Bøker utgitt av Set Margins' publications

A wide-ranging collection of essays spanning design, decolonization and historyHot on the heels of his books The Impossibility of Silence and The Failed Painter, designer, writer and teacher Ian Lynam's latest body of work is an urgent and impassioned examination of the contemporary condition. War with Myself is a wide-ranging collection of essays spanning design, authenticity, empire, decolonization and history.Originally hailing from New York, Ian Lynam holds a BS in graphic design from Portland State University and an MFA in graphic design from CalArts. He is faculty and former cochair at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the MFA Graphic Design program. Lynam is a cofounder of the critical cultural online journal Néojaponisme and the associated print journal NJP. He is a Mead Show winner and a two-time winner of both the STA 100 and the Asian Pacific Design Awards.

Through onsite interventions, Giannotti challenges the existing order of public art institutionsResponding to the museum status quo, Aldo Giannotti's concepts and props reshape the institution's social and spatial architecture. Through dialogue with staff, guards and visitors, Giannotti engages with the museum and its underlying purpose.

Proposing new ways of implementing modern technology to support and improve women's health servicesIn a world propelled by swift technological progress and perpetual obsolescence, women frequently find themselves adapting and altering their daily experiences in order to remain functional. In the 21st century, as technology purports to comprehensively assess and address women's conditions and physical discomfort, Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed delves deeply into the realm of female health technologies, revealing a space where science, holistic methods and mythology converge. This book challenges the idea of combining ancient wisdom with modern innovation and takes readers on a multidisciplinary journey to explore the intricacies of women's health. What roles can digital tools and devices play in promoting female health? How can the use of digital tools and devices be beneficial for the promotion of female well-being? How might digital tools and devices be used to support and improve these systems?Morgane Billuart is a French writer and visual artist. Currently, she holds a research position at the Institute of Network Cultures.

Using data, diagrams, maps and visualizations to challenge dominant narratives and support the resilience of marginalized communitiesThis volume collects contemporary artworks and projects that use data, diagrams, maps and visualizations as ways of challenging dominant narratives and supporting the resilience of marginalized communities.The artists and designers featured critique conventionalized and established truths that obscure important histories or perpetuate oppressive regimes; they also contribute to positive social change by engaging communities and providing alternative strategies for storytelling, communication and organizing. Historical and contemporary uses of data and visualization in colonization, surveillance and management are problematized through critical interventions that use performance, embodiment and counternarratives. The publication is the product of an exhibition organized by Onsite Gallery at OCAD University, Toronto, in 2018.Contributors include: Joshua Akers, Burak Arikan, Josh Begley, Joseph Beuys, Alexis Bhagat, Vincent Brown, Bureau d'Études, Teddy Cruz, Department of Unusual Certainties, Peter Hall, Alex Hill, W.E.B. DuBois, Patricio Dávila, Catherine D'Ignazio.

A lovingly designed and scrupulously researched social history of the traditional Romanian blouseMade by generations of women, the folk garment of the Romanian blouse secured its language despite eons of fierce changes. Author Simona Bortis-Schultz creates a cultural-historical biography of the blouse, from Neolithic beginnings in northeastern Romania and western Ukraine, through the period of folk revival, the Communist era and the post-Communist emigration out of the region. Design, location, colors and their semiotic significance relay the elements of a deliberate communication carried forth by women through enduring craft from prehistory to today. The Romanian proverb "to hold your heart in your teeth" means to move forward bravely despite fear. The book is an homage to generations of resilient women: honoring the design qualities of this feminine fortitude and the garment they made to survive.Simona Bortis-Schultz is a New York-based illustrator, designer and educator. She is currently on faculty at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.

