The Artist Statement

What
I felt a bit relieved after studio time this morning when we were tasked to focus the 'what and why' of our project in just a few sentences, as the past week I've devoted a great deal of time to developing an artist statement for my project. For me, this is a guiding line betwixt here and April wherein I can explore, but still keep focus.


I initially came up with:

The intent of this project is to work with the student group, the Roosevelt Institute, over the course of the year to increase membership, event attendance, and heighten the Roosevelt Institute's visibility on campus.

I was trying to dig further into the logistics of this, and I realized there's really two groups I'm trying to reach. The first is the people who are interested in topics of public policy. This is what I call 'preaching to the choir.' They already want to do work on policy topics. They are majoring in politics, or history, they are part of other campus organizations like Student Democrats or Human Rights Through Education, they just aren't aware of our organization in specific.

The second—I'd argue more difficult group—are people who are not traditionally attendees to these types of events or groups. Reaching them is more difficult and will take unorthodox methods of advertisement (e.g., guerilla advertisement, video work, flooding the Michigan Daily with editorials).

So, my statement needed revision in light of this, and also to rectify some clunky language:

The intent of this project is to work with The Roosevelt Institute—a campus student group—to increase event attendance and membership, while reaching out to students who aren't traditionally inclined to get involved.

This works better, but it's two steps forward and one back. First, I don't know what recesses of campus the uninvolved students lurk in, so their identification is crucial if I'm to reach them. Also, the statement doesn't speak to what the organization does and propagating that on campus:

The intent of this project is to work with The Roosevelt Institute—a student group focused on independent research of public policy issues—to increase event attendance and membership, while identifying and reaching out to students who are not traditionally involved.

Better, more complete, if not a bit lengthy. The portion within the em dashes feels it could be its own sentence, and in general feels a bit cold:

My intent is to work with The Roosevelt Institute, a campus student group focused on independent research of public policy issues. I hope to identify and reach out to students not traditionally involved with student groups, increase event attendance and group membership, while expanding the visibility of The Roosevelt Institute among the student body.

Closer… that last bit needs some revision. 'Visibility' doesn't speak to informing people what The Roosevelt Institute actually does:

My intent is to work with The Roosevelt Institute, a campus student group focused on independent research of public policy issues. I hope to identify and reach out to those not traditionally involved with student groups, increase event attendance and group membership, while promoting the purpose of The Roosevelt Institute to the student body.

'Promoting the purpose' is a perfect way to put it, but it seems to me I should be able to say it all in one breath if need be:

I want to work with the student group The Roosevelt Institute. In doing so, I hope to involve students not typically active with student groups, increase event attendance and group membership, while promoting the purpose of The Roosevelt Institute on campus.

Why
An artist statement is the synthesis of our reasons why. These thoughts are what motivate us, compel us to work on projects and spur creativity. They are often this confusing mumble of thoughts which we have to break down, logically to find focus.

My reasoning is two-fold. On one hand, issues of public policy—health care, international relations, urban planning in Detroit— are of great interest to me personally. Initially, I thought focusing on one of these issues in specific would make for a good project, but I found difficulty in tying myself to just one of these issues.

I felt, then, I should advocate for a group that already does wonderful work on all these topics. This is really the other component of my motivation, to explain what the group does and differentiate it from other organizations on campus.

The Roosevelt Institute is comprised of individual policy centers (e.g., the center on health care, the center on international relations) that do independent research on topics people within the group are interested in. After analyzing a topic, students then create policy papers, which they are able to pitch to state representatives in Lansing and are also published in a national journal. People can be part of multiple centers, centers can collaborate with one another to put on events.

Each policy center has a director. All the directors meet once a week to communicate what their policy center is doing and coordinate larger events. The directors are also responsible for fielding requests from other campus groups and non-profit organizations. For example, last year The Roosevelt Institute was asked to do research for the Stop The Hike campaign, which advocated a steady tuition rate for students. This year, we're being asked to look into a variety of topics for Great Lakes Urban Exchange, a non-profit organization.

