MDes Open Project: Re-imagining the Archive

Working in collaboration with several prominent institutions, this Open Project will engage students in the process and practice of designing and developing data visualizations of these institutions’ archival holdings.

Data visualization is not a neutral exercise in creating and communicating understanding. It need not involve computers. Members of the Open Project will pursue, evaluate and critique rhetorical & aesthetic gestures in the pursuit of knowledge creation through these archives.

Archives are never neutral, complete or perfectly accurate. They are always inscribed by power, history, practice, culture and other factors. Open Project members will investigate these archives through the tools they already have and will be invited to learn new tools and tool-making practices to address questions that arise through the process of making many visualizations over the course of the semester.

The Open Project will provide access to a range of leading designers and curators whose practices and knowledge offer productive models for thinking through these questions. Visits to sites, museums, and/or archives complement the studio work, and a series of guest lecturers, both from the partner organizations and elsewhere will provide their own perspectives.

The Open Project welcomes MDes candidates from across all four Domains (Narratives, Ecologies, Mediums, Publics), and will not require any particular technical baseline other than an ability to make and learn from what’s made. Deliverables from the Open Project will include drawings, sketches, observations and visualizations, as well as more developed and perhaps interactive digital visualizations. Volume of output will be as important as the quality of any “final” works. We will expect to iterate, revise, refine, make and learn from mistakes. We’ll be using visualization not only as a way to answer questions, but as a way to generate new kinds of questions through the process of making. These questions can then be potentially answered in different ways, whether through more visualization or other methods.

Each candidate will visualize some aspect of a different archive / collection involving the built or natural world. The work will be evaluated in their relationship to the creation of knowledge. The idea is not so much to fully represent the whole archive as it is to understand what it means to try to identify salient aspects of representation, gaps, or errors.

We’ll have a series of archives that candidates can work with, in partnership with or with the support of institutional partners. We’ll investigate ways that we can compare archives to one another, and visualizations of archives to one another. At the end we’ll roll the projects up into a book / publication.

Several books and shows will inform the working process of the project. These include Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo, Autographic Design by Dietmar Offenhüber, Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, When We Are No More by Abbey Rumsey, and Gary Hustwit’s new movie about Brian Eno.