Co Lab: Collaborative Design Survey

Young, hungry, interdisciplinary designers and artists are teaming together in small packs to tackle personal and client projects, while bucking old world views of authorship and agency-based assembly line production. Armed with cheap gear and accessible programs, they can design anything for anyone, wearing their voice proudly on their sleeves. Authors/designers/faculty ras+e--themselves a small, interdisciplinary team--explore this collaborative landscape with an overt sense of humor, original illustrations, custom typography, dozens of Q+As with a diverse range of contemporary practitioners, and buckets of bright red ink (0, 100, 100, 0). Because design theory needs an imp, this collection of accessible essays and tightly curated Q+As refuses to bore.

Elizabeth Herrmann and Ryan Shelley are researchers, designers, writers and teachers. They lecture at Northeastern University in Boston and other universities across the US. They collaborate under the name ras+e.
Design collaborative ras+e formed in the
fires of the MICA Graphic Design MFA program [2011] and promptly declared dominion of the netherworld bordered by design, photography, printmaking, writing, music, video, and installation. After inventing a printmaking medium, drawing physical typefaces, and crafting theatrical comics, ras+e launched professionally with the business model, "Pay me to think." They now shoot their arrows across the country as artists, designers, writers,
and faculty.