Peter Hall is a design critic, and senior lecturer in design at the University of Texas at Austin, where his research focuses on mapping as a design process. Between 2001 and 2007 he was Senior Editor and Fellow at the University of Minnesota Design Institute, where he co-edited with Jan Abrams the book, Else/Where: Mapping - New Cartographies of Networks and Territories and edited The Knowledge Circuit, an online journal of conference reports. He has been a contributing writer for Metropolis magazine since 2000 and has written widely about design in its various forms, including gaming, elevators, building graphics, bridges, neon lights and office chairs, for publications including Print, I.D. Magazine, The New York Times, and The Guardian.He taught a seminar class on design theory and writing at Yale School of Art between 2000 and 2007. He wrote and co-edited the books Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, Sagmeister: Made You Look and Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics. Since 2006 he has been Vice President and co-organizer of DesignInquiry, a non-profit educational organization devoted to researching design issues at an annual gathering in Vinalhaven, Maine.
Mapping as a Design Process
Now that we have a hard time containing design problems, let alone solving them, and design decisions come with serious ecological and cultural consequences, what is happening to design and design criticism? The rise of mapping as a design process offers an alternative to the old linear models of design as problem-solving: design becomes a subjective act of framing, researching and presenting factors influencing design decisions. For critics and historians, mapping shifts emphasis away from reading “matters of fact” to exploring “matters of concern,” as Bruno Latour put it: we move from armchair pronouncements based on pictures of design, to working investigations of the processes behind designs. In this talk, design critic and educator Peter Hall argues that to map is to explore how interests take shape, in the form of products, systems, interfaces, policies and designed experiences.
