WHAT MATTERS International Symposium
and the :OUTPUT Competition
Otis College of Art and Design in collaboration with :OUTPUT Foundation

Public Events March 16th and 17th., 2007 @ Otis

Maximum Participation: 100 People. Fee: $100
Registration for educators and practitioners begins Feb. 1, go to: www.otis.edu
Registration for students must be made through Kali Nikitas: knikitas@otis.edu
(there is a limited number of seats for students)

WHAT MATTERS is an international symposium for professionals, academics, and students of graphic, product and architectural design, hosted by and at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California, in collaboration with the :OUTPUT Foundation, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

WHAT MATTERS is the first triennial symposium in which Otis will work in collaboration with the renowned :OUTPUT Foundation. :OUTPUT is the largest international competition for students of visual communication and to commemorate their 10th anniversary they have initiated this symposium and extended entries to include architecture and product design

WHAT MATTERS will consist of five lectures by internationally recognized professionals in the fields of graphic design, product design, and architecture, and three presentations by teams of faculty and students from academic institutions representing those fields. Presentations will address WHAT MATTERS (?).

WHAT MATTERS asks this question in the context of increasing specialization of skills and production processes within a flattened world of globalization. How can graphic, product and architectural design maintain their disciplinary concerns within this commercially driven context? How can transfers between these disciplines advance their specific concerns? How can WHAT MATTERS to these disciplines affect commerce and production? How can WHAT MATTERS to graphic, product and architectural design make a difference?

The WHAT MATTERS Symposium is a public event that requires registration and will take place on March 16th and 17th. The :OUTPUT Competition Jury is a private proceeding and will take place on March 18th and 19th. Winners of the competition will be announced in late March 2007. A book documenting the winning entries will be distributed through an international distributor.

:OUTPUT Foundation
http://inputoutput.de/
:output is a non-profit organization in Amsterdam. The goal of the foundation is to support young talents and provide a platform for the exchange of ideas on design education and the design profession. We ...

... organize the competition :output calls for input
... publish the yearbook :output with the best works of students around the world.
... organize the biannual design conference "What matters"
... connect industry and design education through innovation projects (:output lab)
... build an international network of design education

WHAT MATTERS Speakers/:OUTPUT Competition Jurors

Anne Burdick, Los Angeles, USA
Anne Burdick is the Acting Chair of the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design, and Design Editor of Electronic Book Review (electronicbookreview.com). In her practice, Anne collaborates with texts and writers to produce new modes of reading and writing. Despite winning the prestigious Leipzig Award for the “Most Beautiful Book in the World,� Anne does not call her practice book design. Rather, she designs spaces for writing in diverse media and environments, which sometimes includes books. Her projects are wide-ranging: poetry installations for the Getty Research Institute, unique approaches to lexicography with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, experimental fiction at the Walker Art Center’s Gallery 9, and books of literary/media criticism by authors such as Marshall McLuhan and N. Katherine Hayles.

Neil Denari, Los Angeles, USA
Neil Denari has been at the forefront of architecture and design for the last 20 years. Prior to launching NMDA in Los Angeles in 1988, he lived and worked in New York where his work explored the technical and formal impact of technology on architecture. In 2002, Denari was given both the Richard Recchia Award and the Samuel F.B. Morse Medal for architecture from the National Academy of Design in New York for distinguished work in the field. Denari is the author of two bestselling books, Interrupted Projections and Gyroscopic Horizons. Denari formerly was Director of SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and has taught at various schools including Columbia University, the Bartlett, SIT Tokyo, and UT Arlington. Neil Denari currently holds the position of Professor-in-Residence in the Architecture and Urban Design department at UCLA.

Laurie Haycock Makela, Stockholm, Sweden
Laurie Haycock Makela is an internationally recognized voice at the intersection of graphic design and digital media. From the early to mid-90’s Laurie was Director of the design department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 1996 she chaired, with her late husband P. Scott Makela, the graduate program in the 2-D Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Since moving to Stockholm, Haycock Makela has been well known as a designer of installations, exhibitions, gardens and „experience design“ in an art context, as well as a guest professor at HfG in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Konstfack and KTH in Stockholm.

Florian Pfeffer, Amsterdam, Netherlands/Bremen, Germany
Florian Pfeffer is a partner of the design studio ‚jung und pfeffer‘ with offices in Amsterdam and Bremen. He is professor for visual communication at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany. Pfeffer is a regular speaker at design conferences in Germany, Italy, USA and Turkey and has taught at universities in the USA, Germany and Lebanon. He writes and publishes essays about the role of design in history and future society. Pfeffer is the creator and the director of the :OUTPUT foundation, as well as the editor, designer and author of the yearbook :OUTPUT.

