The Critical Edge
Tonight's Critical Edge panel discussion, moderated by I.D.'s Julie Lasky at the Center for Architecture, provided a warm and personable forum for talks around design criticism. But by the time each of the panelists got through the obligatory background-'n'-bio—TenbyTen Magazine's Annette Ferrara (sassy), Designers on Design's Max Fraser (charming), Apartment Therapy's Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan (thoughtful), and Consumed's Rob Walker (real)—there was precious little time left over for debating the topic at hand. As these things go however, tonight was pretty good, and Lasky did her best to provoke some decent nuggets. Sadly, and startlingly, there was no mention of the web as a forum for design criticism—has anyone been to Amazon's reader reviews, consumerreports.com, engadget, or about a million discussion forums—though Fraser came teasingly close when he broke down the media's reticence to trash anything from a pages-to-burn perspective (books can't afford the pages, magazines can't offend/betray their advertisers and publishers, newspapers can indulge just a little, since they're tomorrow's "fish wrapper").For my money, email the attendees the speakers' bios ahead of time, provide links their work, and then let's all dive into the discussion right away, shall we?
