Lecture by Rebeca Méndez, with Adam Eeuwens as part of the Arts + Activism Lecture Series organized by the Art | Sci Center, UCLA. When: April 19, 2007, 6 – 8 pm. Where: UCLA, Design | Media Arts Department, EDA.

From the moment that design began to emerge as a discipline in the 1920s it was closely associated with an idealistic and utopian vision. Good design could contribute to a better society. But twentieth-century modernism also engendered in design a deep concept of ‘professionalism’—a neutral and dispassionate objectivity—which has primarily manifested as a non-critical service-to-industry attitude, and has proven inadequate in a world that is crying for concern, involvement, accountability, and commitment…

When we set out as chairs to form the Design Jury we selected people that are not necessarily interested in the world of design, but in the design of the world (to quote Bruce Mau). People who appreciate a better looking world, but have a much deeper interest in a more balanced and better functioning world, opening up new opportunities. These brilliant people are:

Bob Stein—inventor, provocateur, the smartest person I know, and founder of The Institute of the Future of The Book—invited core advisors of the institute to a retreat to reassess the Institute’s mission. I joined the advisory board in 2005, thus found myself in Hotel Cashelmara in New Jersery’s gray coast with a brilliant bunch of artists, writers and thinkers.

Since the late 1980s, the subjects of my photographic series have included industrial sites, hotel beds, patterns in nature, landscapes and seascapes. “Wake” is my latest photographic series which documents the beds I have slept on during my travels in the past years.

Méndez is currently collaborating with mexican artist Rubén Ortiz Torres in the design of his mid carreer monograph to be published at the end of 2007 by Turner Libros, Spain.