Search for meaning: a study on the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Graphic Design Department CAMARGO, Iara Pierro de / MA / University of São Paulo / Brazil VELLOSO, Leandro M. R. / MA Student / University of São Paulo / Brazil Cranbrook Academy of Art / Post-modern Design / Visual Language This paper proposes to study the design process and design criticism in the well known post-modern moment in Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Department of Graphic Design under Katherine McCoy’s Co-Chairmanship (1971 to 1995). This research intends to show some problematic concepts, like Deconstruction, that surrounded the school and some visual examples of graphic experimentation that could be seen as visual meaningful ideas. 1. Introduction The Cranbrook Academy of Art was built in Bloomfield Hills, in Detroit’s Metropolitan area – state of Michigan, United States in 1930’s by the conception and investments of George G. Booth and designed by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen who directed the academy in the earlier years. The school was conceived as an institute directed to the development and teaching of nine areas in the arts field, and since its foundation is an important educational center of innovation, research and creation. The Design Department was found in the late 1930’s and had as faculty and alumni some very well known designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia and Eero Saarinen. But only in the beginning of the 1970’s, when Katherine and Michael McCoy were invited to co-chair the department, the graphic design production became relevant. The Design Department was divided in 2D, under coordination of Katherine McCoy and 3D under Michael McCoy. Both worked in the school for almost 25 years. Katherine McCoy, in interview, explained that this period (1971-1995) could be divided into three distinct phases: modern (when they started), transition or late modernism (formal postmodern), and the critical post-modern phase (when it became more theoretical and experimental – late 1970’s to 1990’s). brook’s Design Department questioned the modern functionalist approach, and especially during the 1980’s new ideas were explored to make the designer also a producer of graphic meaning. The students and faculty started to read and create graphic work that could engage text (verbal content) and graphic ideas and images. Some of these we can find in some graphic examples inserted in this article. The idea that design form has meaning was not always unanimous. It must be remembered that until the 1970’s design was mostly ruled by formal, functional and neutral assumptions. The modern approach seemed to sought graphic design as a neutral support to the text/content. For this paper, we intend to discuss some of the graphic and theoretical ideas of Cranbrook’s students and faculty in the critical post-modern phase (1978-1991), based on field research in October of 2010 where interviews were collected and also based on relevant selected bibliography. 2. Theory and criticism One of the first graphic experiments having the theory as a background is the work made in 1978: the graphic design project for the special Issue of the French Currents of the Letter of the Visible Language Journal (Fig 1 and 2). The project was developed under the leadership of Katherine McCoy and the consultancy of Daniel Liebeskind, and made by the students Richard Kerr, Alice Hetch, Jane Kosstrin and Herbert Thompson. The special Issue brings articles with post-structuralism themes. Throughout these periods we can perceive a formal and critical change, that first seemed to question modernism and later, the visual and verbal language. Although it is important to note that the whole Cranbook’s environment openness is an important factor and accordingly to BRAYBROOK (1985: 78) “Cranbrook was a living learning community where students and faculty could freely interact”. In addition to that, (BRAYBROOK, 1985: 80) McCoy explains the informal and open structure of the school, and more importantly, the idea of having weekly critique sessions that provide the students to develop verbal abilities. In the late 1970’s some of the students and the faculty of Cran- Figure 1. French Currents of the Letter: cover and introduction spread. CAMARGO, Iara Pierro de; VELLOSO, Leandro M. R. 2012. Search for meaning: a study on the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Graphic Design Department. In Farias, Priscila Lena; Calvera, Anna; Braga, Marcos da Costa & Schincariol, Zuleica (Eds.). Design frontiers: territories, concepts, technologies [=ICDHS 2012 - 8th Conference of the International Committee for Design History & Design Studies]. São Paulo: Blucher, 2012. ISBN 978-85-212-0692-7. DOI 10.5151/design-icdhs-012 Search for meaning: a study on the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s graphic design department Figure 2. French Currents of the Letter: pages from essays 1, 5 and 8 The graphic format intended to reflect the reading and interpretation of the text of the Issue. Katherine McCoy, in interview, said that before this work they hadn’t had the influence of poststructuralism. The design team realized that they needed to understand the theories presented in the text to make a graphic interpretation, Richard Kerr argues in interview that: “We all needed a “crash” course in semiotics and specifically the French avante