A Blog Poem, Part I

Designers Develop
Distinctive Dementia
Denying Dear Debts Due
Descendants now Dead;
Doubt and Denial,
(Dada? Or de Stijl?)
Design Does Defile
Damned Discourse, instead.

Distrustful Detractors
(And Dear benefactors)
Disciples Discharged by
Disgrace or Dismay;
Delaunay and Duchamp
Delacroix (Muschamp?)
Designers Dare toil
the hours away.

DaVinci, De Kooning
(Girardi cartooning)
Delightful, Delicious,
Delovely, Detached;
Dexterity Derailed
For Downloads that retail for
Dollars and Dollars
Of monies mismatched.

Documentation
(eternal Damnation!)
Design Desperation
Dickensian Dash;
Distracted by Distance
Denying resistance
Developing Dapper,
Deceptive panache.

Despite Deconstruction
Determining function
Designers do Decorate,
Detail and Draw;
Database Driven, the
Die-hards (God Love 'em!)
Don Duotones, Deeming:
DESIGN IS THE LAW!...

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Sign Language: Endangered Species or Utopian Uprising?

Many of my students have, over the years, considered the street writ large as a kind of flexible, experimental canvas. Their sources — and here I would include everything from Aaron Siskind to Gabriel Orozco — inform work in which reflections of urban life are radically reconsidered. What becomes quickly evident in such investigations is the degree to which we "read" a city, how we traverse its recognizable patterns and, in turn, respond to its barrage of multi-directional and often conflicting cues. And here, the seductive transparency of language becomes particularly intriguing: from poster signage to street graffiti, mapping systems to media walls, WALK to DON'T WALK, it is this thing that Ellen Lupton once called "the designer's common currency", or typography that often becomes the connective tissue between the ubiquity of the urban landscape and the uniqueness of each individual path...

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