MDes - Morgan Martino

Welcome back, dear reader, to a new installment of this blog!

During this semester’s Studio class, we have been tasked with both designing and performing a prompt for ourselves every 2-4 weeks. The focus is to be on making practices, which can then in turn feed our Thesis work.

Prompt:

This first prompt took a circuitous path to find its wording. At first I attempted to follow more abstract prompts, such as “Design or mend Holes”—However I felt myself drowning in their ambiguity. After some time for reflection and making, I chose to describe this prompt as:

Use design making practices to celebrate and bring attention to an overlooked or underappreciated object.

Inspiration:

The object I decided to investigate was the humble Occlupanid, also known as Bread tags, bread clips, ties, or buckles. These small (1” square) plastic objects can be found in almost any kitchen or grocery store, and are used to seal plastic bags of bread, milk, or other food products. 

1. HORG

My first resource that I turned to was HORG.com. The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (HORG) is a group that documents and classifies Occlupanids. Their use of taxonomic structures playfully pokes at and questions the ways in which we make sense of the world through a scientific lens, while also being an earnest celebration of of an object that is both abundant and invisible in our daily lives.

2. Marguerita Mergentime

My other main inspiration for this project were the designs of Marguerita Mergentime. Mergentime (1894-1941) was a textile designer working in New York in the 1930s and 40s. Her work was primarily two-dimensional on printed fabrics, mostly for domestic settings.

While appreciated in her time, much of her work was

Her work has a modern and graphic sensibility, with her often incorporating text, stark geometric patterns and bold colours in her designs. What draws me to her work was her sense of whimsy and humour, with designs often inspired by folk art that she collected. 

Method:

With these inspirations in mind, I set to work creating a design that could bring attention to my chosen object of the occlupanid. 

I used Linoleum block printing, which offered a quick and accessible way to translate my designs into repeatable patterns. 

After printing an edition of these designs of paper, I moved to fabric where I began experimenting with placement and repetition. I ended up with a square design that could be implemented on napkins or tablecloths. 

My ultimate goal for the design was to bring my chosen object which is most often encountered and interacted with during the purchasing and preparation of food into the environment of food consumption as a way to shift perception of the occlupanid from something disposable and forgettable to an object of value, both aesthetically and emotionally.

I was able to share this work through a show put on by the Neighborhood Gallery, a student run gallery located on the fourth floor of Emily Carr University. The show, entitled “Brain Itch”, was centered around themes of Desire, Impulse, and Craving. It ran from February 14-26 2024.

Below is the artists statement I submitted to this show:

Toxodentidae explores the sub-conscious desire to collect and the impulse to classify vernacular objects. Based on the satirical yet earnest taxonomic structure of Bread tags pioneered by the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (HORG), the piece lovingly highlights and pays tribute to the humble Bread Tag, inviting viewers to reflect on their own relationship to ordinary objects found within their daily life.

This final prompt of the semester was an invitation to explore new design research methods by investigating an area of inquiry that we were passionate about, hopefully leading towards an eventual thesis topic.

The first week of the project my goal was identify a research question that I could then pursue, followed by identifying a method and research plan to explore that question. As it happened to work out, I ended up deciding on what method I wanted to explore first, then determining my research question. I started by examining some books that inspired me at that moment. This included :

Design and Violence (2014) Paola Antonelli and Jamer Hunt edt.

Bad Luck Hot Rocks: ‘Conscience letters’ and photographs from the Petrified Forest National Park (2014) Phil Orr.

Trash (2006) John Knechtel.

Thoughtless Acts? (2005) Jane Fulton Suri.

The theme that tied each book together was their creation, display, or curation of collections/archives. Each book was along a continuum of controlled curation, with Design and Violence being a heavily curated collection of design work that was exhibited at MoMA, and Thoughtless Acts? being mainly comprised of amateur photos documenting everyday vernacular acts of design. Many of these collections, such as the ‘Conscience letters’ from the Petrified Forest National Park, emerged organically through passive collecting practices that rely heavily on chance and outside actors.

I find these forms of archive compelling for their ability to highlight emerging patterns, values, and systems that are often overlooked or dismissed with more active forms of collection, classification, and curation.

I also explored the Feral Atlas: an online collection of ‘Field Reports’ documenting ecologies of the Anthropocene curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou. This archive uses the design capabilities of its online platform to its advantage, with field reports floating around the screen at random to be discovered by chance. This is an attempt to avoid the hierarchies often bonded to archival and curatorial practices.

