Most of my classes this quarter require a lot of personal stories and input in order to create the concepts for our projects. For example, in my Type 4 class, we are creating a book that weaves 3 pieces of text along with images to create a narrative on an assigned sense. The majority of the text comes from the book A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman. My assigned sense is sight. Anyways, one of the 3 texts included in our book has to be personally written by us and composed of thoughts we have made about our sense in a 'sense' journal that we are keeping this quarter.
Another class I am taking this quarter is the infamous 'Chair Class' of Portfolio Center, taught by none other than the president of the school, Hank Richardson. The class is about design history but our biggest deliverable of the quarter will be a chair that we design and actually have produced. The concept of the chair must be based on an assigned design style era as well as a personal story of our own. I feel like I can't do a description of this class justice so I am going to include an article written on the class:
It's 5:30 a.m. and already the big table downstairs at PC is littered with wadded up napkins, Styrofoam coffee cups, and Krispy Kreme donut crumbs. Oh, and stacks and stacks of books—everything from modernism to McLuhan. Sitting around--and on--the table, eight or nine students with wicked cases of bed head discuss the periods that shaped the shifting currents and concepts of our modern world--weighty subject matter that sometimes even leads to a debate in these wee hours (Okay, it might actually lead to a full-blown argument; they're still a little cranky).
This is Hank Richardson's History of Design, a rite of passage at Portfolio Center, a trial by fire concocted by a man who believes sleep is for babies, the infirm, and old folks. These classes often last until well after noon. Sometimes they're held on Sundays. Such conditions—even these minor upsets to the students' sense of order--make for conflict, and Hank knows that conflict gives birth to creativity. He aims to put these guys and gals off balance, test their sense of reality, and, at the end of the day, change their reality altogether.
This is how he primes them to use the lessons design history provides. Hank likes to quote the late designer Dan Friedman, "It is important to find comfort in the past only so long as it might expand insight into the future," a viewpoint that jibes with Hank's own conviction that neophyte designers should explore the relationship of design history and design criticism primarily as a catalyst for new ideas.
Students learn that each overlapping period, or 'graphic style', is in essence a narrative, a story of history, representing a specific characteristic of attitudes and taste. These periods exemplify a 'philosophy of lives' occurring during a time of a disorderly, often tumultuous twentieth century. Portfolio Center students come to understand that the modern student's reinterpretation must reaffirm the truth that design is culture.
The deliverable products in this class are beside the point, though exquisite chairs are most often the end result. Because Hank knows that a true work of art comes from the exploration of—again—conflict, he urges students to discover that conflict within their own personal, powerful stories, which means that the work is distinctive, driven by their unique experiences, and expressed in each one's particular voice.
A former student of Portfolio Center, Dave Werner, has a video about his chair on his website. First of all, his web site is incredible and everyone should check it out here
Here is his video about his chair:
examples of former chairs:
