By Ann Dingli

The MA DWC students and tutors have joined the Jamie Oliver regime. We too have been exposed to a dose of that brand of energy he so typically represents. Our evening at Recipease in Clapham Junction (one of Jamie’s branch of cooking class establishments) saw us creating a beautiful plate of pasta from start to finish.

This exercise was embarked upon in order to allow us to give some serious thought to the aspect of ‘making’. So we began preparing, which is what we did for the most part, for the cooking element of the lesson only actualized at the very end for around five minutes. This already lends a parallel to the craft of writing; the time one spends preparing thoughts and structure in his or her on mind before actually cooking up a text is far longer than the actual writing process.

The craft of pasta making, like writing, involves one having to work and re-work at a single piece of material until it acquires the perfect degree of consistency, length, and smoothness. You crank the pasta dough (which you have pieced together with your hands) through the flattening machine, or pasta maker, over and over until you are left with a long thin strip of dough. Out of that, you are able to craft tiny butterscotch and ricotta filled pasta entities such as tortellini and ravioli.

Once you have cooked up all of your ingredients and laid them most in the most nurturing of manners onto your plate, you are finally allowed to digest the components of your ‘makings’. This is where the similarities between the craft of both cooking and writing come out in their full plainness. A touch more lemon and perhaps more pasta water would have meant perfection. Quite like going over a composed piece of writing- mental tweaking and adjusting can go on forever. Instead we just ordered another glass of wine, tried not to be so critical, and enjoyed the food.

17 October 2011

We held a workshop today about what “critic” means, what it means to be “critical”. Each student was asked to bring in examples of what they considered to be criticism. We had Diane Arbus photos, New Yorker cartoons, Erik Spiekermann Twitter streams and Bruce Mau quotes. And these only begin to scratch the surface.

The range of examples, images, articles, films showed a terrific spectrum of critical vehicles: from a critical product, to a political cartoon, to Myspace as a critical space, blog comments, Twitter streams, viral culture jamming, and not forgetting newspaper, magazine articles and books, including one made up of solely of covers.

Students were then asked to unpack their critical selections and find words or phrases to best characterise what we might mean by critical. These were broken down various ways ranging from criticism as metaphor to looking at criticism in terms of its immediacy and considering criticism as a form of social awareness.

The workshop felt like an exciting series of prompts, helping us realise just how vast and how much potential criticism has both in terms of its form as much as its content. We’ve decided to keep our workshop sheets up in class and hope to continue adding to them as our ideas of criticism change and grow.

By Ann Dingli and Harry Leeson
12 October 2011 

William Shaw is a journalist and web editor for the London Design Festival. He is also a contributing editor at Details magazine, and has worked for such high profile magazines as The Face and Blitz.For the second year running William has asked the students from the MA Design Writing Criticism at the LCC to contribute critical writings to the London Design Festival blog. They were asked to pick and review events, installations and exhibits from the festival’s wide variety of showcases. Students were faced with the challenging task of having to turn over critical reviews within a strict deadline. Eight student reviews were published on the blog, mingled in with reviews from established writers such as Ben Morgan and Shaw himself.Two weeks later, William came to visit the students in the DWC classroom for some feedback and chat about the experience. His comments on the students’ writing style, approach, work ethic and level of criticism proved to be extremely helpful and constructive in allowing them to understand the positives and negatives of their work.

William’s visit not only provided a response for the students with regard to the LDF blog task, but also shed light on his personal tips and insight into the design writing industry. His experience in the writing field, and his willingness to share thoughts and opinions on current trends was invaluable to the students. The event was a perfect starting point for this year’s MA DWC course.

@william1shaw

By Kristina Ketola Bore
12 October 2011

Justin McGuirk is an award-winning design and culture critic for London’s Guardian newspaper. He was an editor of Icon magazine, the international architecture and design magazine. In addition to his Guardian column, McGuirk is currently collaborating with Rem Koolhaas’ think tank AMO, as the publishing director for the Strelka Institute, a new post-graduate institution for architecture, media and design in Moscow. Justin McGuirk kicked off the first of this year’s In conversation with… a guest critic series where industry professionals engage in conversation with present and past students about the craft of design criticism. Students had the pleasure of meeting with Justin in the V&A Museum’s Sackler Centre during London Design Festival. The discussion topics ranged from the inclusion of design writing in news media, online writing’s affect on criticism as a practice, and writing for a general audience.