I was interested to explore how these forms of emergent collection-making could be used as a research method within the practice of design. I was inspired by similar methods such as Poetic Observation (Fulton-Suri, J. 2011) and Everyday Material Collection (Woodward, S. 2020) which placed a high value on individual observation and reflection, emotional response, and respect for everyday objects and actions as key to understanding larger patterns.

And so I set forth to put this practice into motion.

Mind your P’s and Q’s

Once I had honed in on a research method, my research question came into place quite organically. I am interested in how we demonstrate and enact thanks and gratitude within public space, and specifically how designed artifacts (both vernacular and formal) can contribute to or diminish its impact.

How do vernacular and formal artifacts and systems of design contribute to or diminish acts and understandings of gratitude within public space?

I would use an emergent collection-making method* in order to explore this question. As this question could be explored in many ways, I decided to tighten my focus on the specific appearances of the words “Thanks” and “Thank You” within public space as tangible examples of gratitude being practiced.

*I enacted this research method by going on walks around my local neighborhood and keeping an eye out for written “Thank you’s”. When I noticed examples, I would document them through photos taken on my mobile phone. These documented photos then became the basis of my collection, which could then be used in further research synthesis through curation, categorization, and taxonomy.

Once I had collected several dozen of these photos, I returned to them to reflect on patterns and themes that emerged, as well as my own emotional reactions to the collection.

I found that the words “Thank You” were used quite infrequently within public space, with most signage foregoing it altogether. When it was employed, it was often attached to messages that ranged from neutral to passive aggressive and borderline hostile. The messages were almost always requests for people to do or not do something, with the gratitude contingent on the reader acquiescing to their demands.

From a graphic design perspective, some signs de-emphasized the ‘Thank you’ through smaller type, while others emphasized it through delicate script fonts and bright colours. Many included an exclamation mark for added emphasis and emotion, while others finished with a period.

Riso Realizations

While my initial goal was to create a book or zine that compiled and curated my research findings, I realized that this work was still in its infancy. I was still unpacking my reflections, and I knew I was not yet ready to publish anything definitive or prescriptive on the subject.

However, I still wanted to have a way to make some of this work, which up to this point had been entirely stored within my brain and phone, into a more tangible setting.

I chose to print two of my favourite images of public Thanks using a two-colour Riso process. Both photos were decided upon for their juxtaposition, one being handwritten and the other designed and implemented by a national corporation (A&W Canada). The later is quite generic in its message, thanking customers for purchasing food at their drive in, while the former is quite specific in its request for members of the public to only use the letter box for its intended purpose.

Final thoughts

As I previously mentioned, this project is still in its infancy, and requires further time for the collection to grow before any definitive patterns or insights can emerge. As it stands, I do feel as though I have learned from this research experience. I am interested in seeing how I can better build upon this idea of emergent collection making as method, and where it can best fir within more traditional design research processes.

Open studio was an opportunity for me to share my research with the wider Emily Carr community, as well as a moment for me to reflect on my own practice.

I decided to use this time as a chance for me to make my reflections tangible through a poster that guests could take away with them after visiting my studio. The front includes a bold statement about my practice as a designer, with the back providing more detailed information about my values, research methodologies and current areas of interest, as well as some of the scholars I am currently influenced by.

The folding of the poster was inspired by this leaflet from studio Lo Siento for the Design Museum of Barcelona.

I found this exercise quite helpful for me to reflect and position myself within this program. I look forward to next years open studio where I can create another takeaway and compare how and in what ways my understanding of myself as a designer has changed.

For this prompt we were asked to begin a dialogue with a reading from one of our other classes through making. I chose a chapter from Bowker and Stars book Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (2000) entitled “Categorical Work and Boundary Infrastructures: Enriching Theories of Classification”.

Sorting out is a book that explores classification, categorization, standardization, and other forms of sorting and separating information in life. In this chapter, Star and Bowker explore how classification systems inform social spaces, through relationships between people, objects, and communities of practice. The authors argue that classification systems, even ones that are abstract or intangible, have a material and symbolic effect on us—impacting who we allow into our communities and what we find natural. The concept of naturalization is brought up in an anthropological context in relation to objects, exploring how things can transition from strange and novel, to natural, routine and invisible.

A key concept from this reading is the idea of Boundary Objects, or artifacts that have membership to different communities of practice, yet are used or understood differently by each group. As the authors begin complicating the idea of communities of practice by adding the idea of being a member of and being impacted by multiple communities of practice (an intersectional approach), they advocate for reassessing the bureaucratic and hierarchical nature of contemporary western classification systems in favour of more fluid and convergent forms that anticipate globalized communities who each have their own interpretations of information. 