As you can see, it's quite a different group, it allows people to actually change something, not just write about it. Boiling down my reason 'why' to a few short sentences is a challenge, but if I'm made to:

I'm working with The Roosevelt Institute because combines a group focus on public policy and my passion for politics. By promoting The Roosevelt Institute and involving a broad range of people, I am able to also advocate issues that I feel strongly about.

Discovery
I've started some preliminary design work the past few days, the most important of which is a survey of current members.


I'm distributing it to the directors of each policy center this Sunday, so people within the organization should be able to fill one out over the course of the next week and return it to me by Sunday, October 11. I'm hoping the survey will give me a better grasp of what current members are like and help me target similar people that we just haven't reached.

The group also asked me to do t-shirts. I'm currently coordinating prices with a couple of companies, but the big challenge has been the design. I'm a fan of a more simplistic, text based or single image approach, but I expect there to be some resistance to that idea. Many student group t-shirts have very little hierarchy and are just smattering of sleek—or often unsleek—graphics.

The average person will see a t-shirt for less than two seconds. What will engage them enough to ask what your shirt is about? I think having something clear, quick and intelligible may be the best route for that.

Beyond all this, I'm trying to develop a plan to advertise both the regional event that will be held here in November and displaying the group outside just its events, but more on that to come.

What Next
I'll be fairly straightforward, I need to distribute the survey, compile the survey t-shirt, come up with at least two or three solid t-shirt ideas, and talk with the two Roosevelt co-presidents about this event November 13th and 14th.

How I Spent My Time
I spent a good deal of time running between libraries, trying to come up with research on survey development. A&D resource Annette Haines was very helpful in giving me direction. Two books I found useful were The Survey Handbook and also Using Web and Paper Questionnaires for Data-Based Decision Making. Afterward, I went about designing and printing it for distribution.

As for the t-shirts, it's been a lot of sketching. I used a contact of a friend of mine to get a quote on prices for shirts, my goal is to keep them under $15 a head, so they pay for themselves and The Roosevelt Institute need not toss in what little long-term funds it has. I got a quote for $608 on 75 American Apparel t-shirts, so roughly $8.10 a person. It might be hard to beat that.

On an unrelated, but somewhat relevant note, I found out yesterday I'll be having dinner with Paula Scher on October 22nd which will be an excellent opportunity to pick the mind a branding demigod, if only for a brief time.

Ideation

Discovery
The creation of idea is one of the most intriguing parts of the design process, but also the most frustrating. I freely admit, one of the chief reasons I came to an art school that lacks specificity—we have no concentrated major—was because I understood myself as a technically proficient, but not particularly creative artist.

I felt, and still do feel, that being around a variety of creative works helps stimulate growth in my mind and meliorates non-traditional art background.

Most projects I work on start not with a stroke of genius, but a constant plugging and refinement. This approach always reminds me of a Malcolm Gladwell article in which he compared Cézanne and Picasso. Fundamentally, Picasso was a person of pure vision and execution. It's not to say he did not experiment, but his madness was a clarity many of us aspire to have, whereas Cézanne came to fruition through his constant iterations.

People, myself included, are most inclined to go through the route of refinement, mainly because so few people have absolute, clear vision artistically or otherwise. However, this route often leads you to spend time, sitting, trying to squeeze out that next drop of creativity to pursue or polish.

As a personal approach, I think my method can best be described by a pendulum:


On the right, there is the more conservative, methodical approach. This is where I typically begin a project. I sketch, ask questions, try to set up parameters with which I can answer these questions, and attempt to logically approach my problem. I think this technique is more typical of someone without an artistic background. Projects are visualized as a problem, wherein there are solutions and methods to reach those solutions.

On the left, is the more liberal, wide-angle approach. As a 'right-of-the-pendulum' person, I admit it's difficult to envision what is in this territory of creative exploration, but I think it could best be described in two ways:

1. Experimental ideas I've not considered, as they seem to fall outside the scope of a method approach

2. The part a project that cannot be planned

Iteration itself is not an A to B process, as it might appear.


The above is taken from the MFA thesis project of Alex Egner , who says:

"My graphic design process allows for ongoing exploration and freedom of movement, but I always keep one eye focused ahead. So what appears to be a straight path from Point A to Point B actually includes many detours and stops along the way. A seemingly simple project has underlying complexity."

