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The Walker Art Center and AIGA Minnesota announced today the theme and speakers for the 2023 edition of the acclaimed Insights Design Lecture Series. Tickets are now on sale for Walker Art Center and AIGA members; tickets become available to the general public on Thursday, January 19 at 11 am. For more than 30 years, Insights has brought together leading designers from around the world to explore innovations, trends, and possibilities in the evolving field of design. Prior speakers have ranged from luminaries such as Sheila de Bretteville, April Greiman, Lance Wyman, Lorraine Wild, Cornel Windlin, and Armand Mevis, to vanguard artist/designers like Martine Syms, Bráulio Amado, Bart de Baets, and Sara de Bondt. This year, the series, which kicks off on March 7, will examine the significance of identity to design practice, with participants sharing the ways in which identity—whether individual, professional, political, institutional, and/or collective—has shaped their perspectives and approaches and is continuing to change the field more broadly. The 2023 edition of Insights will include five in-person lectures at the Walker, as well as a selection of free virtual workshops and projects that allow for an expanded audience to engage with the series’ topics and content. All of the Insights events will be recorded and, at the conclusion of the series, be posted on the Walker’s website. A complete roster of events is included below.
The 2023 speakers and participants are recognized for their pioneering design work and represent diverse backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints. The in-person event line-up includes Prem Krishnamurthy, whose groundbreaking and multi-faceted practice embraces graphic design, curation, education, and activism; feminist media artist and game designer Angela Washko; Nike’s Senior Global Creative Director Serifcan Ozcan; WeShouldDoItAll, the design collective responsible for the Community Galleries at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and Twin Cities punk collaborative Extreme Noise Records. The lectures will be hosted at the Walker on a weekly basis from March 7 through April 4, 2023.
The Insights virtual programming includes an online workshop with the design collaborative tendernet that will explore the possibilities of technology created through feminist lenses; a presentation about the loss and evolution of institutional identity with Slovenian design studio Grupa Ee; and an online gathering to explore the creation of a people’s history of BIPOC Queer design with design studio Polymode. Additionally, the United Nations Design Team will be developing written content about the design and impact of national iconography for the Walker’s renowned digital design platform, The Gradient. All of the virtual programming and digital content is provided to audiences for free.
“We are delighted to once again partner with AIGA Minnesota to present the Insights Design Lecture Series. The Walker’s commitment to design can be traced to its earliest days as a public art center and has included the presentation of major exhibitions on architecture and design, the creation of print and digital magazines, and the production of hundreds of books and catalogues that capture the latest innovations in publishing. The Insights series is an essential part of the Walker’s vision to continue to embrace design as a core part of its program,” said Asli Altay, the Walker’s Head of Content and Communications. “This year’s Insights programming focuses on identity as central to both the evolution of design practice and the changing nature of museums. We look forward to engaging our audiences with this incredible roster of participants, both in-person at the Walker and online.”
INSIGHTS IN-PERSON PROGRAMMING
Prem Krishnamurthy
Tuesday, March 7, 7:00 pm; Walker Cinema
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
Prem Krishnamurthy has a polymorphic practice that includes design, education, curating, writing, and artmaking. Currently, Krishnamurthy directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design consultancy, and organizes the Department of Transformation, an emergent, itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. Previously, he founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York. A Cooper Hewitt National Design Award recipient, Krishnamurthy continually investigates individual, group, and organizational identity through the development of new ways of thinking about, and approaching, design.
WeShouldDoItAll
Tuesday, March 14, 7:00 pm; Walker Cinema
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
The ethos of Brooklyn-based studio WeShouldDoItAll (WSDIA) is that designers should not be constrained to a singular expertise. WSDIA’s work oscillates between branding, spatial, environmental, interactive, and print projects. As the creative lead for the inaugural Community Galleries in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, WSDIA took a nontraditional approach that created a linear path to connect multiple galleries by highlighting how African Americans crafted possibilities in a world that denied them opportunities. Exploring themes of agency, creativity, and resiliency, WSDIA deploys reflective and progressive approaches to the importance of identity both within projects and studio practice.
