“For design is about the making of things: things that are memorable and have presence in the world of the mind. It makes demands upon our ability both to consolidate information as knowledge and to deploy it imaginatively to creative purpose in the pursuit of fresh information.”
“The essential function of our profession [design] in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward an easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time for higher visual and auditory retention of data.”
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”
“To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.”
Portland, OR: Pacific Northwest College of Art
Visit: We met with Library Director Dan McClure.
PNCA is over 100 years old. Used to be a museum school. The Portland Art Museum library had archival holdings documenting the old museum school.
PNCA archival holdings are principally institutional – some architectural drawings. They are in the process of moving to a new space, and once they are in the new location archives will be processed.
They school developed software called “homeroom” where a lot of information is collected. The IT folks wrote a special program for the library called “Mimi” which puts their archives online for internal PNCA users. It is built on Open Source software – Ruby on Rails, PHP – the search engine is “Lucene” (?). A demo showed some very nice image zoom capabilities.
The new building with have a “Center for Curatorial Studies.”
PNCA is a part of the new joint MFA program (with OCAC) in collaborative design.
There is something called the Portland Center for Visual Art which attracts big name artists for residences. PNCA has 6 archival boxes of documentation.
All of their guest lectures are documented with videio, but most of them are fine art rather than design.
The editor of “lowercaseUppercase” teaches there – Margaret Richardson
Discoveries:
Area sources that bear examination:
Nike
Intel
Ziba Design (they do have an archivist)
Egg Press ( a Portland letterpress).