what shall we do with our walls ?

title of book by Clarence Cook, published in 1880


Yellow Keys pattern, Courtney Cooney; more here

We design wallpaper patterns as an opportunity to think about design verities, and the function and status of decoration in the light of readings of

Adolf Loos. “Ornament and Crime” (1908), in Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside CA: Ariadne Press, 1998); and
Hal Foster. “Design and Crime,” in Design and Crime and other Diatribes (Verso) First published in the London Review of Books, 2000

Several of us were struck by the emergence of limited-edition or “bespoke” wallcoverings, afforded by digital design and production technologies. These include hand or machine-printed patterns, to which transfers and vinyl stickers can be added in free deployments. An example is Rachel Kelly's “Long Flower,” which can be seen here. See Mary Schoeser's “Limited Editions: 1995 to Today,” in the second edition of Lesley Hopkins, ed., The Papered Wall : The History, Patterns and Techniques of Wallpaper, Thames & Hudson, 2005. (Schoeser is Senior Research Fellow at the Textiles Future Research Group, and prolific author on silk, wallpaper, etc. See her bio here.)

leads > delicious

Earlier in the semester, we began to identify, annotate and organize good resources on, within and around design. The work was — Find a minimum of five quality further discussions of, or images relating to, themes in either one of these two readings.

Armin Vit : Glide'08: The Infrastructure of the Web as Design Education —
However, there is a certain activity that I engage in that perhaps puts me in a position to talk about the subject of using technology, the web in particular, in favor of design education: I poke around the web. A lot. at speakup (October 2008), on the occasion of Glide ’08 — Global Interaction in Design Education / Biennial Design Web Conference (October 2008); and

Steven Heller : A History of Aggressive Design Magazines —
Graphic design evolved during the late nineteenth century from a sideline of the printing industry into an autonomous field with its own lore, icons and personalities. The missing link in this evolutionary process is trade magazines. at designobserver (December 2008).

I have taken vetted, edited and and assigned tags to linked received, and moved them directly to the design stories links at delicious. Not all of the links at this location have been generated in this course, but those that are are tagged "216" (course designation) and the first and last initials of the students who submitted them.

I see this delicious project as a long-term one, in which annotations and tags will be all-important means to make the tool useful. Here and there are sprinkled links to flickr photosets — typically of individual designers' works, or design magazine covers; these colorful 72 pixel-square thumbnails help to enliven the otherwise blue/gray bibliographic array, but also provide clues into what may lie behind these names and titles. More or larger visuals, however, would be distracting and subvert the indexical (pointing) function of these bookmarks.

On the practice of bookmarks, I liked this essay-in-progress from a paper toward coagulating ideas — an effort to compare historical and contemporary material and digital practices for remembering and sharing what has been read: annotation, especially bookmarks — by Britta Gustafson at UC Santa Barbara. Other discussions of indexing one's reading are listed at one of my index rerum pages.