Thoughts on the Two Articles

Research and Destroy

“The role of the designer is in peril. Designers are increasingly threatened with becoming the proletariat of the creative industry, silently carrying out whatever the client dictates. Daniël van der Velden sees only one solution: research and development. The designer must completely throw himself into his own personal, independent production of knowledge. Today, if there is something that needs to be designed, it is the designer himself.”

This opening statement got me thinking about my future as a graphic designer.  It is somewhat concerning to me because like he says, the designers role in our society today is changing very rapidly.  After reading this a question has been stuck in my head.  How do I redesign myself?

“We no longer have any desire for design that is driven by need. Something less prestigious than a ‘designed’ object can do the same thing for less money. The Porsche Cayenne brings you home, but any car will do the same thing, certainly less expensively and probably just as quickly.”

This quote is so true.  It seems like Americans don’t look for something that will “just” get the job done anymore, we need something that will get the job done and look good while doing it.  But is that necessarily a bad thing? 

“We have already talked about need. Instead of giving the wrong answers, design should instead begin asking interesting questions.”

As graphic designers we need to take his advice and start to change how and why we design.  After reading this article, I believe graphic designers as a whole are at a crucial crossroads right now in our culture and we need to figure out which road is the best to travel down.

“With the removal of need and the commissioned assignment as an inseparable duo, the door is open to new paths. The designer must use this freedom, for once, not to design something else, but to redesign himself.”

This quote just reiterates the first quote, but I thought it does a good job of summing up the challenge we face as graphic designers at this point in time.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Republic of Fat (Excerpt)

“Much as today, the astounding productivity of American farmers proved to be their own worst enemy, as well as a threat to public health. For when yields rise, the market is flooded with grain, and its price collapses. What happens next? The excess biomass works like a vacuum in reverse: Sooner or later, clever marketers will figure out a way to induce the human omnivore to consume the surfeit of cheap calories.”

In my opinion this is the underlying cause of our obesity problems in America.  Farmer’s yields were getting bigger and bigger and they didn’t know what to do with all the extra so people in the food industry figured out what to do with all the extra grain. This led to our almost all of our food containing corn products which directly contributed to the unhealthy lifestyle of many American people. “Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese.”  That's a major problem that the surplus of corn had a large hand in creating.

Introduction

Well hello there!

My name is Joshua Thorne, I am a senior at UNL studying graphic design and minoring in music technology. When I'm not obsessed with projects or working as an AmeriCorps member I like to sit around cafes and drink too much coffee, or stay up all night making weird electronic music.  My current food addictions are honey and cinnamon. You can put it on ice cream, cereal, in coffee. I mean, it's pretty awesome.

I began taking a critical eye to food around high school when I started to gain a lot of weight and had issues with my blood-sugar levels. Realizing that diet was the biggest factor, I consciously cut HFC and unnecessary sugar and carbs. I know just how much influence food has on the way you feel. In this class I realized how even though in Nebraska we are surrounded by corn, I never really knew where it went or how it was being used.

Research and Destroy:

"Design only generates longing. The problem is the problem of luxury."

I think all of the problems discussed in this article also highlight what is positive about design. How it is more than a profession and more than a 9-5 job. And how there aren't strict definitions or any set career path. While I haven't experienced it myself, I know and have heard of the industry of design where designers are told what to do. I agree that designers need be independent, self-driven, and critically thinking about what they are doing and why. I was at first annoyed by the tone of this article which seemed to be speaking as a designer to the rest of the world. However I realized this article is directed towards designers as a plea to shake up the system and take responsibility for more purposeful work.

Omnivore's Dilemma 
I really enjoyed this article. Nothing like looking to the past to contextualize the present. My mother told me stories she heard from her mother about the Great Depression. My grandmother, around age 12, would have little to eat during the day, however at every meal she would be given a glass of whiskey. This was mostly because whiskey was the most affordable source of energy at the time. Same goes for today, now that corn is the most abundant crop it is everywhere and it also the most affordable source of energy. It is interesting to see the political and socio-economic systems that lay behind this industry of corn. It's easy to be cynical in investigating our corn-problems, but maybe someone out there said that this would be a good thing. A way to avoid food shortages. All in all, our current position isn't easy to avoid as repercussions and consequences of a corn-country begin to show.

Hello!

My name is Amanda Kessler and this year my baby sister turned 3, I will be 23 at the end of this month.

This will be my fourth year at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I am a Bachelor of Fine Arts major with an emphasis in Graphic Design.

