DIGGING FOR SPRAWLING ROOTS

It seems like design careers are like rams with their heads lowered. Somewhere in mid-charge they stop by the seminar room of the Media Design Program and sit on the opposite side of the table from me. In the swirling dust that marks their recent absence, amidst their still strong scent, I begin to feel my thighs twitch and my shoe digging into a starting-line grip.

More and more (as I approach my thesis), I've realized that this is a starting line. Only it isn't a line, but more of a circumference. It is from here that I will narrow the meandering of my path and trade breadth for distance. But, go too narrow and I will be known as the "(insert subject of specialization here)" guy! Do I get a tattoo? A brand? Take some kind of oath? I wonder what it feels like when you're crossing through the pigeonhole.

It probably feels great because it's during the celebration of your recent success of your work examining the relationship between (insert interesting topic in current events) and (insert subject of specialization here). This is good because now, in addition to all the back-patting, you've started collecting parentheses-phrases. Now you finally have some copy to put underneath your name on your business card:

Jonathan Jarvis
(insert subject of specialization here) Designer

Better still, you now have conventions to go to, where you can hand out that business card, and blogs to write sardonic comments on, where other people with similar parentheses-phrase collections respond. You have everything except an official membership card to your discourse community (that remains imaginary).

I'm not trying to have the specialist vs. generalist debate here, but rather express my epiphany in a sarcastic manner. I'm in a graduate program right now to become a specialist, at least by the time I graduate. Until then, I'm frantically trying to acquire as much general knowledge as I can, so I know what I'm choosing not to specialize in.

Perhaps that is why I enjoyed Jean-Francios Blanchette's talk so much. Who would have thought that deep questions about meaning, Benjamin Aura-type deep, would arise in the field of archiving? Who would have thought about the field of archiving in general? Jean-Francios asked "what is the content of Pac-Man?" Unable to shrug off my baser excitement at the mention of one of my childhood favorites, I bent forward to respond "binary code." Between my earlier reclined, cross-legged slouch and my now concave engagement, I realized (with the assistance of Jean-Francios's comment about how he played Pac-Man in the pub while sitting down with a beer) how the coding is only part of Pac-Man. His Pac-Man was horizontal and mine was vertical (and now portable). Which version is the "real" Pac-Man? What part those experiences is Pac-Man? Such fascinating questions are raised when your focus is on such a narrow point. Fascinating solutions are also proposed, like preservation through access: realizing that consistent access is necessary for the preservation of archived material, and archival genealogy: tracing the paths that this consistent access takes the material through.

But to focus your entire career on such things? As fascinating as they may be, Jean-Francios is still an archivist at the end of the day. And Lorraine Wild is still a book designer. And even with an AIGA gold medal, she still has to wrestle with editors over her cover design. Is it necessary to remain exclusive to one field to get to the intellectually satisfying particulars? Tim Durfee seems to be doing some interesting things in different directions.

At the end of his presentation, Tim made a comment about how a nautilus shell could be used to determine lunar drift. This example, I thought, was the most inspiring comment I've heard about trans-diciplinarianism to date. What exactly is the field of environmental design anyway? It seems, like media design), that it is ‘a little-bit of this’ and ‘a little-bit of that,’ that comes together to make something meaningful but never too heavy in any one area.

Why not, then, pick and choose all the choice bits from several different disciplines instead of devoting your life to the study of just one? Yes, yes, I know, it’s not that easy. You have to establish yourself first. Ah-ha! It all comes full circle now. In order to establish yourself, you need to do interesting work, something like examining the relationship between (insert interesting topic in current events) and (insert subject of specialization here). However, from there, after you’ve dug deep enough, it seems that you hit a system of roots. Here is where all of those generalist interests come back into play. From here, it becomes more about navigating around the rich soil than digging down to it. It seems to me that if I maintain contact with the surface world once I’ve hit the roots (with a periscope, if you will), then maybe I’ll be the one sitting on the other side of the seminar room table.

And I guess design careers are more like gophers than rams...