Lectures

The Informational City 2011
20 Sept 2011, London College of Communication
Part of the London Design Festival

London is a city full of visible and invisible layers of information and of digital and analogue spaces. Now in its fourth year, this lecture programme explores the ways in which designers, architects and policymakers have informed and influenced our understanding of the contemporary cityscape.

We were pleased to welcome Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas as this year's guest speaker (pictured here with Kasper de Graaf taking questions from the audience). Dame Judith shared her views on the richness of London' s cultural and informational landscape to an audience of students, policymakers, educators and designers. The lecture was streamed live on Policy Review TV who had partnered with IE for this event.

A former leader of the City of London Corporation, a director of Merrill Lynch and chair of the New West End Company, Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas was a key figure in London life long before Mayor Boris Johnson appointed her this year to spearhead the city's partnership with the private sector as chair of London Partners. In March 2011 she co-chaired the Apeldoorn Conference, a biennial government-sponsored dialogue involving business, government, academia and the media drawn from across the UK and the Netherlands, on the theme of 'Making Successful Cities.' This year's keynote Informational City Lecture has attracted interest in many quarters because few people are better placed today than Dame Judith to comment on the importance of information in the economic, social and civic life of modern cities.

For further information see http://informationalcity.org/

Leviedei Italy
Patrick Roberts and Teal Triggs presented some of their thoughts behind interdisciplinarity using research projects undertaken by members of the i.e. team for the conference Le Vie dei-Mercanti held in Capri, Italy (4–6 June, 2009). During their visit, they documented some of the more interesting examples of the island's distinctive signage.

Dar Al-Hekma
Teal Triggs was awarded the Dar Al-Hekma Prize for Outstanding Contributions and Achievements 2008/09 for her work as a graphic design historian, educator and critic. The Prize was established by the Dar Al-Hekma College — a women's university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — in 2004. Teal also participated in Tawasul, the first International Design Conference held in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (16–18 May, 2009) and conducted a fanzine workshop with Dar Al-Hekma students.

Jeddah Saudi Arabia

Scenes from Jeddah Saudi Arabia: workshop with students as part of 'Tawasul' conference.

Catherine Dixon outlined the difficulties with the ongoing use of typeface classification schemes derived from the Vox system of 1954 in her paper 'Beyond classification: finding new ways of understanding typeforms' presented at 9° Bienal de De Gráfico ADG (24 April 2009).

Catherine Dixon

Photograph: Henrique Nardi.