Hasta La Ideas

Is design criticism alive and kicking? Celebrating the inclusion of Design Writing & Commentary as a new category of entry for the 2012 Core77 Design Awards, Core77 Editor in Chief Allan Chochinov sat down with Jury Captain (and Chair of MFA in Design Criticism at School of Visual Arts) Alice Twemlow to talk about misconceptions of the field, her “deep bench” of co-jurors and demolition derbies! Core77 Design Award entrants can get a sneak peek at what this year’s jurors will be looking for in the Design Writing & Commentary category in the first of our 2012 “Meet the Jury” posts.

Allan Chochinov: Let’s start from the beginning Alice. For the upcoming 2012 Awards program, Core77 has added a new category called Design Writing and Commentary. As the jury captain for this category, can you first start by telling us a bit about the jury team you’ve selected?

Alice Twemlow: Well I think I’ve selected a magnificent jury team! We’re asking for people to submit writing about objects, spaces and systems—designed things and all the ideas, infrastructures, social and economic forces, uses and resistances that connect and disconnect them. So it’s clear we need a team of jurors who are both experts in their subject areas and sufficiently nimble to cross their boundaries. I also wanted to plant the seeds for a good debate when we meet to discuss our decisions on the entries so I made sure to assemble jurors who take different approaches to their own writing and who have strong views on what matters both in writing and in design.

Michael Sorkin, Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, and founder of Michael Sorkin Studio represents academia and architectural practice but also the kind of fiery writing fuelled by political beliefs that I truly admire. With a long career in journalism, Michael is the most seasoned of the group and will help give us the long view, and help to counteract a tendency in much online writing to ignore the long and rich history of design writing.

Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a selective online inventory of fascinating information about, and insights into, a vast array of topics. She has an excellent grasp of contemporary issues in design and the interconnected nature of design’s significance. She also appreciates new and experimental approaches to, and venues for, writing which I feel will play an important part in this competition, influenced perhaps by Core77’s own innovations with regard to format and approach.

In examining the political power structures that shape our designed environment and the systems through which designed entities move, Tom Vanderbilt‘s books Traffic and Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America, represent the direction that good writing about design is headed. Tom understands the difference between point of view and polemic and is a master of deep research.

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