different level. There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path. Our aim here is to find the trail, establish our footing, and begin the climb.
I often find this kind of coincidence, synchronicity, and resonance happen often when I’m circling around something that feels true. (In my process, I know I’ve landed on something “right” when synchronicities happen.)
The first class I ever taught was in 2013 (ten years ago!) at Yale called “Interactive Design” in the art school. Students in my class learned to make webpages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. What I like about making your own website is how you are in control, you have agency! You have control of not only what the website contains, but also its navigation and its architecture — unlike social media. The web was made as a democratic medium — it was designed to both read and write to! But nowadays, it’s often easy to forget that we can write to it. In other words, it’s easy to forget our agency in adding to the collective knowledge commons beyond social media. (I wrote a lot about this in an 2018 essay you can read here.)
Today, I still think there’s value in making one’s own website, or making a website from the ground up. But I believe what’s more important is to have a big picture goal of contributing to shared knowledge or discourse in some way. There are lots of ways to do this beyond websites, and in our class we will explore many. (But websites are also very cool, and we will also explore them!)
In “Wikipedia as a Sacred Text,” Carolyn Li-Madeo, a designer at the Wikimedia Foundation (who works on the Wikipedia app’s design), has a conversation with Sharon Park, another designer. At the end, they talk about what happens when you Google something and nothing appears. It means you can … make a Wikipedia page about it … or make something on your own terms. Carolyn says:
It’s weirdly exciting to find nothing, because it means you can make something.
Wikipedia is great, but it’s also a collective encyclopedia. It takes a very neutral tone on purpose because it’s for a large number of people to use as reference. But when thinking of what kind of publication our class might make, I’d like to take an approach that maybe someone like Einstein might appreciate.
I recently learned Einstein used to do something specific. To get his brain in the zone, he would bring together two very different things to see what the connection was between them.
(The above was from a conversation I did with Charles Broskoski, one of the many co-founders of Are.na You can read it here.)
At its essence, I think creativity is bringing two unlike things together. Creativity is connecting things. You could say creativity is linking!
After reviewing all these thoughts over, I realized it might make more sense to change the title of the class from "Link" to "Conversations." I think the energy lies in the conversation, and link is an important strategy to channel the energy.
Anyway, I'm curious if any of this resonates with you!
Looking forward to working with you all,
Laurel
