The 2010 NC State Graphic Design Graduate Symposium

Last friday and saturday I attended NC State’s Biennial Graphic Design Graduate Symposium: Design, Community & the Rhetoric of Authenticity. From the get go, know that it was a top notch event, executed with the care and precision of a full-blown international conference.

The graduate students—and faculty—established an open framework where myriad ideas were exposed and conversation encouraged. Invited lecturers, through key presentations, sparked a general narrative, each presenting their own set of points of view and strong arguments. Break-out sessions provoked academic discussions and new idea development. Supplementary content, such as exhibits, installations and video-recorded interviews made the experience whole, providing strategic pauses with rather unique and intriguing points of view.

The Manifesto Lounge, by Tania Allen, Brooke Chornyak, Ryan Gottfried & Rebecca Knowe.

Through ideas such as soul, normatives and community engagement, main stage lecturers Elliot Earls, Brenda Laurel and Jon Sueda presented different, but rather engaging perspectives on design’s (and a designer’s) relationship to “authentic” experiences. Then, Joerg Becker from the University of Illinois at Chicago got the audience’s heads spinning, questioning the very nature of anything that a person may call authentic: “As soon as we call something authentic, it stops being authentic.”

On saturday I moderated a break-out session, Technology Preventing Authentic Nuanced Communication, which I shortly framed to produce a dialogue from the attendees. The level of discussion, as in other sessions in the symposium, proved to be meaningful and insightful.

Useful Ambiguity exhibition by Cady Bean-Smith & Samyul Kim.

Detail of Useful Ambiguity exhibition by Cady Bean-Smith & Samyul Kim.

I owe a round of applause to Tania Allen, Kelly Bailey, Cady Bean-Smith, TJ Blanchflower, Brooke Chornyak, Gary Dickson, Sidney Fritts, Tony Fugolo, Ryan Gottfried, Lincoln Hancock, Samyul Kim, Rebecca Knowe, Dan McCafferty, Caroline Prietz, David Raymond, Laura Rodriguez, Lauren Waugh, and Liese Zahabi, coordinators of the event. Special shout-out to first year graduate student Gary Dickson for having had the courage to present his work Mutation Breeds Authenticity in the main stage of the symposium.