garde. Daniel Libeskind gave us information for we better understand the academic articles”(2011). Katherine McCoy explains the concept of the project by quoting the Issue introduction written by George H. Bauer: “This is not the place to inscribe the story of the re-emergence of letters, words and books as objects to be seen; nor would be appropriate to bundle tidily the delirium of readings you see before you. Transparency of the text gives way to opacity. Words unseen, letters invisible, now magically appear before our eyes as plastic object games. Language is once again visible. The tradition is long, but marginal – at the edge. Here are gathered, quite unscientifically and purposefully obsessional, French Currents of the Letter” (Fig. 1). The idea of making text into a concrete matter, in other words, visible instead of invisible, could have a parallel relation with the Derridean idea of Grammatology (Derrida 1976): to emphasize written language over phonetics, adapting it to graphic design and making it visible. This project, by forcing the reader to pay attention to the text, making it extremely graphic, breaking with some design/editorial rules, brought something new. Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies Rick Poynor (2003) explains that: As the reader proceeds through the eight essays, standard book conventions are progressively undermined. The text columm expands to fill the inner margins, interlinear space increases, word spaces inflate until the text explode into particles, and footnotes, usually confined to a subsidiary role, slide across into the body of the text. The intention was to highlight the phisicality of the printed word´s presentation and to establish new nonlinear connections between words, opening the possibility of alternative ways of reading. (Poynor 2005: 53) The progression functions in a way that the first article of the Issue is perfectly readable, but from then on the articles begin to change, having the final (the 8th) a complete extreme, where the spaces between words and the leading make the verbal content looks like a spread out texture (fig. 2). Richard Kerr, one of the students involved in the project, explained in interview that they had envisioned a ninth progression, where they would expand the words even more, just like the graphic treatment presented in the Issue cover, enlarging, for example, not only spaces between words, but between the letter units. However the idea was abandoned. The students also wrote a design statement to explain the graphic strategy, that gave to the Issue complementary conceptual information, showing how the students were engaged not only to produce, but to argue. It shows a reflection about to the complexity of the articles related to the graphic design solution. But even with the extreme experiment of text and reading in the design, Katherine McCoy explains in interview that: We sent the design concept with the eight formats to the Visible Language editor, Merald Wrolsted, for his review, and we 74 CAMARGO, Iara Pierro de / VELLOSO, Leandro M. R. wondered what he would think about the reading difficulty of the last two essay formats. So we were very pleased when he called me and said the design was brilliant! He was completely supportive and instructed us to proceed with the final artwork for printing as quickly as possible. However, I always did wonder if the authors of the last two essays were unhappy that their writing was so difficult to read. Beside this introductory work (French Currents) that mixed theory and graphic design, the Department became really well known by the end of the 1980’s and beginning of the 1990’s for the experiments involving new ideas of working with graphic design, exploring the interrelationship between text and image. Several authors claim that those Cranbrook experiments were mainly inspired by deconstruction and post-structuralism. They were, indeed, reading and applying theory to discuss and produce graphic work. In 1990, the book Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, was published to show works from the exhibition of the same title. In the book, we have, besides the work produced in the 1980’s from students and faculty, some theoretical articles that reveal new ideas in graphic design. One of the articles written by Katherine and Michael McCoy explains this new approach and the searching for meaning in graphic work: New influences rapidly began to appear in the Design Department, centered around reading in post-Structuralism French literary theory and post-Modern art criticism. The emerging ideas emphasized the construction of meaning between the audience and the graphic design piece, a visual transaction that parallels verbal communication. Building on the linguistic theories of semiotics but rejecting the faith in the scientifically predictable transmission of meaning, these ideas began to have an impact on the student´s graphic design work. New experiments explored the relationships of text and image and the processes of reading and seeing, with texts and images meant to be read in detail, their meanings decoded. Students began to deconstruct the dynamics of visual language and understand it as a filter that inescapably manipulates the audience’s response. (MCCOY 1990: 15/16) In the text above we have the declaration from the McCoy’s about the post-structuralism influences in the deconstructing of the dynamics in