goldsmithsdesign

‘City Strips’ explores the cities of comics franchises without their heroes

Last week, the 310NxRd space at Goldsmiths hosted an exhibition of ‘City Strips’, a zine of comic architecture produced by P.O.I.

Comic series are usually all about the superhero and his adventures, but ‘City Strips’ is all about the cities: it removes characters and speech bubbles from issues of popular franchises such as ‘Superman’, ‘Batman’ and ‘The Walking Dead’, allowing us a better look at the spaces that these heroes inhabit.

The purpose is to explore the context that gives comic heroes agency, Goldsmiths Design lecturer Stuart Bannocks explains. It’s also undeniable that these comic cities are an important part of who its heroes are: “Spiderman could only be Spiderman in New York; if he were in London, he’d have to walk everywhere or take the bus!”

Don’t worry if this sounds exactly like your kind of thing and you missed the exhibition, though; you can also find ‘City Strips’ in comic shops.

MA ID 02: the 2015 Interaction Design show

Last week, students graduating from the MA in Interaction Design exhibited their final projects in the St James Church at Hatcham, New Cross. We’ve already featured a few of these projects on the blog; if you haven’t yet, read our interviews with Karen Barrett, Tom Hoare and Shih-Yuan Huang.

Naho Matsuda’s project focuses on the hidden, dark thoughts and revenge fantasies that most of us indulge in sometimes. Naho collected stories of such fantasies of murder and revenge and then asked some professionals from other fields to make sense of them: a crime investigation specialist, a private detective, a poet, a designer… Continue reading “MA ID 02: the 2015 Interaction Design show”

Rose Sinclair to talk about Dorcas societies at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Updated date and bookings open for this event:

Source: Rose Sinclair to talk about Dorcas societies at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Critical Practice and Fashion workshop with recent MA graduates

Hannah Korsmeyer and Cyrielle Andre, recent graduates from Critical Practice and Fashion, will be holding a workshop exploring the complementarity of both these fields on Monday 7 December at Goldsmiths. Fashion and Critical Practice students are invited for a collaborative day of learning through making: “Working together in the studio, we will not only be exploring our own understanding of what “critical practice” and “fashion” are, but what unexpected creative insights can be gained from a process of making to question.”

What will the workshop be about? Hannah &Cyrielle provide us with some quotes that reflect their approach:

‘[All] design is ideological, the design process is informed by values based on a specific world view, or way of seeing and understanding reality. Design can be described as falling into two very broad categories: affirmative design and critical design. The former reinforces how things are now, it conforms to cultural, social, technical and economic expectation. Most design falls into this category. The latter rejects how things are now as being the only possibility, it provides critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values.’
Dunne and Raby, Design Noir, 2001

‘Learning through making, manifesting things in the world, moving away from the narrow notion of “professional” skill in order to produce and manifest. Strategic making is making from below, from the grass roots or the existence of everyday life. It is not a matter of applying means to some utopian end, but instead to manifest new meaning into the current as a proposition, a dialogue”. The Fashion Condition Collective, 2014