The authors mention the concept of Monsters, exploring them through a feminist lens incorporating ideas from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1992). They interpret Monsters as beings or objects that occupy borders and margins of categories, who straddle between categories and muddle binaries, or who don’t exist within categories altogether (defying comprehension through classification.) They link the concept of Monsters and borders, defining their relationships as “A monster occurs when an object refuses to be naturalized (Haraway 1992). A borderland occurs when two communities of practice coexist in one person (Anzaldúa 1987). Borderlands are the naturalized home of those monsters known as cyborgs.” This exploration has made me excited to further imagine the ways in which monsters can be better understood as an element of design.

Further readings

The Lost Thing (2000) Shaun Tan

Monstrous Objects & Monstromrphism

The above sources all helped me to think through how monsters are a part of design—so much of design can be considered monstrous, from the hectares of broken and obsolete objects created by industrial designers, to the frighteningly seductive power of advertising and propaganda created by communication designers, to the insidious manipulation and electric consumption employed by UX/UI Designers.

In order to synthesize the ideas I was learning about and developing, I decided to create some definitions (ironically another form of classification). The first was for the idea of Monstrous Objects, a specific category of designed artifact (tangible or intangible) that acts and/or causes reactions from others like those of a monster.

The second definition was for a new word I had developed: “Monstromorphism“. This was based on ideas of anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human traits to non-human animals or objects, and objectification, or the attribution of object qualities to humans and other living beings. Monstromorphism acts similarly, assigning monstrous traits to objects and systems designed by humans. This word helped me distill an action I was seeing happen, but did not have a way to describe.

Bureau for Monstrous Objects

My idea for responding to this text is to create a counterfactual organization, similar to The Golden Institute and The Federal bureau of odds and ends (The Lost Thing Tan S. (2000)), that is responsible for monstrous objects. I want to create a story through the design artifacts of this bureau that helps people reflect on their own relationship with objects they understand as monsters. 

My first question is what are the values and goals of this bureau? Were they created to care for these objects? To destroy them? Hide them? Study them? My initial idea was for them to be an organization for classification—because monster(ous object)s inherently resist classification, this sets up a contradictory and impossible task for the Bureau. This humorously absurd situation helps the viewer let their guard down when reflecting on their own relationships with objects.

In order to bring this concept to life I created some design artifacts for the Bureau, including a logo, seal, and classification form. The form was based off of precedent from other government documentation and identification forms from passports to military medical forms to wildlife identification cards, as well as more fantastical designs from fiction such as the X-Files and TTRPG character creation sheets.

Some areas of the form I was particularly interested in were the Intersecting Systems and Psychological Impact sections, as I felt they would provide the most insight into the ontological relationships these designed objects provided.

I used these artifacts as elements within a workshop I held within our core studio class. During this workshop performance, I embodied the character of a manager at the Bureau of Monstrous Objects (BMO) who was training new recruits. This gave me the opportunity to outline the Bureau’s goals and values while also drawing in my audience through embodied play. After explaining what the BMO was, I invited them to complete a ‘training assignment’

Fill out an M-1 form (Monstrous Object Identification)

• Use an object from your daily life that you monstromorphise
• Be sure to identify your current relationship to this object, and why you believe it to be monstrous
• Think about how it makes you feel, and what systems it intersects with
• Don’t forget to draw your object and attach it to your form

Participants were game to engage with this activity, spending several minutes filling out a form—many entries had an element of humour to them, however just as many were taken very seriously.

When participants handed in their forms, I offered them a button with the Bureau’s seal as a way to initiate them as members of the BMO, completing the workshop.

Further Questions

• How can Monstrous Objects help us reflect on the categorization methods we employ for making sense the world we live in?
• What role do we as designers play in the creation of Monstrous Objects?
• How do Monstrous Objects point us towards Monstrous Systems? 
• How do we better understand and work through the tangled and knotted mesh that connects us with our monsters?
• How do we care for our monsters?

Linoleum, 13 Principles & Battle Jackets

For this project, I chose to explore Linoleum as  material—specifically in the context of Lino-block relief printmaking. While working at the Alberta Printmakers Society over the summer, I had had a chance to try carving and printing a block, however, the material and process was still rather new for me.

At the same time that this project was introduced, I had begun my RA-ship with Emily Carr’s DESIS Lab. DESIS is a global network of design-led research labs based in universities which supports research that advances design for social innovation towards sustainability The network founded in 2009, now over 60 labs—Emily Carr’s was the first and remains the only lab in Canada.

Although I was familiar with the lab, having worked with it on numerous occasions during my undergrad, I noticed a new (to me) sign that had been put up in the window, stating that this lab upheld the values found within the 13 Principles of Transformative Social Innovations.