visual language. And they introduce the idea of the construction of meaning between the graphic piece and the audience. As we can interpret in the two student’s posters explained bellow, one can see several meaning games at play in the work. These are not always easy to interpret, making some critics skeptical of this idea of audience participation. Also the works below intensively show the inner background of the designers which could be seen as the author’s personal content. The Scott Zukowski’s poster from 1986 (Fig. 3) has graphic and verbal elements, that in the first sight, seem distant from the context, are very ambiguous; but after Katherine McCoy´s explanation, the work seems to tell a story. There are several double coded images and text, like the word “LOAF”, the image of a lunch case, the image of a relaxing chair and the text “He is an idle man”. The use of all elements could tell to the observer that maybe “LOAF” describes a person who is idle and relaxing (or lazy). But the other element, the traditional factory worker’s lunch box, according to Katherine McCoy in interview, could mean that the Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies Figure 3. In order: Scott Zukowsky “Loaf” and Scott Santoro “Find” Posters loafing person is a hard worker. However, the elements are quite dark for a person who is happy about being at home just relaxing. McCoy explains that Scott Zukowski made this poster to his dad, not because he was lazy, but because he had lost his job in the factory. The poster is about unemployment. The FIND poster of Scott Santoro1, 1987 (Fig. 3), is another double coded work. Santoro appropriates of two photographs that, according to Katherine McCoy in interview, looked like two male genitals. In the first photo there is the word “Findlay”, town’s name in the state of Ohio. In another context “find lay” can be slang for “look for sex”. Bellow the images there is the textual information, with the word “FIND” in evidence and bellow the text “Lounge, February 13, 10 pm”. This was a poster developed for a Valentine’s Day party. The secret message is “go to the lounge (party) and find a lay”. Katherine McCoy explains that the image in the middle, a plumbing system, is the kind of imagery that Santoro often experimented with because of the plumbing background in his family (his father was a plumber and Scott often assisted him as a boy). The designer of the poster also wrote a text called Plumbing design, where he explains the relation between his own family background and how it affects his design process. Santoro explains: The FIND poster was designed for a St. Valentine’s day party with a water theme (as in buckets of it -everyone was going to get wet they said). It’s the first instance where I deliberately incorporated plumbing imagery into my design. Here a sexy valve with Egyptian hieroglyphics (because water was so fundamental to that society), and blunt language that read: FIND IN LOUNGE February 13, 10pm. All very double-coded (Santoro 2010)2. We must also remember that in the 1980’s and 1990’s the Cranbrook work was widely published. A number of articles were written about the school, like Lupton´s “The Academy of Deconstruction” for Eye #3 magazine. Lupton’s concept seems to stigmatize and generalize the school´s approach. She shows 1 Student between 1986 to 1988 2 Available on: http://www.worksight.com/plumbing_design/Manuscript_Plumbing%20Design_Brno_2010.pdf - accessed in 5fh of April 2011. 75 Search for meaning: a study on the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s graphic design department the pioneer theoretical approach of the school, that was diverse, but the title seems to privilege Deconstruction Theory. Besides Lupton, also Chuck Byrne and Martha Witte (1990), in their article about Deconstruction in Graphic Design, write about the importance of literary theory influence to graphic design in Cranbrook. (Byrne, Witte 1990: 251) Rick Poynor (1991), in his book Typography Now: The next wave, shows some graphic and typographic works that explores the break with traditional typography. He argues: Cranbrook has been at the forefront in exploring the dense, complex layering of elements that is one of the most salient (and frequently criticized) characteristics of the new typographic design. Unlike the earlier work of the New Wave Designers, this is not simply a formal exercise in collage-making; the method arises directly from an engagement with content. The Cranbrook theorists’ aim, derived from French philosophy and literary theory, is to deconstruct, or break apart and expose the manipulative visual language and different levels of meaning embodied in a design, in the same way that a literary critic might deconstruct and decode the verbal language of a novel. (Poynor 1991: 13) In that time the deconstruction term could be over-emphasized, as the criticism defined Cranbrook as the school that followed deconstruction as a strict discipline. In fact, the students and faculty had access to critical texts, but it was just one of a number of theories discussed in Cranbrook. The term was clearly in vogue, having as one example the Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson´s Desconstructive Architecture exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Julia Moszkowicz (2011) in Lost in Translation: The Emergence and Erasure of ‘New Thinking’ within Graphic Design Criticism in the 