Articulation 101

Veranstaltungsart

Fachpraxis

ECTS

4 ECTS

Leistungskontrolle

Vorlage und Präsentation von Arbeitsergebnissen

Beschreibung

Articulation 101 is a class for those who want to learn the art of putting words to your art. It’s a valuable skill to be able to explain what you are working on, whether you are an independent artist, a designer in a team, or a craftsperson. No matter what you make, you might find you need to explain your work to a collaborator, a buyer, an agent, or even just your parents. And even if all of that seems outside of your needs, some days it helps simply to be able to write it down and explain it to yourself.

So Articulation, as a skill, is about putting the right words to things that may not have words yet, or that have someone else’s words, or that need to be sharpened to a point. We’re often told, as creative people, that our work should speak for itself, but it really helps to first found out what it is supposed to say.

Possible course exercises:

Project description in the 1–2–3 model (short, medium, long)
The same story for different audiences
Positive/negative (different ways of framing your perspective)
Art description (two groups both describe art without mentioning any formal qualities, only implications, and after both try to see which is which)
Course ‘reading’:

Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
About Buildings + Cities, Luke Jones and George Gingell (Podcast)
Typographica’s ‘Favorite Typefaces’ reviews
More to come
(All of these deal with describing the visual into something else. Sometimes something more, too.)

My end goal, the dream outcome, is for every participant in the course to have found a valuable use for putting their work to words, be that as an auxilliary form (a poem that throws new light on the work or a portfolio description), as a framework for critique (helping themselves and others talk about the work in depth without necessarily grasping for their paint brush or computer mouse), or as a way to collaborate and consult better as a designer (in board rooms, in work rooms, as a volunteer, as a design director).

[Although this class is relevant to Professionalisierung, it doesn’t provide the encompassing entrepreneurial content so you should still follow a respective class for a Professionalisierung-Schein at a later date. IK] 

This class is taught entirely online and in English.
Robin Mientjes is a type designer from The Netherlands living in Oslo, Norway