Once again, Jamy Ian Swiss tantalized our senses. We’re still in awe.
Joshua Klein, frog Principal Technologist, opened with words we can all live by: be careful what you say at cocktail parties. Klein has endeavored into a most fascinating journey of exploration into a creature most of us consider banal - crows - who turn out to have uncanny and unbelievable capacities. They can bend wire to hook unreachable food or drop stubborn nuts into flowing traffic so that the cars will break them open.
“Cultural adaptation,” Klein explained, is the crow’s unique ability to learn from one another, supplanting our ideas of traditional incremental Darwinian evolution. Though usually associated with humans, cultural adaptation turns out to be quite prevalent in crows, a crucial element of survival in an ever-changing world.
Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, recalled stories of the wonderful experiments of the design power couple. “What’s important,” Eames emphasized, “is that they never delegated understanding.” He shared with us photos of the beautiful forms that had never reached production. Charles explained to Eames how Eero Saarinen always said he couldn’t wait to be an adult, “so he could really get to play.” Perhaps best symbolizing the extent of play incorporated into Charles and Ray’s lives was the honorary degree from Clown College. In retelling the story of the iconic Powers of Ten film, Eames illuminated for us the playful yet insightful relevance of the project, how looking at things from different angles can promote inspiration and fresh ideas.
Chee returned to the stage to turn the tables on our beloved Master of Ceremonies. As the son of the first Design Director at Steelcase, Hockenberry admitted to “know a lot about the psychology of designers” though confessed that he can’t draw. With an education in Baroque art and music, which surely prepared him for reporting from Kosovo, John’s career has spanned nearly all media. John introduced us to his newest project, The Takeaway, a new drive time radio show based out of New York City on public radio. The challenges of creating a successful new radio program in this day and age, where everyone carries in their pocket the broadcasting power of televisions from the 1980s, can best be summed up by John’s inability to communicate to students at the MIT Media Lab the idea of a radio show. He broke through, though, when explained, “it’s like a podcast that uploads into the air.” Work you magic, it’s the coolest, he reminded us.
The magic of the word, Hockenberry transitioned, was only the tip of the iceberg of our next speaker, Paula Scher, lauded as one of Pentagram’s most fearless graphic designers. With raw energy and brutal honesty, Paula recounted her experiences of serious play and how their transitions into solemnity indicated it was time to find the next challenge. It was only with this fearless, ignorant seriousness that the next level of growth could be reached.
Paula’s thirty year career began with a wonderful job designing record covers and a deep hatred for the typeface Helvetica, “the most clean, fascist and oppressive font out there.” Four key moments of seriousness were clear: (1) the early rejection of Helvetica and the indulgence of mixing typefaces from Victorian to Art Nouveau, which resulted in critical praise and the label of Post-Modernist. With such an official seal, Paula knew it was time to move on; (2) the wonderful growth of the identity of the Public Theatre, which rejected contemporary theatre identity and found a uniquely loud voice that Paula embraced down to every, even minute, Public Theatre visual representation; (3) melding typeface with architecture and expressing words in a literary and artistic way across our most imposing structures such as the Bloomberg Headquarters to the more playful Performing Arts School in Newark, NJ, where Paula employed painters to install her great visual types; (4) a rather peculiar commission to design a logo for a neighborhood, of all things, in Pittsburgh. Instead, Paula observed the iconic underpasses running through the city, turning them into a sort of logo in and of themselves.
Throughout, Paula reminded us that while the steps of growth always move onward, their height will diminish because there will be less to discover and less to learn. These solemn crescents are terrifying realizations, because that’s when you have to go back and find the next thing you can invent, to be ignorant with, to be a fool with, to fail with, “because that’s how you grow and that’s how that matters.”