Date of Award
Spring 5-1-2014
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Clement Valla
Second Advisor
Jon Sueda
Third Advisor
Dylan Fracareta
RISD Fleet Library Catalog Record
Abstract
Graphic designers, by nature, create sets of rules or conditions to establish relationships between disparate parts. The product graphic designers produce is thus an assembly of materials organized by these rules. In the context of our increasingly networked culture, there is an opportunity for graphic designers to reconsider how we orchestrate relationships. Rather than establishing conditions to make discrete objects as singular designers, this thesis proposes methods for generating new content and new form in collaboration with others.
Through rule-based design and trans-disciplinary collaboration, this body of work explores the terms of co-production. Using site-specific events, I assemble small networks of collaborators and design context-specific rules to facilitate collaboration. To create rules that are responsive to my collaborators, the design process starts with extensive conversations in order to understand my colleagues. Embracing constraints while allowing for flexibility, the rules are then revised and improvised in the collaborative process: some encourage consensus whereas others invite transgression. The diverse processes of collaboration are practices that enable me to be more open to alternative perspectives in spite of personal preferences and disciplinary differences.
To preserve these ephemeral events, I also create post-event documentation. Instead of simply reporting the events, the documentation reveals the working dynamics behind these collaborations: it is a mediating tool for analyzing these relationships, facilitating further collaborations, and even fictionalizing the collective experience so that these often invisible processes can take form.
My thesis started as an open-ended inquiry to create openings in my design process, a personal and public endeavor to be transformed by conditions beyond my own. Through events of assembly, my role as a graphic designer has expanded in the project life cycle: I am both a content generator as well as content mediator using processes of collaboration and documentation. My work does not seek to present prescriptive rules or formal unity. Rather, it is an anthology of events resonant with the way I approach design, a process-driven and open-ended inquiry in response to my immediate environment, it is a kind of "tropism" referred to Critic Brian Holmes as "the need to torn towards something else...to open up new possibilities of expression, analysis, cooperation and commitment."
Recommended Citation
Lee, Chloe, "Events of Assembly: exploring the terms of co-production" (2014). Masters Theses. 1506.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1506
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
Additional Masters Examination Committee members / advisors: Rob Giampietro, Anthony Graves, and Bethany Johns.