the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Ellen Lupton

Details, Details: Ellen Lupton’s Design Rant

This lecture took place on September 23rd, 2008 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Find out what’s wrong with dumb quotes, toasters, justified type, free fonts, hotel rooms, your best friend’s bra, unwelcome gifts, the food pyramid, and more, much more. Writer, curator, and designer Ellen Lupton is obsessed with promoting design thinking to general audiences. The D.I.Y. movement is affecting every intellectual industry, from politics and journalism to music and rocket science. How is it affecting you? Today, anyone can be a designer (if they try) or a publisher, pundit, rock star, or filmmaker. Lupton will analyze the design story behind everyday situation, and she will talk about how anyone can mobilize the power of design thinking.

About Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002).

She recently has focused on bringing design awareness to broader audiences. Her book Thinking with Type (2004) is a basic guide to typography directed at everyone who works with words. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design processes to a general audience. D.I.Y. Kids (October 2007), co-authored with Julia Lupton, is a design book for children illustrated with kids’ art.

Her latest book is Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips, 2008). She is the co-author with Abbott Miller of several books, including The Bathroom, the Bathroom, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992), Design Writing Research (1996), and Swarm (2006).

Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the U.S.  She graduated from Cooper Union School of Art in 1985.

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