Final Publication: A Collection/Catalog

Today we considered what form our group publication could take. We pondered the merits of a printed book versus a digital publication in PDF form, and considered the fact that it can be difficult to decide to do a printed piece once you’ve focused on the digital component, whereas focusing first on the printed piece inherently calls for the creation of a digital document. We also considered the fact that we’ve been working in document sizes beyond the realm of what is likely easy and affordable to print. We considered the possibility of a printed piece with special inserts, or a specially bound piece that would allow large spreads, but came to the same conclusion.

After this brainstorming and consideration of our options, we decided to go in a direction that will both offer a certain degree of flexibility and has the potential to be very visually interesting. This is going to be a hybrid “kit,” a collection/catalog of items/pages—with the single restriction that we use the 8.5x11 dimension. This is a final size—so, for example, you could produce item(s) in an 11x17 size and then fold it down to 8.5x11, or you could produce a larger poster that would fold down to 8.5x11, or you could unite smaller components into an 8.5x11 final size. Our conversation touched on the idea of whether and how we set up some basic rules for the document; for example, how might someone make their way through it? We should also consider the creation and assembly of the document in terms of our systems reading, thinking about how “this” affects “that” and whether there is some basic system to the pages. We discussed the idea of a document allowing some of the free experimentation we executed in our hybrid-picture-matching game—something you could open up and lay out and use to make your own connections. We returned to the idea of how to integrate our three different topics, and discussed how the format of the class is itself a model for the publication, in that we come together each week to unite the strands of conversation and ideas we have been carrying through our own projects individually. We discussed the fact that as we are planning and making our projects, we should think about what would happen if you mixed and matched the items within: crossing chairs—with books—with Taiwan. What happens when you send a chair from the Vitra design collection to Taiwan, then bring it back? Where does Taiwan fit into the history of printed books? How have printed books influenced the design of chairs?

Next up is figuring out how to actually make the project. We should explore different papers and other materials, sizes (still with the goal of arriving at an 8.5x11 package), textures, colors, typefaces, etcetera. We should also determine how the publications (at least four copies) will be packaged, i.e. creating folios for the finished collections. Aside from this literal bringing together of the items, we should consider how all the elements tie together, how we structure moments of separation and moments of integration within the document. For next Tuesday we should come with printouts of EVERYTHING (basically ALL content), so we can lay everything out together and see how this final collection of items will actually work. Following that we will produce!