In this documentation studio we will investigate the limits — and possibilities — of the political agency of design, focusing on a singular historical episode in its modern history: The International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), 1970. At the same time that we make this particular investigation, we will think more generally through senses of the historical archive, its precarious constitution and its peculiar value for understanding the horizons and foreclosures of the present moment, in the world of design and in political life more generally. As we research and build concepts, we will work in the particular medium of graphic design, to critically activate and recuperate elements of the Aspen archive.

This semester we will spend time digging through all the multi-media materials that are related to the IDCA of 1970, fortuitously located in the special collections at the Daley Library here at UIC. We will try to get to know as much as we can about this incredible event from 1970, in which multiple factions of militant hippies, from across the US (including Chicago and UIC) and the world, descended upon the idyllic and privileged haven of Aspen, interrupting, challenging, and generally provoking confusion and discord within the elite environs of this hegemonic professional design conference. 

The events at the 1970 conference remain confusing, fascinating, hilarious, and weird, in the context of both the history of the design discipline (including architecture) and the history of the counterculture and the associated political upheavals of the 1960s and 70s in the US. We are incredibly fortunate to have access to this particular material archive. And there is a lot, partly because the bands of hippies who made this intervention were not only militants in their political and ecological commitments, but in their interest in emerging technologies of media as well. 

Our studio will revolve around two basic questions, and their relation: (1) what is the meaning, from our seemingly remote but perhaps surprisingly continuous perspective, of this historic rupture in the field of design discourse? and (2), more generically, how can we give new life and urgency to the fragmented historical materials of an archive, through curation, interpretation, and design? How can we (re)produce a meaningful picture, or a narrative, of history, that does something other than simply reproduce the received truths of our contemporary moment? How can we “recover” a lost moment in time, that adheres to the “truth” and messiness of its actual unfolding while also giving it coherence and contemporary relevance in a novel representation?

We will think about the poetics of the documentary. We will aspire to give truth to the materials of history as we stage seances of reproduction rather than rehearsals of representation.

We will work though these questions together in the form of a single printed publication that curates, organizes, and supplements the materials we locate in the archive. We will develop the precise shape and extent of this publication as we go through the semester. While each studio participant will be responsible for one section in the publication, we will be alert, throughout the semester, for ways that we can collaborate and work together on the whole.

Our class sessions will be roughly divided into the following parts: (1) research time spent in the archive, (2) group discussion of these materials and of related texts, (3) studio time editing and reproducing these materials and designing their publication, in a series of workshops.