Rick Poynor (VIC)

AGDA Victoria invites you to an evening with Rick Poyner at the Capitol Theatre, Melbourne. This promises to be an entertaining and challenging presentation for anyone involved in the design community, so book early to avoid disappointment.

Design Thinking or Critical Design?

This presentation will focus on the implications of two new design terms that have recently come into use: “design thinking” and “critical design”. Design thinking is taught in American business schools and seeks to challenge design’s established practices and received ideas. But it does this from a business perspective, and while it claims to empower design’s users, its concerns remain essentially commercial. The second development, critical design, has arisen from within design practice and to date it has received less attention. Critical design proposes new possibilities for design as a form of speculative practice, and it implicitly resists design thinking’s urge to gain control of the design process in the name of an ultimately self-serving and reductive notion of the public good.

Rick Poynor founded Eye magazine in London in 1990, edited it for seven years and is now its resident columnist. He writes the "Observer" column for Print magazine and he has written about design, media and visual culture for Blueprint, Icon, Frieze, Domus, I.D., Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine, Adbusters, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and many other publications.

His books include More Dark Than Shark (1986), a study of Brian Eno's early songs, Typography Now: The Next Wave (1991), and Typographica (2001). He is the author of two collections of essays, Design Without Boundaries (1998) and Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001). No More Rules, a critical study of graphic design and postmodernism, appeared in 2003.

Poynor studied the history of art at Manchester University and gained an MPhil in design history from the Royal College of Art, London. He has been a visiting professor at the RCA and a tutor at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, and he lectures widely on design matters in Europe, the United States and Australia. He is guest curator of the exhibition "Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties", which opened at the Barbican Centre, London in September 2004 and is touring in China through 2005.

Contact: AGDA Victoria Secretariat
Telephone: 1300 043 310
Email: Send an email