Recreating the Past: Concrete Poetry and Motion Design

I presented at MODE. The Motion Design Education Summit was founded in 2013 by a group of professors with the goal to create an outlet for the dissemination of research in motion design and define the field. Motion Design is a subset of visual communication design that consists of time-based messaging usually taking the form of movies, films, and animations.

From the introduction:
Design is often described as a future-oriented discipline where practitioners and educators regularly work within a culture that seeks “new” and “original” work. The discourse of innovation calls designers to solve problems from the present and invent the future. Considering that “the past in the design process is generally conceived more as context than as subject” (Soro, et. al., 2), recreating past work from others in contrast to creating something new can expose students alternative ways of making. In this paper I describe and discuss the process of recreating pieces from the Concrete Poetry movement as a starting point for students to explore typography and motion. To recreate is to “create again” and is a way to start a dialogue that acknowledges the presence of the past and the work
of others.

Full proceedings here.