What Next
My intent for this coming week is to define Point B, explicitly, with the understanding my path to it won't be linear. With multiple meetings and events over the course of the year, I feel the pendulum will swing toward the left as the project necessitates.

My initial plan will falter and I'll be forced to improvise in ways that will both make my project more ambitious, and allow me to understand more deeply the way my creative process works.

How I Spent My Time
A new affection I discovered during my downtime became quite constructive for my thoughts. I spent a great deal of time looking at the recent MFA theses of different school's students (Yale School of Design, Cranbrook Academy of Art). I wanted to see how other designers began with questions and artist statements and how they unfolded.

Perhaps this time spent was more for the sake of comfort and confidence in my own project, but the MFA candidates of one university was particularly instructive, The School of Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. It was a source of inspiration I highly recommend, especially Alex Egner, mentioned above, and Carissa Henriques.

This encompassed a large part of time this past week, but I managed to get to the Hatcher Library and check out Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte. I hope the text will be useful in formulating an idea of what this 'brand' should look like, though I'm not trying to get too tied to the visual aspect of this project yet.

Block

Discovery
I was lucky enough to listen to Swiss designer Bruno Monguzzi speak yesterday, and it was interesting hear him speak of design as one of problem solving. He said, "You do not need to come up with the answer… It is right in front of you. All you have to do is look hard enough. The answer is right there."


With this methodology, it seems there should be a calming resolution once the answer is discovered, but there isn't really. You finish with a project and so many new questions arise. Monguzzi himself pointed out, it's difficult to pick a work of his he likes the most, because all he sees are his, "Missed opportunities."

When I consider my project, there is this knee-jerk reaction to want something pedagogical, a clean, 'academic' resolution to a problem with an equally considered aesthetic counterpart. Experience should tell me that, without exception, none of my projects have found harmony so easily.

Over the past few days, I've been trying to revisit a few projects I truly struggled with, hoping to understand how I moved beyond my intuition and refined the scope. Naturally, there's no how-to guide to overcome a mental block. Detachment has proven the best path at times.

It's aggravating to look vacantly on one side of an impasse, unable to see around its periphery. As it stands, my current idea is three-fold:

1. Work with the Roosevelt Institute to create a consistent and identifiable visual brand over the course of the year

2. Study and the target specific student demographics to increase event attendance and membership

3. Create a design standards publication that outlines both the research and design choices for use by future members

The concept is not all too troublesome, but it seems there is a component lacking. Consider these three steps as one part of the equation. I am essentially a design consultant for the Roosevelt Institute. The other part of the calculation is what I get, beyond simple satisfaction. What revelation occurs to me over the course of the project that I am yet unable to see?

Being objective, while I may greatly enjoy this project over the course of the year, I don't see what could be revealed to me that I could not understand now. Part of the beauty in design and art is not just the outcome, but a clarity that arises in the act of making. Clarity shouldn't be mistaken for answers, rather just a unique understanding of one's own work and how it relates to the environment around it. It might even raise more questions than it answers, that could even be the intent.

From an early age, we are taught to ignore intuition and to reconsider our gut feelings logically before acting upon them. In spite of this, I've found a wealth of opportunity through that small, illogical voice and I've come to trust it a great deal. Due to that, I'm reluctant to forsake my ideas entirely. It might be that I'm simply missing an opportunity, within what I've already defined, to do something I cannot yet see or understand.

One comforting notion is that my mind is wandering with specificity. At the beginning, my thoughts circled the broad and complex issues of Metro Detroit, legal immigration, and public transportation, but even as they've narrowed to a small student group on campus, there is a continuous feature—public policy.

What Next
It's most important for me to understand that I have time. This is not a decision that will be made between now and Tuesday, nor does need to be. Pressure will likely exacerbate existing fear. Simply, I need to be consumptive of other ideas, not just to take my mind away from the task at hand, but allow it to dawdle in another area I'd not yet considered.

How I Spent My Time
Aside from spending time in Monguzzi's lecture, I took the time to read two Ladislav Sutnar books which were chiefly about legibility and continuity within information systems. Further, I attended a Roosevelt Institute meeting—from which the bulk of my frustration now stems—and spent time talking to the two co-presidents about their intentions for the year.