These principles are from the Manifesto for Transformative Social Innovation, which was developed between 2014-2017 by over 25 researchers in collaboration with the TRANSIT (TRANsformative Social Innovation Theory) research project. Researchers studied 20 translocal networks including over 100 initiatives spread across 25+ countries, mostly in Europe and Latin-America The manifesto is inspired by insights, examples and experiences from these networks and initiatives.

“[This manifesto] is written by and for activists, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, citizens, critical intellectuals and other engaged individuals who are interested in understanding and contributing to social change to face the challenges of our times and to imagine alternative futures.”

“The aim of this document is to unite those people, to identify complementarities, differences, common insights and challenges…to formulate a common call for action to create focus and momentum for collaboration.”

Manifesto For Transformative Social Innovation

“…social innovations are changing social relations, leading to new ways of doing, thinking and organizing, and aiming towards a world based on ecological and human values, nurturing the commons and treasuring basic human rights and democracy.”“social innovation alone is not enough: we need transformative change to make a difference: to challenge, alter and replace the dominant institutions that are ingrained in society (e.g. individualism, hierarchy, competition). Such processes of challenging, altering and replacing our dominant ways of doing, thinking and organising, is what we call transformative social innovation.”

Manifesto For Transformative Social Innovation

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At the same time that this project began, I was thinking a great deal about battle jackets. Battle Jackets are an article of clothing (usually denim, canvas or leather jackets, but sometimes vests, coats, and even pants) created and worn by members of various subcultures, including metalheads, punks, motorcyclists and queer/trans activists. These jackets are covered with patches that share bands, political affiliations/beliefs, and other markers of sub-cultural affiliation. While patches can be machine embroidered, many of them are hand made by the wearer or by members of their community, either by hand embroidery, silk screen, lino relief printmaking, acrylic paint, or even felt-tipped marker. 

Battle Jacket Values:

• DIY (Do It Yourself)
• Anti-Consumerist
• Mending/Repair
• Individual expression
• Grassroots Subcultures/Against mainstream culture
• Signals community affiliations, subcultural interests, & personal beliefs/values

Process

Each lino block quickly turned into a daily design challenge, offering me the opportunity to reflect and ideate on how I could create visual representation of the ideas, values and concepts explored within each principle. Often the ideas communicated through these principles were quite complex and did not lend themselves well to representational imagery. I first looked to Gestalt principles of design as a way of better understanding different ways in which people find patterns in visual stimuli.

Low Fidelity Sketches

By the end of the first week, I had managed to connect with the Print Media Studio and gain access to their relief presses, inks and inking stations in order to create proofs of the designs I had thusfar created.

Photopolymer

During my second week, I was able to again reach out to the Print Media Studio for another orientation and demo. 

I had realized early on that carving the text of all 13 principles (1020 characters) by hand would be impractical given the scale and scope of this project. However, I still wanted to find a way to include the text within the prints I was making (or at least have the option to). 

I considered several options for how to do this. Digital embroidery would give a lovely tactility and warmth to the pieces, however it requires lots of time for set-up and runtime and can be cumbersome to use when creating multiples. Screen printing would solve the problem of rapid reproduction, however it could make the prints feel too rigid, and I was worried that the different printing methods might clash with each other. I decided on Photopolymer.

Photopolymer is a printmaking method emerging in the mid 20th century similar to metal type which uses light sensitive resin to create raised printing surfaces. My hope was that I would be able to use the photopolymer plates like rubber stamps, which could be easily applied to the patches.

I am very pleased with the final result of the photopolymer plates. They produced fine detail in their prints, with just enough roughness to make them connect to hand carved visual cues of the lino blocks.

Printing Process

Final Designs

Final Battle Jacket

Future goals

I will be hanging a selection of the patches I have created, along with their text in the window of the DESIS Lab as a way of better communicating the values held by this lab with the rest of the student and faculty population. 

I also intend to host some patch-making sessions within the DESIS Lab. These will include skill sharing sessions and open dialogue spaces where guests are able to carve their own blocks in response to prompts (potentially the 13 principles used by myself, or perhaps other topics commensurate with DESIS values/mission) and be able to print them on patches that they can then take home and wear. I believe Linoleum blocks are a good fit for this kind of social design practice, as in my experience, they are an easily accessible creative technique with a forgiving learning curve that can be used to create multiple final outcomes.

Final Reflections

• A daily practice requires discipline and a disregard for perfection
• Making in response to past work provides structure, however it can also be confining
• My approach to designing is reliant on a dialogue between personal & social practice