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Design Essays

We Have Impact

by (author) Brian Boigon

Publisher
Memoirs Publications
Initial publish date
Jul 2013
Category
Essays, Popular Culture
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780991868445
    Publish Date
    Jul 2013
    List Price
    $3.99

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Description

We Have Impact is a collection of short essays on design and society. The book was conceived as an exercise in both thinking and framing design into a poetic system of language and verse. The contents and its aggressive periodicity are braided into a single written design project. We Have Impact addresses how the problem of design itself has been overlooked, particularity in the social design fields. Boigon extracts the design attributes of a variety of sites, including questions around who designed the Weekend, Halo, Mutiny and how snow redesigns the city's surface and audio-graphic qualities. WHI is divided into an eccentric directory of content in which the overall cartographic grammatology creates a pathway into the enchanted forest of the authors wild mind. The author retools the social field of design with each chapter and delivers a scrabble of words across a calculated cadence of verse.

About the author

Brian Boigon's work as a cultural producer was launched with his book "Speed Reading Tokyo" in 1990. He has worked in and out of academia, the entertainment and media arts industries. He is currently the Director of the Undergraduate Architectural Studies program at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Design at the University of Toronto. As a teacher on fire, he has penned a recent studio lecture course entitled "How to design almost anything" which will be soon followed by "How to design almost nothing". Boigon's current research is based on the hysterical history of video gaming and his targeted extraction of a motion pathway design theory from cartoons to wireframes. His recent article "Wild Physics" is a tirade on modular locomotive design during game play. Boigon lives in Toronto and continues to lecture and work internationally.

Brian Boigon's profile page

Excerpt: We Have Impact (by (author) Brian Boigon)

We Have Impact explores how much design influences our everyday lives. Divided into a series of short essays, We Have Impact speculates on the origin of established social conventions like the weekend, common object like a tube of toothpaste, and natural phenomena like snow. What all of these essays have in common is the question: do our lives shape design or does design shape our lives? Do we have impact? Or, are we only designed to believe we do? Design as a proto-functional way of life in an artificial construct. It has been ushered into our daily routines by postwar advertising and meaningless twenty-first century lifestyle branding brought to us by companies like Ford, Apple and McDonalds, fictional heroes like Lara Croft, Bruce Wayne and Harry Potter, and groups of game console architects like Red vs Blue at Bungie. Given the armada of influences now surrounding our decisions, We Have Impact proposes that every move we make is, in essence, designed.