 However I do have interests in drawing and painting.

As for the topic of food and water, I was at first unsure what this really meant to our class until we started to take inventory of the items around us. This got me some interest in seeing from which companies is corn used the most and the amount of water the process of crop to food this all takes. Which might be interesting to speculate the future of food if we tried to hold the top companies responsible for our growing epidemic truly becoming "Children of the Corn".

When I'm not busy with school and life I play video games and table top games such as Pathfinder (think D&D). I also play Magic the Gathering with friends. As for personal work, I mostly like to do character development and fiction writing. I am currently co-authoring two stories with some friends. One story is based on an ongoing Minecraft session.

Hey, I’m Alyssa Brunswick.

The quick facts: I’m a senior advertising major. I want to be a web designer/front-end developer. I love cats and squirrels and hula hooping.

My feelings on food: I come from a city of 25,000 people and there is corn farming and cattle production everywhere around us. This class is a really interesting experience and it's making me question the food I eat. I really hope to learn more and find a way I can help.

Commentary on Two Articles

"Research and Destroy" by Daniel van der Velden:

The biggest point I took away from reading is that we as designers should not feel bound by only designing for consumption's sake. We should take on projects that inform and generate change or the suggestion of change. For that we must do like other disciplines be informed in what we do, which leads to the following quote:

"With the removal of need and the commissioned assignment as an inseparable duo, the door is open to new paths. The designer must use this freedom, for once, not to design something else, but to redesign himself." 

To me this becomes not only an investigation into the project one does but sometimes the designer has to allow the findings to shape themselves. Which if we stuck to a corporate angle isn't much of an development outside of ascetic taste to satisfy a larger amount of consumers.

Another aspect the article had brought up was that Graphic Design has seen a visible split and I can say that it's very true. Which is best explained in this quote:

"It is not so strange that a branch of graphic design has evolved that no longer hangs around waiting for an assignment, but instead takes action on its own accord. It has polarized into the ‘willing to work’, who often have little or no control over their own positions, and the ‘out of work’, who, with little economic support beyond  re-channelled [sic] subsidies or grants, work on innovation for the sake of innovation."

I can honestly say I have been taught from a more commercial end in the past, but at the same time those instructors pushed to think past end product and look at the steps we took to get there more and more.

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"The Consumer: The Republic of Fat" an excerpt from The Omnivore's Dilemma by Micheal Pollan :

In short, we the people have become alarmingly more obese as a nation thanks to putting in corn in to more of our food supply. At length, this excerpt explains to us how we used corn to produce whiskey which lead to prohibition. While the end result of prohibition as riots, crime, and a decrease of consumption. Seeing a similar prohibition to HFCS or other corn byproducts would likely not happen, there is too much money in corn to allow that.

"Much as today, the astounding productivity of American farmers proved to be their own worst enemy, as well as a threat to public health. For when yields rise, the market is flooded with grain, and its price collapses. What happens next? The excess biomass works like a vacuum in reverse: Sooner or later, clever marketers will figure out a way to induce the human omnivore to consume the surfeit of cheap calories."

I guess I feel a tad dumb for not realizing we as omnivores we are rather dumb when it comes to taste. We are wired to want sweet since that means calories, and HFCS or other corn byproducts are going to be empty calories but taste sweet. This goes towards other high processed foods that offer more sweets and fats than are actually worth in our modern diet. So that fact about omnivores was new to me.

So I conclude that unless there is a bigger push for change in how we deal with corn, we might not see the change needed.

Thoughts on Research and Destroy and The Consumer: A Republic of Fat

Research and Destory

There are better things we can spend our time on as designers than what a lot of us are currently doing. It’s important for us as designers to look for problems to solve. You don’t have to work in an agency making ads for businesses that are ruining the environment, economy, world, etc. It’s sort of similar to the work I do at the newspaper. I don’t ABSOLUTELY LOVE designing a newspaper. It’s not very exciting work and there’s only so much room to move around in terms of design, but it pays me money that I need to buy food and pay rent. I think a lot of what I’ve been hearing from my professors and professionals lately is that you can do that crappy day job that pays you money, but have something you’re passionate about that is really making a change that you can do, too. Maybe it even becomes your day job that pays you money. There’s a thing called Passion Projects that’s kind of devoted to things like that (Jessica Hische’s is really good).