Fiona Raby, London, England
Fiona Raby is a design practice partner at Dunne & Raby, London. Recent projects from Dunne & Raby include „Consuming Monsters: Big, Perfect, Infectious“ which examines the role of design in the debate about the future of bio-technology where she references the case study Bioland, a hypothetical shopping center. ‚Evidence Doll’, a product from Bioland was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2005. Previously Raby was a senior research fellow at the Royal College of Art, where Raby jointly managed the Critical Design Unit within the CRD Research Department with industrial designer Anthony Dunne.

WHAT MATTERS Academic Presenters

Elliott Earls
Elliott Earls was appointed Designer-in-Residence and Head of the 2-D Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2001. Earls formed The Apollo Program in 1993, whose commercial clients include Elektra Entertainment, Nonesuch Records, Little Brown & Co., Scribner Publishing Co., Elemond Casabella (Italy), The Cartoon Network (U.K.), Polygram Classics and Jazz, The Voyager Company and Janus Films. Earls's work has been featured in the books: The Graphic Edge, Cool Type, Faces on the Edge, Type in the Digital Age, One and Two Color Graphics, and Cutting Edge Typography. Earls also has been a visiting artist at numerous American universities and presented workshops on design, culture and new media in Europe and America.
Presentation with: Cranbrook M.F.A. candidate

R.E. Somol
R.E. Somol is a Professor in the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University and Visiting Professor at the Princeton School of Architecture. He has previously taught design and theory at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Rice University, Columbia University, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is the editor of Autonomy and Ideology and his writings have appeared in publications ranging from Assemblage to Wired. As guest editor of Log 5, Somol continued efforts to displace architecture’s institutionalized modes of criticality by a renewed engagement with the projective possibilities of the discipline. His collection of essays, Nothing to Declare, is forthcoming from ANY Books and the MIT Press.
Presentation with: Andrew Heid, M.Arch., Princeton School of Architecture (2006)

René Veenhuizen
René Veenhuizen is partners with Tejo Remy and is on faculty at the School of Art in Utrecht. Their work has been exhibited all over Europe, in Japan, Los Angeles, and New York. They have received a number of commissions from individuals, institutions, and organizations inside the Netherlands and abroad. René has lectured in Europe and in the United States, most notably, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACME.
Presentation with: Utrecht School of Art student.

Volker Albus
Volker Albus has studied architecture at the RWTH Aachen and since 1984 is practising as a designer of furniture and interior architecture. Albus has curated numerous exhibtions and regulary publishes a column in the magazine "form". He is a professor for product design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe/Germany.

FIFTEEN A Typographic Exhibition
Fifteen is an exhibition to celebrate 15 years of the FontFont Library and the relationships and inspirations that have made it possible. The exhibition will also feature FUSE, a seminal publication on experimental typography published by FSI between 1991 and 2000, which was instigated and edited by London-based designer Neville Brody. FIFTEEN reveals some of the tricks of the type trade and shows how type is used in ways never imagined by its creators.

Erik Spiekermann
Prof. Dr. h.c. Erik Spiekermann is information architect, type designer (ff Meta, itc Officina, ff Info, ff Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk et al) and author of books and articles on type and typography. He was founder (1979) of MetaDesign, Germany’s largest design firm with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. Projects included corporate design programmes for Audi, Skoda, Volkswagen, Lexus, Berlin Transit, Duesseldorf Airport and many others. In 1988 he started
FontShop, a company for production and distribution of electronic fonts.
In 2003 he was awarded the Gerrit Noordzij Prize for Typography from the Royal Academy in The Hague, Netherlands. In 2001 he redesigned The Economist magazine in London. His book for Adobe Press,“Stop Stealing Sheep� has recently appeared in a second edition and both a German and a Russian version. His corporate font family for Nokia was released in 2002. The exclusive family of typefaces for Deutsche Bahn (the German railway system), designed with Christan Schwartz, was awarded the Federal German Design Prize 2007.

He left MetaDesign in 2001 and now runs SpiekermannPartners with offices
in Berlin, London and San Francisco. Clients include Bosch, Deutsche Bahn,
Pioneer Investment, Messe Frankfurt, Nokia, Birkhäuser Verlag Basel and
many others.

WHAT MATTERS Organizers
Kali Nikitas, Otis Chair, Communication Arts

Steve McAdam, Otis Chair, Interactive Product Design

Linda Pollari, Otis Chair, Architecture/Landscape/Interiors