While Darwin's scientific contributions remain ever significant, it's worth remembering he was also a man of his era — privileged, white, affluent, commanding — who generalized as much as, if not more than, he analyzed, especially when it came to objectifying people's looks. In a recent interview on the Today Show, ... Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. In her interview, Jessica talks about cultivating oneself as a visual thinker, observer, and thus a designer, advising young designers and young architects to maintain their own practice and invent their own work. Because I’m outspoken? JH: I grew up with parents who were collectors. I do not have a disciplined mind. We did this before “design thinking” became part of the mainstream lingo, before design became a hot topic.
Exploring a century of technology in the gestation and reproduction of these images is a huge challenge, and I am eager for access to new technologies, guidance, and expertise in this area.Several years ago, I created a class for Yale freshmen called Studies in Visual Biography that encouraged students to learn how to tell stories other than their own. Teaching non-artists is always a little bit like being a foreign exchange student. The archive consists of 8x10 glass plate negatives of an anonymous assortment of surgical patients—old, young, black, white, rich, poor—most of which have never been seen. Podcast Interview: Scratching The Surface with Jarrett Fuller Keynote Presentation: Google SPAN Conference Interview: Hero Meets: Sonos’ VP Global Brand There are several Talking Heads songs that really help me tap into the Sonos mission. In so doing, comparisons can — and do — glide effortlessly from hypothesis to hyperbole, particularly when images are in play.Almost exactly a century after the arrival of Darwin's volume, Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, published a study in which he determined that there were seven principal facial expressions deemed universal across all cultures: anger, contempt, fear, happiness, interest, sadness, and surprise. Being a good designer can probably be interpreted many different ways, but to me, I think that you have to be willing to confront what you believe even if it’s not popular. Only a decade after the anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne’s produced the first neurology text illustrated by photographs, Darwin claimed to be the first to use photographs in a scientific publication to actually document the expressive spectrum of the face.Combining speculation about raised eyebrows and flushed skin with vile commentary about mental illness, he famously logged diagrams of facial musculature, along with drawings of sulky chimpanzees and As a man of science, he set out to analyze the visual difference between types, which is to say races.
If evolution is seen as the study of unseen development—biological, generational, temporal, and by definition intangible—the camera provided the illusion of quantifiable benchmarks, an irresistible proposition for the proponents of theoretical ideas.Jessica Helfand is a designer, artist, and writer. The Cushing Portraits. I shut down the studio.I started Design Observer in 2003, with Bill, Michael Bierut, and Rick Poynor, who was then the editor of With Design Observer, we wanted to find a way to cast a wider net around design as a way to engage different disciplines and people and ideas.
I like hybrids and mashups, shifting the coordinates of what we look at and respond to, and reasserting our ability to see and hear and look and listen. I see my studio as a daily practice the way some people see yoga: it’s a sanctuary. As an undergrad, there were only three graphic design classes you could take - beginning, intro, and advanced - and I did those all in the first year. That got in my way. The problem is that ethics is not an institutional concern: it’s a This is a personal one. I can think of no better place to be this winter.First—from a content perspective—my scientific aptitude is minimal, but my curiosity about the brain, and its relationship to the human countenance, is huge. June 2018: Jessica Helfand is one of three artists chosen to participate in Face Value, the US entry into the London Design Biennale for 2018. They were paying the bills, but they didn’t represent my mind or my abilities or my ambitions.
My father was a collector of prints, posters, and ephemera, and an enthusiastic donor to and supporter of The Huntington; both of my children studied history of science in college. That, I think, is the hardest thing to do. Why did they come to me?