I also found myself spending a lot of time looking through the design section of Ted Talks, not just that of Jacek Utko mentioned in an earlier post, but also David Carson.

Intuition

I've been down with the flu these past three days, and thus I've had a lot of time to ruminate upon my project.

Sunday morning I went to a meeting for a public policy group on campus called The Roosevelt Institute. Essentially, The Roosevelt Institute is a non-partisan group comprised of students who do independent research for their center (e.g., center on urban planning, center on international affairs, center on health) and create policy based off their findings.

It is quite unique in this way, as the group is beholden to neither left or right leanings (though admittedly bills itself as more progressive). Members have the chance to get published nationally and even get the opportunity to pitch their policy in their state capitol.

If you've not heard of them, I doubt you're alone. Despite being part of a large network across the nation—nearly 85 chapters—with a national committee in Washington D.C. that can count, among others, a former White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense in its ranks, they remain rather unknown on campus.

Why?

This problem reminded me of a Ted Talk I watched last spring with Jacek Utko. Utko was probing the reason for declining newspaper readership. Beyond the obvious rise of the internet, what he found was the way in which the internet communicates. The internet facilitated the medium of exchange much better than the clunky print designs of old.

At it's heart, readership was a design problem. His subsequent redesigns of newspapers have yielded great returns, merely by making them more accessible and, to some degree, more playful. We are even seeing older, more established newspapers, like The New York Times, alter format due to cost and thereby rethink their design.

I've been involved with Roosevelt for two years now. My first, it was purely in a writing capacity. The second year I had trouble making many of the meetings, but I began offering my services as a designer instead. It was my first real experience doing work for a student group like this, but slowly we began to discover something.

Basically, the way student groups advertise has not changed in fifty years.

They flyer every hallway, hand out leaflets in the Diag, they make Facebook groups (essentially your internet leaflet), and if they have a bit of money they make buttons or t-shirts. None of this is effective though. It doesn't harp to a specific demographic that would be interested in coming to events.

The scatter-gun approach wastes a great deal of time on people who wouldn't come anyhow, rather than finding out where people who are interested in international politics, or health care, actually are. It produces the same outcome. Loyal members drag some of their friends to the event and that's the turnout. What's worse, when a person does make something effective, a blog, a catching t-shirt design, it never gets passed along to the next generation of leaders. There's a quick turnover in student groups.

What is happening can best be described as a design problem.

Near the end of last year, we tried something different. Rather than spraying an array leaflets for an event The Roosevelt Institute was putting on, we decided it would be best to try and target. I created a colored poster in a run of 50 that we placed more strategically in the Ford School and other international affairs-minded areas of campus.


The turnout was quite surprising. For a voluntary lecture on campus, not at all sponsored by the University of Michigan, we managed to pack a lecture hall. There were people actually standing because we didn't have enough seats.

People already do such wonderful research on issues I care about, but are read by so few. This is really the crux of the project I envisioned doing on Detroit. It's not that the statistics and information aren't there, it's that people don't know where to look.

The problem at hand has a clearly defined goals (to increase membership, attendance, and find out where our demographics are) and means to reach them (through design) over the course of the year. Doing a year-long project with The Roosevelt Institute would not only offer several opportunities in design, but would also allow me to create something a lasting for the organization by researching effective marketing strategy for them.

I'm not certain that design was directly responsible for the outcome of the event above. I'm really interested in finding out how much it was though.

Create Something

In high school, you get taught this 'light house' writing approach, where you start very broad and through the course of your paper you come to point, an answer at this beacon of light.

One of the best teachers I ever had pointed out this method is actually quite wrong. Writers should come out and forcefully state their interest and intent at the beginning of their work, ideally within their thesis statement, then support it. He argued, it's painful for your reader to endure the entirety of a work without any understanding of intention. What if your conclusion is a disappointment after the reader has worked hard for four-hundred pages? It's why many great novels lack a very firm resolution.

Of course, he admitted there are exceptions, and you should not give everything away, but I've been thinking a great deal about these two approaches.

