Design Matters Today with Abbott Miller

It is Friday again! That means that Design Matters is live at 3 PM ET. My guest today is the wonderful Abbott Miller.

Abbott Miller is a designer, writer, curator, and educator whose projects are concerned with the cultural role of design. Before joining Pentagram as partner in 1999, he was director of Design/Writing/Research, a multidisciplinary studio whose interest in the public life of the written word has taken shape through books, magazines, exhibitions, symposia, and media projects. The studio pioneered the concept of the “designer as author,” undertaking projects in which content and form are developed in a symbiotic relationship.

His exhibitions and publications include The Process of Elimination: The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste; and Swarm, done in collaboration with Ellen Lupton; and Printed Letters: The Natural History of Typography. Other exhibitions include “The 30th Anniversary Covers Tour,” a traveling exhibition for Rolling Stone magazine; “Geoffrey Beene Unbound,” a retrospective of the clothing designer's career at the Fashion Institute of Technology; “Up, Down, Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks” at the National Building Museum; “RockStyle” and “Lennon: His Life and Work,” both at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum; the Harley-Davidson 100th Anniversary Open Road Tour, a centennial exhibition that traveled the world from 2002-2003; and “The Couch: Thinking in Repose” at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. He has designed graphic identities for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, Mohawk Paper Mills and the Noguchi Museum. Other projects include the exhibition catalogues Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle for the Guggenheim and Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio for the Whitney Museum of American Art; and a program of publications for Steuben Glass. Miller is the editor and designer of the visual and performing arts journal 2wice.

His most recent projects include a book on Charles and Ray Eames, produced for Vitra; a catalogue for the upcoming exhibition “Superheroes” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the exhibition design for the new Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, WI, to open in July of this year. Miller is also working on a book and exhibition produced with the world’s largest conservation group, The Nature Conservancy, that focuses on design and sustainably harvested materials in various parts of the world.

Miller's work has been acknowledged with numerous awards, including his design for 2wice, which was named Magazine of the Year by the Society of Publication Designers (SPD), and for Dance Ink, which received a gold medal from the SPD and was nominated twice for a National Magazine Award. In 1994 Miller––together with Ellen Lupton––was awarded the first annual Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. Miller has taught design at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland since 1997. His work and critical writing has appeared in Eye, Print, I.D., Émigré, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Journal of Graphic Design. He is the co-author, with Ellen Lupton, of Design/Writing/Research: Writing on Graphic Design. A survey of his design work, Open Book: Design and Content, will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2009.

Design Matters airs live weekly on the Voice America Business Network, now the industry leader in Internet talk radio. The show was voted a "favorite podcast" on PSFK's Marketing Podcast survey and was recently voted 9th out of over 300 entries for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s People’s Choice Award. The show is also available as Podcasts on iTunes, where over 100,000 people now download the show every month.

Design Matters is from 3-4PM EST and you can view the VoiceAmerica Business site and listen to the show from a myriad of locations:

You can go here, through the Sterling link: http://www.sterlingbrands.com/ListenLive.html

Or you can go here, through the Voice America link: http://www.modavox.com/VoiceAmericaBusiness/