A witty, tongue-in-cheek discussion of design's potentials and pitfallsIn focusing on creating preferable conditions, the discipline of design is optimistic by default. And yet, vernacular manifestations of skepticism, dissatisfaction and even resentment toward design abound. Instead of systematically discarding them, can these "sad passions" shed a valuable light on the blind spots of the field? Can disillusion be something more than disillusionment? Can it become an emotional method to unveil design's dysfunctions and contradictions?Author Silvio Lorusso looks into historical and present manifestations of design disillusion to shorten the gap between expectations and reality when it comes to the everyday practice of designers. Using humorous and irreverent visuals, often containing jokes about design, Lorusso constructs thoughtful dichotomies on such topics as synthesis and autonomy, power and impotence, and aspirations and compromise. The result is an amusing yet academic consideration of the design profession and its future.Silvio Lorusso (born 1985) is the author of Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe. He holds a PhD in Design Sciences from the Iuav University of Venice, and is an assistant professor and vice-director of the Center for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon.

Essays and lectures on design pedagogy from a group founded by faculty members of Pratt InstituteHow does design give form to social fictions? How does design and the professionalization of design schooling maintain the priorities of nations and capital? Through Witnessing names and wrestles with institutional design education's pseudo-neutral relationship with colonial capitalist world orders and what it means to teach and design today. It slowly weaves together ideas on designing as a mechanism of maintenance and teaching against bureaucratic inertia.This volume compiles discussions from the Post-Radical Pedagogy lecture series organized by Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee and Xinyi Li, who are all assistant professors in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute in New York. The series operated as a vehicle to activate pedagogical practice through and against institutional inertia; it explored, antagonized, challenged and interrogated the values and legacies that shape design pedagogy today. Engaging in pedagogical expressions of rage, generosity, forgiveness, slowness and chaos, the lectures, essays and interviews in this book reflect on the possibilities and sometimes impossibilities toward un-doing and un-maintaining the enduring legacies of colonial powers.

Works that look to the normative female body and its role in (art) historyThis series of sculptures by Dutch artist Doris Boerman (born 1988) responds to self-design as a form of mass occupation and pseudo-individuality in popular culture. With hair, earrings, scrunchies, wall plugs and gallery walls, the series interrogates the feminine as a commercially constructed value.

An artist's inventory of offhand and everyday anti-Asian languageIn this slim artist's book, Utrecht-based artist Seulbin Roh (born 1996), of Asian descent, collects a variety of discriminatory comments and questions she has heard and overheard in the course of daily life--casually racist or sexist language that Asian people endure constantly in Europe and the US. "I can't imagine myself being in a relationship with an Asian man"; "is it really tight down there?"; "I like Korean food better than Chinese food. You know what food means here, right?"--these and many more offhand remarks are compiled by Roh and laid bare across the pages of this book to starkly present their banality and their racism. The book reads in English starting from the front and Korean from the back.

"A personal book about material anxiety in creative work, The Failed Painter discusses singular and multiple production processes, perfectibility and imperfectability in times of virtual surface, and hunger for authenticity. Writing in the persona of the titular "failed painter," Ian Lynam, author of The Impossibility of Silence: Writing for Designers, Artists & Photographers (2021), directly addresses design practitioners by calling them to investigate how the material components of their practice are sourced, delving into everything from the labor conditions of manufacturers to the intricate processes of production and distribution. Lynam grounds his investigation in the day-to-day with a collection of essays on design and art spanning culture, race, nation and sheer vandalism. This highly curated yet various assortment of approachable writing on aesthetics touches on space exploration, mercenaries, puberty, instant nostalgia, precarious labor and, of course, zombies."--

A conversational, impassioned treatise on the realities of a socially engaged design practicePacked with conversational interviews, personal and critical essays, and a wide-ranging collection of graphic works, Design against Design examines the realities and relations that constitute a socially engaged design practice. Canadian designer Kevin Yuen Kit Lo (born 1978) offers candid, almost confessional, insights that challenge the status quo of design writing, demanding that we think more critically about the politics of visual culture under contemporary capitalism, and importantly, how we can act against it.The collection is organized around four key themes: Critique presents a political economic analysis of graphic design in relation to capitalism and considers practical ways to resist it; Practice looks critically at how designers work toward (and sometimes against) social change; Materiality focuses on the craft of graphic design; and Autonomy considers the emotional and relational aspects of graphic design.

