Monday, November 29th from 12:30 to 1:30 pm in room 160 of the annex...let's come listen to Matt!
Matt Livengood has been a practicing designer since 1997 and a design educator since 2006. He received his Bachelor of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University, and his MFA in Design from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (or NSCAD University) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Matt has worked as a designer in Chicago, Portland, and Chapel HIll, NC; prior to joining the design faculty at Portland State, he was an assistant professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.
Although his professional portfolio includes a variety of projects, from packaging and branding to event promotions and publication design, his professional and teaching interests exist primarily within arenas not directly linked to marketplace and business settings. The construction of meaning and how design can (and should) be used to battle meaninglessness within our visual cultures is of general interest; signification, visual rhetoric, and the functional value of aesthetics are topics of particular interest to him.
The major emphasis of his graduate studies was, on the surface, an examination of the design of same-sex wedding invitations. This work focused upon how the conceptual and formal approaches used for such objects might be refocused to propagate more sincere representations of actual same-sex couples today, and to portray and acknowledge the history of same-sex relationships. The same-sex wedding invitation was used as a case study, however, to examine more universal issues: How do graphics and visuals foster constructed identities? and, How might new emerging subcultures formulate their own distinct, genuine visual identities? The work being discussed in this lecture will examine such questions and review some of the visuals and strategies formulated when this research was initiated.