James Goggin

By Laura Fox

“In a way, this position is my first job,” James Goggin tells me, referring to his transition last August from running his own design studio in London to becoming the director of design, publications and digital media at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Goggin’s approach to design is transgressive; he explores ideas across supposed boundaries, like museum departments and mediums ranging from print and digital to spatial and architectural. With other past roles as a magazine art director, university visiting critic, lecturer and even writer, Goggin’s expansive mindset dovetails neatly with the new models for audience engagement and institutional innovation currently pursued by the MCA. We talked about his role in further extending the MCA’s reach into the city.

One of the main reasons Madeleine Grynsztejn recruited you to the MCA was to create a new visual identity. What’s happened so far?  

This new identity isn’t window dressing. I didn’t want to just produce a new logo, color, or different font. We’re spending the year talking to every department, asking such questions as how do the databases work, how does the point of sales system in the store work, how does ticketing work. We have to know how everything functions before we can design a new identity. And, much of that is logistical rather than aesthetic design. It might not be something that’s tangibly visible as design to the public, but it can be seen in the overall visitor experience.

The release of the new identity will coincide with the culmination of Michael Darling’s curatorial planning, the restructuring of the building and galleries, new people arriving, and all of the programming started by Madeleine Grynsztejn more than three years ago. As a designer, I want to be working with the overall context—here, it’s the city of Chicago and our links with the community. Read the rest of this entry »

Gustav Klutsis, "Worker Men and Women: Everyone Vote in the Soviet Elections," 1930

RECOMMENDED

The separation between everyday life and the visionary designers of the avant-garde is one of the ongoing ironies or misrepresentations of the twentieth century. An exhibition at the Art Institute retrieves the connections among graphic design, designed objects, art and “everyday life,” displaying book covers, teapots, postcards and the dynamic graphic work of six visual artists. What we now take for granted as industrial design was just beginning in the early years of the century when Ladislav Sutnar was designing dinnerware and posters celebrating commerce and industry. His sculptural china embodies the restrained play of spherical volumes, while Piet Zwart’s apple-green pressed glassware is more compact as tubular tea cups sit in hexagonal saucers. The emphasis on form rather than decoration not only severs ties with the clutter of the Victorian past but identifies everyday items with the values—efficiency, durability, mass distribution—of emerging industrial and communications technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

With Konstantin Grcic, it’s all about probjects. That is, the project-based design of an object. In the first major American exhibition of Grcic’s work, the Art Institute brings together a collection of the designer’s chairs, pens, shelving, tables, silverware, serving ware, stools and fixtures. The collection illustrates the energetic output of the German designer, who reinvents his design approach for each project/object (or probject).

Grcic started out as a cabinetmaker. But his curiosity outgrew the narrow design questions posed by cabinets and perhaps it was because he built so many empty ones that Grcic began dreaming up new things to fill them with. He writes, “We can never speak about objects without imagining people using them.” And how else do you use a cabinet except to fill it with things? Read the rest of this entry »

My drink leaves a moisture ring on Schubas wood floor. It’s Sunday night, and the cream of Chicago’s creative crop mingle around me. Boys with glasses far exceed those without; the beard-to-clean-shaven ratio is equally disproportionate. It’s a packed house, populated with the sort of people who burst into laughter when guest Davey Sommers of ColourLovers.com makes a joke about Rotoscoping and Roto-“tilling.”

It is the “The Show ‘n Tell Show,” a late-night-style talk show featuring the city’s most dynamic illustrators, designers, cartoonists, poster-makers and photographers. Co-host Michael Renaud says it is an exciting time to be a graphic designer in Chicago; there’s a centralized creative community of studios doing mind-blowing work… a fact most non-designers are unaware of. The “Show” hopes to bridge that gap and bring design work to the masses. Read the rest of this entry »