1990s, recaptures the ideas about the criticism and postmodern investigation, especially in Cranbrook during the 1990’s and uses as reference point, Lupton’s (1991) and Mike Mills’s (1992) articles for Eye in 1992. According to Moszkowicz, Lupton’s article criticizes Cranbrook work under accusation of authorship intentions. Despite an initial appreciation of the intellectual aspirations of Cranbrook Designers, Lupton accuses the Department of TwoDimensional Design of ultimately nurturing an ‘artistic selfcontained’ genre that fails to look beyond the graphic artifact to the world of business and media. (Moszkowicz 2011: 244) The author, in this article, also works with Mike Mills’ argument, that seems to demonstrate enthusiasm for the Cranbrook’s intellectual approach, but criticizes the same. (Moszkowicz 2011: 246) Another famous graphic work, this one made by Katherine McCoy, drew attention to criticism as it apparently sought to sell deconstruction theory. The poster publicizing Cranbrook Design Department’s program – 1989 (Fig. 4) was considered by Poynor as influenced by Derridean Deconstruction (2003: 51). The author describes the use of the opposite words in the middle of the poster. However we must remember that, actually, Derrida questioned the opposite hierarchies to prove its arbitrariness. Katherine McCoy explained in interview that they weren’t really opposites, but word-pairs with related conceptions. The poster is very interesting also for the content being suggested by the conceptual word-pairs and with the see/read/image/text diagram, that is one of the key ideas: to learn how to explore relationships between text and image and to learn how to read and see. The key idea to understand the theoretical approaches in Cranbrook is to understand that the Department was a free thinking environment, where the students and faculty had access to several theoretical references. The influence of some of those poststructuralist and post-modern references had spread out and were studied in many other schools, besides Cranbrook. As teachers, Katherine and Michael McCoy supported the individual search of each student to it find his/her own voice. That principle differed from other schools with confined methods, where all students worked with the same references. They believed in mutual search (by exchange) and not in mutual conclusion (where everyone needed to have the same result). (McCoy 1990: 14). Conclusion Figure 4. Design Department Poster designed by Katherine McCoy Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies As we could understand in the making of this article, the Cranbrook Academy of Art was really a school where the debates and the influence of theories were very important to work experimentation. However, deconstruction was not the main base. In some projects like the posters FIND and LOAF one can clearly see the author´s personal background, and if some critics have defined the designer authorship strategy of Cranbrook as being a poststructuralist strategy, they were right in some way. Despite of that, we must always remember the importance of Cranbrook´s 76 CAMARGO, Iara Pierro de / VELLOSO, Leandro M. R. openness and the search for meaning in design, even if some projects were complex or even ambiguous. Acknowledgment We would like to thank Katherine McCoy, Michael McCoy, Richard Kerr, Scott Santoro and Leonardo Guidugli. References Byrne, C. & Witte, M. 2001 . A Brave New World: Understanding Deconstruction. PRINT, November/December 1990 in Graphic Design History in HELLER, Steven, BALANCE, Georgette. New York, Allworth Press. Braybrook, S. 1985. Cranbrook at Sixty. Print Magazine, November/December. Derrida, J. 1976 . Of Gramatology. Translation: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press. Lupton, E. 2006. The Academy of Deconstruction. EYE Magazine, EYE3/1991. Design writing research. London, Phaidon Press. McCoy, K. & M. 1990. The New discourse. In: ALDERSEY-WILLIAMS, Hugh et al. Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse. New York, Rizzoli International Publications, p.14-19. Moszkowicz, J. 2011. Lost in Translation: The Emergence and Erasure of ‘New Thinking’ within Graphic Design Criticism in the 1990s. Journal of Design History Vol. 24 No. 3: 2011. Disponível em http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/3/241.full.pdf+html acesso em 29 out. 2011. Poynor, R. 2003. No more rules: Graphic Design and Post modernism. London, Laurence King Plublishing. __________. 1991. Typography now: The next wave. London, Booth-Cliborn Editions. Santoro, S. 2010. Plumbing Design. Available in: http://www.worksight. com/plumbing_design/Manuscript_Plumbing%20Design_Brno_2010.pdf – access 10/04/2012 About the author(s) Iara Pierro de Camargo is a graphic designer and teaches Graphic Design at Faculdades Metropolitanas Unidas. She is currently studying in the Design and Architecture Program of University of São Paulo, FAU USP, to receive her PhD degree. She has a MA degree and a Bachelor degree in Philosophy in the same University. <iaritcha@hotmail.com> Leandro M. R. Velloso is a graphic designer and interface developer. He is currently studying to receive his MA degree in the Design and Architecture Program of FAU USP – Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo –, where he graduated in Architecture and Urbanism. <leandrovelloso@usp.br> Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies 77