Responsive Projects

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Responsive Projects aims to create and sustain a continuing dialogue around design’s role in society.

The 2013 forum will focus on the theme Identity, combining lectures with productive, critical discussion between speakers, facilitators and audience addressing current practice and the future of branding. Speakers will explore and discuss their interpretations of identity and its relationship to design, looking outside traditional industry definitions of the term. Identity will investigate how we actively shape and perceive society, culture and the world around us.

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Ken Garland is a designer, author and teacher who has played a significant role in the development of contemporary graphic design. After studying design at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts in the early 1950s, he opened his own studio, Ken Garland & Associates, in 1962. Ken champions a belief in the social responsibility of design, and his ideas are still as relevant today as when he first published the groundbreaking First Things First manifesto in 1964.

Ken is also the subject of a recently published comprehensive monograph of his life and work by Unit Editions (UK).

Ken’s portrait courtesy of Jason Wen.

→ Ken Garland & Associates

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Rob Giampietro is a designer, teacher, and writer. As principal at Project Projects, he leads interactive and identity projects for clients in art, architecture, and the cultural sector. The studio has twice been a finalist for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum‘s National Design Awards.

Since 2006, Rob has been an MFA thesis advisor for graphic design at RISD and has contributed to workshops at Columbia GSAPP, Harvard GSD, Parsons The New School BFACDT, SVA MFA Interaction Design, and Yale School of Art.

As executive board member and vice president of AIGA/NY from 2007-9, Rob organized programming that included a historic conversation between Wim Crouwel and Massimo Vignelli and a free series of talks by emerging designers at the Soho Apple Store.

Recent research has focused on technology’s ongoing influence on language and communication and notions of identity in arts institutions. Rob’s essay on the rise of graphic design MFA programs, “School Days,” was published in the Walker Art Center’s Graphic Design: Now in Production catalogue in 2011.

→ Project Projects

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Living and working in Sydney, Mark Gowing has been designing identities, books and posters for 25 years. Mark is driven by the belief that design is as much about feeling as it is about understanding. This commitment is exhibited in the studio’s output where Mark seeks to engage audiences with emotional communications for leading arts businesses such as, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, UNSW Press and Hopscotch Films.

Much of Mark’s work is characterised by investigations into typography and language through his experimentation with abstraction and form. In recent years this inquiry has evolved beyond the communications-based traditions of design and into experimental formats of self expression.

Mark’s work has been exhibited and published around the world. He has received numerous international awards including New York Type Directors Club excellence awards, Tokyo Type Directors Club excellence awards, Graphis Poster Annual Platinum and Gold awards as well as a Golden Bee Laureate Award. In 2008 Mark became the first Australian to win the Gold Medal at the Warsaw International Poster Biennale, which has since been followed by a Gold Medal at the Mexico International Poster Biennale in 2012.

Mark is a member of the agIdeas Advisory Panel and director of the Australian Poster Biennale.

→ Mark Gowing Design

Michaela Webb is Creative Director at Studio Round, an award winning design studio based in Melbourne.

Michaela has over 16 years experience in the design industry, including time in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia. In London, her experience included working on some of the world’s biggest brands while at renowned brand agency Wolff Olins.

Following this, she moved to award winning design agency Spin. She was responsible for developing creative ideas and strategies for a wide variety of fashion, cultural and corporate clients.

Michaela established Studio Round in 2003. Since then, she has been responsible for creative direction, design strategy development and art direction of the studio’s projects.

From 2006-2009 Michaela was co-President of the Australian Graphic Design Association of Victoria and a member of the Design Victoria Advisory Board to State Government.

→ Studio Round

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After working in various sized design firms, in 2004 Dan Pike founded his own studio,
The Letter D, to pursue the more intimate side of design. The studio has focussed on developing partner-based relationships with local entrepreneurs—with a strong emphasis on distinctive typography and the effective delivery of information.

Convinced that good, or at least considered design is in us all, Dan has mentored, lectured, and now teaches young designers the intricacies of typography and its fundamental role in communicating ideas and context.

In 2012 Dan also launched a publishing imprint called Capital P, collaborating with local artists and authors, photographers and illustrators, creators and collectors, to explore the creative culture and industry alive in Brisbane. Capital P acts as a parallel practice to The Letter D, expanding the scope of work undertaken and providing an opportunity to prove there is a market for carefully crafted publications that can speak to a specific audience.

→ The Letter D.
→ Capital P.

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Peter Hall is a design writer, senior lecturer and design department head at Griffith University Queensland College of Art. Before moving to Brisbane, Australia in January 2012, he was senior lecturer in design at the University of Texas at Austin where he taught design theory, history and journalistic methods of research and writing. His research focuses on mapping as a design process.

Between 2001 and 2007 he was Senior Editor and Fellow at the University of Minnesota Design Institute, where he co-edited with Jan Abrams the book, Else/Where: Mapping – New Cartographies of Networks and Territories and organised several symposia and workshops on mapping. He has been a contributing writer for Metropolis magazine since 2000 and has written widely about design in its various forms, including gaming, elevators, building graphics, bridges, neon lights and office chairs, for publications including Print, I.D. Magazine, The New York Times, and The Guardian.

He taught a seminar class on design theory and writing at Yale School of Art between 2000 and 2007. He wrote and co-edited the books Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, Sagmeister: Made You Look and Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics. Since 2006 he has been Vice President and co-organiser of DesignInquiry, a non-profit educational organisation devoted to researching design issues at an annual gathering in Vinalhaven, Maine.

Sagmeister: Made You Look image by Sagmeister & Walsh

→ peterahall.com