Serifcan Ozcan
Tuesday, March 21, 7:00 pm; Walker Cinema
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
Turkish-born, Portland-based Serifcan Ozcan merges his love of the vernacular of Turkish design with the visions of a wide range of clients, including Turkish Vogue, Squarespace, Bud Light, Rhizome, and Jeff Bridges. As senior design director of concepts and graphics for Nike’s Jordan Brand, Ozcan collaborates with a talented team of designers to define the look, feel, and narratives of Jordan Brand products, graphics, packaging, and marketing. Through his work, he explores how material culture, like sneakers and apparel, is used to form personal identity and subculture.
Angela Washko
Tuesday, March 28, 7:00 pm; Walker Cinema
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
Confronting sexism and toxic masculinity in gaming and other digital spaces, Angela Washko’s practice spans interventions in mainstream media, performance art in virtual environments, net art, video games, and moving image works. Washko’s unique approach uses digital and game design to challenge misogyny and queerphobia in virtual public arenas. Her projects include The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, a four-year-long feminist intervention inside the most popular online multiplayer role-playing video game of all time; and The Game: The Game, a dating simulator wherein players experience the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists) taken directly from their instructional books and video materials.
Extreme Noise Records
Tuesday, April 4, 7:00 pm; Walker Cinema
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
Founded in 1994, Extreme Noise Records is the oldest continually operating punk collaborative in the Twin Cities. A gathering place for the punk community, it has supported countless creators of original record covers, apparel, posters, and print publishing whose work is too often underrecognized in mainstream design dialogues. Gathering key designers from the past three decades, Extreme Noise Records surveys the important history of punk in Minneapolis and St. Paul and questions how to celebrate and present design made by a community rather than by a single designer or studio.
INSIGHTS VIRTUAL PROGRAMMING
Imagining Feminist Interfaces Workshop with tendernet
Saturday, March 25, 1:00 pm CST
Online & Free, registration limited to 24 participants
Although technology is often described as “disruptive,” it also serves to perpetuate existing power structures. It’s no accident that our technologies created to act as “caregivers” or “secretaries” have female voices. What does it mean to imagine an alternative, feminist voice interface? Exploring how design can be used as a tool to reshape the technology that surrounds our daily lives, this free workshop with the collective tendernet considers what voice technologies and software could take if we designed them in line with the central commitments of feminism: participation, agency, embodiment, equity, empowerment, plurality, and justice. This is not a technical workshop, and no background knowledge is required.
O.U.R. (Open Source, Underexposed, Reading) BIPOC Queer Design with Polymode Studio
Saturday, April 1, 2:00 pm CST
Online & Free
What does it mean to be known, yet different? To be understood? To be felt? To be remembered? Join bi-coastal, LGBTQ+ and Minority-owned studio Polymode on a journey in the form of a workshop. They will expand upon their own work in poetic research with an invitation to help further develop participants’ and ancestors’ stories. Eschewing a single authoritative voice, this free afternoon workshop welcomes designers to collectively gather O.U.R. BIPOC Queer Design, knowing that it can grow and evolve with input from multiple voices.
Loss of Identity with Grupa Ee
Date of Release Forthcoming
Online & Free
After nearly 20 years of working together on a variety of identities for cultural institutions, Ljubljana-based studio Grupa Ee pauses to ask: What have we become? How does a group, studio, or institution evolve? What is lost and what is found? Through an original video reflection released free online, Grupa Ee explores the effect of time on both design and personal identities.
Design and National Identity with United Nations Design Team
Date of Release Forthcoming
Online & Free
How does the design of national iconography and branding form our individual and collective sense of who we are? Delving into these questions through articles on the Walker’s digital design platform The Gradient, members from the design team at the United Nations investigate.
Additional biographic information about participants can be found on the Walker website.
AFTER LECTURE RECEPTIONS
Directly following each lecture, meet the presenters, grab a drink, and chat with fellow design lovers in the Walker’s Main Lobby.
SAVE WITH AN INSIGHTS SERIES PACKAGE
$90 ($71 Walker and AIGA members; $38 students)
Price includes tickets to five paid events. (Unclaimed reserved tickets are released 15 minutes before the event start time.) Purchase online, visit the Walker box office, or call 612-375-7600.