What I Learned @dcritconference

The D-Crit Conference is just a memory, so I shouldn’t even be posting this, right? Except, if there’s anything the conference should have taught its participants and audience members, it is that design and criticism take time. As a tribute to the afternoon presentations I saw (really, never been less bored at a conference) I offer terse tribute. I hope the new MFAs will take it in proper spirit: not as a reduction but a first set of tangents.

I missed both keynotes, Peter Hall and John Thackara, but have been told I will hate the latter. If that’s not enough of a challenge to get me to watch a video on the computer, I don’t know what is. The whole afternoon seemed like a celebration of the wide world as design, and that world is one in which critics definitely disagree.

Sarah Froelich: The buffet server was an accessory to women’s liberation

Emily Leibin: Modernists tried to put tradition in the closet, but it always popped out

Laura Forde: Maybe Godard was so good because he only knew the French, rather than the English, meaning of amateur

Angela Riechers: You would be wise to consider how your memorial will age

Katie Henderson: Wes Anderson’s movies can be read as warnings to design obsessives: get out of the house while you can

Alan Rapp: Trespassing is the only way to escape the mall (even if it is a mall)

Chappell Ellison: Next time you are at the movies, pay attention to the carpet

John Cantwell: Car sharing may be against North American nature

Mike Neal: Life on Mars = no space vacation, no Dwell spread