Continuing on with my adventures in New York City, last night I had the pleasure of attending the AIGA/NY Fresh Dialogue 25, titled Design Blogging is Changing the World. I wanted to know if this was in fact true. In an almost-full auditorium at Parsons, four leading bloggers presented their work and then participated in a moderated dialogue, answering questions from the audience and our moderator, Alice Twemlow.

Twemlow, a design critic, writer and chair of the MFA Design Criticism program at SVA, eloquently introduced the bloggers and presented the audience with the questions that should be answered by the end of the night, which was helpful in directing our attention. Questions like how bloggers know what to post and when; how do they create a recognizable voice; is blogging a means of disseminating critical thinking about design. Here is a summary of the evening.

Twemlow presenting our speakers.

Kicking off the presentations was Khoi Vinh, creator of subtraction.com and Design Director of the NewYorkTimes.com. Khoi, who’s been blogging since at least 1997, noted the changes he’s seen over the years. One major shift involves the individual and the network. As blogs become increasingly easy to obtain and keep, the design of them is becoming secondary to the power of the network. He pointed to flickr sites in which artists communicate their ideas/portfolios through what they post (images and folder titles). This is a way of tapping into the [flickr] network (and all of its many members and marketing capabilities) without actually maintaining a written blog.

Vinh’s dog, Mister President, also has a blog.

Next up was Allan Chochinov, a contributing author of Core77 and teacher at Pratt and SVA. Allan took us through the interesting visual history of Core77, describing everything it was and is. He used axioms like Everything’s a Story. Everything’s a Community. Everything’s a Platform. Everything’s a [fill in the blank]. And he’s right. Blogs are all of these things. I think the most compelling word he used was community. A blog is a virtual, almost real-time community in which there are active participants. Rather than creating something static (as in a book, which isn’t actually static but just slower to be interactive), blogs create a space in which humans can communicate and connect with one another quickly, and anyone [with an internet-connected computer] can tap into this. (I also happily note that Chochinov is dedicated to sustainable practices. See one of his interesting articles here.)

Eisenberg’s Swiss Miss blog.

We then heard from the very dynamic Tina Roth Eisenberg, creator and sole-writer of Swiss Miss, a blog which began as an archive of the things Tina likes and became an on-going commentary on design and culture. Tina spoke rather beautifully, I must say, about the way in which she sees blogging as a means of connection with other humans. Through documenting her observations (which she posts), she is able to connect.

Cool Hunting creates weekly videos and posts them. One of their favorite projects was this video showing letterpress printers (!) from Brazil.

Our last speaker was Josh Rubin, creator and editor of Cool Hunting, a site which posts interesting/uncommon products that intersect design, culture, technology and art. Basically the blog is a catalog of observations, similar to Swiss Miss, kind of like the new, virtual form of collecting (a centuries-old human tendency). Rubin thinks the future of blogs is a romance with analog; going back to handmade things, showing the beauty of crafts.

Left to right: Twemlow, Chochinov , Rubin, Vinh, Eisenberg.

After the presentations there was a brief dialogue. Twemlow asked why bloggers aren’t having a more critical discussion of design. One response was that blogs might not be adding value to the field by commenting critically in the blogosphere. What?! Designers need critical thinkers and examiners of the craft in order to think better themselves, in order to develop the field. As Twemlow said early in the night, blogs have the ear of the design community. Critical dialogue (what makes something cool or not; what does this say about who we are, etc) is essential to our field, to our thinking, particularly because of the democracy of our industry. Anyone can be a designer; what separates the better from the good is the quality of mind behind the solutions. The question, then, is which blogs want to take on this role in the design community?

One major take-away for me was the personality behind the blogs. Perhaps most evident in Swiss Miss, Eisenberg noted that this was a space for her personal archive, for things she likes and even commenting on her own life. This is a way for her readers to connect with her, to learn what/how she thinks. And I think this is what we are all looking for, the story behind the human, behind the writing. It’s really quite a lovely idea.

Full disclosure: this picture is actually from last year’s super duper sledding slope.

I left the city this morning for the country house in Connecticut (also known as my father’s house) where I’ll be spending most of the holidays with my ridiculously large family, drinking cheap wine, eating lots of food and reading up a storm. I might also try to make a book or two, but no promises. More pictures to come.