Artistically, I could create dozens of iterations of one project, and then vaguely arrive at a comfortable spot. It makes sense to me because I was there for the entirety of the creative process.

On the other hand, some of the more successful projects I've had, I went through the painful process of iteration and exploration. Yet, rather than using my final iteration as the project I hand in, I set what I did aside entirely visually, then re-create the project, bearing in mind what I've done.


The work I've done this way seems to produce a much stronger statement, that is intelligible free of the entire creative process around it.

I spoke with my cohort about our goal of creating 'something' for Tuesday, we defined my target as the organization of data around what interests me, chiefly urban areas and the city of Detroit. Initially, I thought I would create something like Nicholas Felton's creations, or maybe use his side project, DAYTUM, to track the information.


However, there's a real disparity between the information typically listed in his work and on DAYTUM (e.g., miles walked, eggs eaten, planes flown on) and the information I would convey (e.g., unemployment, average income).

Felton's work and any number of DAYTUM accounts are intriguing because of the information on display, not the manner in which it is presented. That is its statement. Don't mistake words, the design of both projects I think is beautiful, but there's nothing all together engaging about charts in graphs. It's the intrigue of, "Why does this person care to track how many miles they travelled with a moustache?"

The data I'm working with is not deeply interesting to others in the same way. The use of charts and graphs can be similarly beautiful, and create a basis of understanding, but unless I present the information in a unique way, people simply won't bother with it. It would be dull, report like.

The visual representation necessitates the interest.

Legibility

This is a great article about the shift in American handwriting. Given the work I'm trending toward, legibility and how intelligible information can be is quite important.

Detroit

At the end of last semester, it seemed like a large chunk of my work became deeply involved with the city of Detroit, its demise, and the hope for urban renewal.

Over the summer, I tried to distance myself from the work, fearing I may become too attached to a project coming into IP. The rest that comes from not working is often equally as insightful, and such is what I found. I still have a deep desire for discourse on the city, statistical metrics, what urban centers mean to metro areas, and how they can be successful.

I think these notions persist in part due to my attempts to travel more this past year. I find new questions arise as I visit other large cities and my experiences are broadened. What makes these other areas successful? Why do we hold on to something clearly struggling? What policies inhibit or promote growth?

I suppose that this is the midpoint between why I came to school, for history and social science, and where I find myself now, an art student. There was a project I completed at the end of last semester that attempted to tackle this.


It was a short video, roughly six and a half minutes of animation with voice overlaid. It was a first foray into sounding editing and comprehensive video editing. It was also a disaster, fraught with error.

I'm not convinced the premise was wrong, I think there was great value in the exploration, but the way I conveyed my findings just seemed somewhat unrevealing and wandering. As my professor pointed out, I chose time as a medium when I picked a video format. However, I didn't utilize it to my advantage.


Time was not the crux of what the information presented. I could have very well printed the information and had the same effect (something I in fact did for a revision of the project).


So the question: Was it the medium or premise rife with error?

I still think my exploration was of interest and was worthwhile to me personally. I'm hoping that this coming year gives me time to, foremost, delve deeper into my interests in this area, and secondly derive a format that compliments the information.

Infographics

Yesterday afternoon, I was painting my room with my friend Tom when my new neighbor, Mike, happened by. We started chatting about majors, Mike mentioned he was a math major. I remarked how I'd actually struggled with math until I hit trigonometry and calculus, because it required more visual interpretation. It became problem solving as opposed to memorization.

Tom, a Russian and Eastern European Studies major, mentioned that while giving due credit to higher math, for most people he felt nothing was more applicable that a solid statistics course.

Statistics are everywhere now. From the way Google begins to understand its search results, to its rival Wolfram-Alpha being entirely devoted to the discourse, to marketing campaigns based of case studies, and so forth. What is particularly useful, and seems to be more common now, is a graphic language built to better express these statistics:


This piece by Gavin Potenza ran in Good Magazine this last week. Admittedly, there is nothing entirely striking about the way the design influences how we see the data, but the statistic's visibility itself is key.


Nigel Holmes designed this for a New York Times Op-Ed about progress made in the years following Hurricane Katrina.

I find my work—in design at least—being pulled more and more in this direction. Graphical information can be both poignant and revealing.