Graduate Symposium Re-Cap

Last weekend we pulled off the 2010 North Carolina State University College of Design Biennial Graduate Symposium entitled Design, Community and the Rhetoric of Authenticity. When we first began the discussions around the topic in studio, to be honest, I was less than thrilled. It seemed entirely too nebulous, too vaporous, too undefinable. How could we ever have an entire symposium centered around a topic where we all couldn't even agree on what the words in the title meant??? This was the practical side of me rearing its head. But eventually I began to get more and more comfortable with the idea of un-finish, of verbalizing thoughts in motion and of embracing and celebrating the debate.

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At the end of the symposium we had asked a team of graduate students from a range of grad programs to react to the overall symposium, sum things up and bring it home for us. They got all conceptual on us and did a spoken word routine where they each spoke a particular thought, line or quote that resonated with them from throughout the weekend in order of its happening. This went around and around a couple times before we arrived at the most resonating call to actions found in the final lecture. I had found this particularly interesting because I too was, of course, taking notes all weekend long and jotted down some particular things that spoke to me. I thought I would include some of them here for you in my recap of the weekend...

"Authenticity may not be real, but soul is real." - Elliot Earls

"You can see soul in music. You can see it in art." - Earls

"Authenticity is totally situated." - Brenda Laurel

"I can f@*king feel it when work is authentic." - Earls

"Isn't advertising ultimately a culturally sanctioned form of lying?" - Earls

"Designing for yourself is something I am very wary of." - Laurel

"Who has the capability to design something authentic and in what context." Jon Sueda

"The original recipe is always the most authentic." - Sueda

"We achieve authenticity when the idea is resistant to mutation." - Gary Dickson

"Where do stereo types and nostalgia fit into the rhetoric of authenticity." - Leslie Atzmon

"71% of Americans are online. How does this affect authenticity?" - Q&A Session

"We are insiders." - Maggie Fost on Merge employees

"To be a tourist is being someone who is knowingly having an inauthentic experience." - Unknown, quoted by Maggie Fost

"Designers are fans with access, which situates us to be incredible tour guides." - Fost

"Popular authenticity doesn't free music, it kills it." - Ken Fitzgerald

"All things are subject to interpretation. Which interpretation prevails at the time are a product of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Technology affords us a way of communicate but it also allows us to isolate ourselves." - Unknown, from break-out session

"In the moment we deem something authentic it ceases to be authentic." - Joerg Becker