"Brands aren't just intruding on culture, they are our culture. They are the sponsored mechanisms for constructing and manipulating meaning and human identity. But should we cede such a fundamental human need to the market? If not, why not, and is there an alternative? What is Post Branding? is a work of 'practical theory'. It is a compact 'pocket-book' format publication composed of four main sections. The first, 'DIS-BRANDED', is a text of 20 short page-long chapters exposing the ideological underbelly and real-world impact of branding. The second, 'MIXED MESSAGES', is a provocative visual essay illuminating the texts' main themes. The third, 'MANUAL', presents a framework for a critical alternative to corporate branding, humorously appropriating found instructional diagrams as a brand manual satire. This section also includes examples of completed contemporary projects that have implemented post-branding principles. The book concludes with 'CONTEXT', featuring a conversation with cultural theorist Brian Holmes and an argument with design historian Steven Heller. Part design experiment, part critical theory, and part how-to-manual, What is Post-Branding? introduces a creative counter to branding's neoliberal orthodoxy."--Vendor website.

How to write about your work--an expert's guide to the craftIan Lynam's The Impossibility of Silence is a book for artists, photographers and designers interested in approaching writing about their vocation and culture. Drawing upon decades of experience as a writer, designer, artist and teacher, Lynam offers up a plethora of inspirational and concrete approaches to writing about creative fields. Called "the Hunter S. Thompson of design writing," Lynam uses his industry knowledge to convey his philosophy on writing specifically in a professional creative setting.Ian Lynam (born 1972) is faculty and former co-chair at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the MFA Graphic Design program. He writes for Idea, Slanted and Modes of Criticism, is a cofounder of the online journal Néojaponisme and the associated print journal NJP, runs Wordshape, a hybrid type foundry, and is one-half of Corinthians, a Tokyo-based art and design curatorial practice.

After endlessly hearing that the Onomatopee publications had a tactility not often found in current art publications, director freek Lomme decided to create an exhibition and catalog addressing the issue of printing today. The result was the hugely successful, palm- sized book that was jam-packed with information and ideas on the subject. Quickly sold out this informative book is once again in print. Included are six contemporary artists and eight international academics and authors in the field of graphic design, materiality, theory, and art, exploring how, in the digital age, our daily interaction with physical materials is greatly altered and how this affects us as humans. Developed in the context of fine book publishing, the project includes in-depth discussions of past printing and reproduction processes, including silkscreen, etching, Risograph, linocut, lithography, and letterpress. Images are limited, but texts are diverse with small reproductions accompanying the art and artist interviews. It is a fresh and rigorous conversation about the process and the art of bookmaking in the twenty-first century.

On the conditions and limits of critical thinking for design culture under capitalismDesign schools increasingly urge students to address social, political and environmental issues in their work. But who can afford to work in this way after graduation?In a dynamic style that draws from multiple contributors, Who Can Afford to Be Critical? discusses the limits that affordability, class and labor impose upon the educational promise of holding a "critical" practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we instead focus first on designers' own working conditions, as one immediate site for collective action? Over the course of four chapters, this publication delves into the modes of precarity in critical graphic work and possible paths toward emancipation from that position.

Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text and graphical presentation are fully integrated, co-dependent, and mutually self-reflexive. This small book work should be of interest to writers, bibliographers, designers, conceptual artists, and anyone interested in the meta-language of diagrammatic thought in graphic form.

A fascinating critical excavation of the universalist claims behind the phrase "we are all..."The title of this small book is inspired by a common rhetorical gesture--"we are all [...]"--intended to implicate people in a given agenda. From the 1887 cry, "We Are All Socialists" to the 2022 rally "We Are All Ukrainians Now," it offers an illustrated history of this rhetorical device, which is dubbed "strategic universalism" by artist, activist and researcher Daniel Tucker (editor of Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic). The book also features an interview with the illustrator Dan S. Wang.Because the original quotations are at times conflicting, the hand-drawn responses to each strategically universalist declaration draws out a wide range of idiosyncratic symbolic approaches to interpretation, laying bare the struggle of different identities involved in the commitment to stand together.