“I’m a designer” seems to be a synonym for “I am creative and cool.” The article says, “Designers often consider themselves very noble in their through-thick-and-thin work ethic, their noblesse oblige.” I think a designer can be so many things. We’ve added words before designer like “interactive,” “industrial,” “user experience,” “user interface,” so is it important to determine what kind of designer you are? The whole article is about designers redesigning themselves, so does that mean specifying with these words? Isn’t it good to keep an open mind into other forms of “design”?

I love that the article tells us to do some of our own reading and writing. I think it’s cool how we’re doing writing projects in this class and that we have to read and research. I think it really helps you get passionate about a project once you start researching it.

“In the future, design might have to assume the role of ‘developer’ if it wants to be taken seriously.” I think we’re already doing this. Today when you go for a graphic design position they want you to know how to do front-end development. From my experience, “developers” are thought of as being smarter and cooler than the designer. That’s a basic example, but in other areas I think it’s really important to know not only how to design what you’re doing, but also how to make it.

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Republic of Fat (Excerpt)

My first thought for this article was that we start eating crappy foods at such a young age that we now have to ween ourselves off of sugar and fat. And I don’t think that’s entirely our faults or our parents’. I don’t think they really understood the consequences at the time, but I think we know them now, so our children will grow up healthier (for what we know now, but hey we could have it all wrong, too).

I come from a pretty agricultural community. It’s a town of 25,000 people and I bet everyone at least knows someone who knows someone who is a farmer. Because I grew up there, I know how important corn is to farmers and I want them to be able to continue. My family owned some farm land back in the day that someone else farmed. My best friend’s grandpa owns a farm in Kansas. Farming is important and we can’t just tell farmers to stop producing as much. They don’t make that much money in the first place.

In fifth grade we took a field trip. We were learning about the Ogallala aquifer. We got on the back of a bus in early September with no air conditioning. It was so hot I almost got sick. We went out to a farm that’s above the aquifer and they explained to us how important the aquifer is. We walked around a field for a while, but it wasn’t a corn field. It was soybeans. I was interested that his article mentioned that. We’ve been focusing on corn, but there’s a runner-up in the category of foods ruining our lives. But that’s the crazy part. This whole trip was about telling us how awesome soybeans were and everything that we can make with soybeans. We never had the conversation about corn and how overproduced both plants are let alone how bad for us they are when they’re converted into other things. It’s sort of propagandist, but that’s the community I grew up in and I’ve always thought corn was so great for everyone, so this is an interesting new idea to me.

I watched a Roger Thurow’s Ted Talk a couple days ago and something he said was that it doesn’t work to just send people in poor countries the extra food we have. It’s almost like our way of controlling the poor people and keeping them poor. When you just give them food, they don’t learn to sustain themselves. The economy collapses for the farmers there because everyone just got free food. The important thing is to help them farm for themselves. You know the old saying. So maybe if we just cut back how much we make, the prices might even themselves out. But then what about all the companies making products for farmers to make all this money? We already have enough jobless people. Yes, they can become businesses that help the world rather than hurt it, but people are still motivated by money. We have to make the idea of making the world a better place seem more lucrative than making millions of dollars. I think we have to come up with a way to persuade their attitudes and have a good idea for them before we can force them to stop what they are doing.

We design things to make our lives easier, but it’s almost like we’re making them too easy. People are lazy and we aren’t burning the calories we’re consuming. iPhones are beautiful and make our lives so much easier, but they’re ruining communication. I think we need to think of the consequences of the “benefit” of a new product or system before we make it.

Nancy

Hello. I'm Nancy.

I'm double-majoring in Advertising & P.R. and Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I'm currently a senior. I enjoy reading tragic books like The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I also like music from artists like... Fleet Foxes, James Blunt, and... the occasional John Legend.

Currently, the class has given me an incredibly interesting glimpse inside the food industry in the U.S. I am very excited to start delving more into this class!

Research and Destroy

This article seemed very interesting. It encourages designers to become more than just a laborer who blindly finishes projects for clients. Designers need to begin thinking more strategically to truly find a permanent and vital spot in the future of advertising and creative design.

Omnivore's Dilemma

It's interesting to begin learning about how corn started to seep into our communities.

As a child, I remember choosing to eat very poorly. Not that I knew any better. Totino's pizza? Yeah, alright. I'll eat the whole thing. Children should be more educated about health in elementary school. Physical education is excellent but health education must be included in that as well. Students need to learn how to properly consume food to benefit their health. This has to start in the school cafeterias. Because, as we all know, school cafeteria meals are definitely not appealing nor appetizing.