This document announces an event series at the Walker Art Center called "Insights" featuring five guest speakers: Andrew Blauvelt from Minneapolis on March 3rd, April Greiman from Los Angeles on March 10th, K-HOLE from New York on March 17th, Bart de Baets from Amsterdam on March 24th, and James Langdon from Birmingham, UK on March 31st. Each speaker will share their work and process in design. The series kicks off with Andrew Blauvelt exploring Minnesota's design legacy and the Walker's new online collection of Minnesota design.

1. Clarke University CBH 309
Live viewing every Tuesday @ 7:00pm
March 3rd – March 31st
The Insights series brings leading designers from around the world to the
Walker to share the thinking, methods, and processes behind their work.
This year, don’t miss your chance to see an expanded program featuring
five guest speakers: Walker design curator Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis),
graphic designer April Greiman (Los Angeles), the collective K-HOLE (New
York), graphic designer Bart de Baets (Amsterdam), and School for Design
Fiction founder James Langdon (Birmingham, UK).
Walker Art Center
March 3
Andrew Blauvelt
Minneapolis
March 10
April Greiman
Los Angeles
March 17
K-HOLE
New York
March 24
Bart de Baets
Amsterdam
March 31
James Langdon
Liverpool
Insights 2015 kicks off with a unique two-part
event celebrating Minnesota and its long-stand-
ing design legacy. The evening be-gins with a
presentation by Andrew Blauvelt, Walker Art
Center senior curator of design, research, and
publishing, who will explore the Walker’s new
web-based Minnesota design collection high-
lighting Minnesota’s diverse heritage across
the design fields. From the world’s quietest
room to the Honeycrisp apple, from the humble
sticky note to the Prince logo, Blauvelt offers a
crash course on what makes our region such a
hotbed for innovation.
Through her Los Angeles–based studio Made
in Space, visionary graphic designer and artist
April Greiman has been creating vital work in
a variety of media for more than 30 years. She
helped pioneer the integration of technology
and art as one of the first practitioners to ex-
plore the desktop computer’s creative potential,
and her unique fusion of a postmodernist men-
tality with digital technology became emblem-
atic of the “New Wave” design approach in the
late 1970s and early ’80s. Her art direction (with
Jayme Odgers) of Wet Magazine is a touch-
stone of this era, inspiring countless designers
since its creation. Today, Greiman is known as
an artist creating numerous multi-media works
for both solo and group shows as well as com-
missions for public spaces.
K-HOLE exists in multiple states at once: it is
both a publication and a collective; it is both
an artistic practice and a consulting firm; it
is both critical and unapologetically earnest.
Its five members come from backgrounds as
varied as brand strategy, fine art, Web devel-
opment, and fashion, and together they have
released a series of fascinating PDF publica-
tions modeled upon corporate trend forecast-
ing reports. These documents appropriate the
visuals of PowerPoint, stock photography, and
advertising and exploit the inherent poetry in
the purposefully vague aphorisms of corpo-
rate brand-speak. Ultimately, K-HOLE aspires
to utilize the language of trend forecasting to
discuss sociopolitical topics in depth, explor-
ing the capitalist landscape of advertising and
marketing in a critical but un-ironic way.
Amsterdam-based Bart de Baets is a fierce for-
malist, an unrelenting experimenter who has
developed a unique typographic attitude that
has influenced designers around the world.
His work spans the entire cultural sector for
clients in the fields of art, music, performance,
and film. A few of his clients include the Am-
sterdam club Paradiso, cultural centers such as
W139, De Appel, AFK, and the New Institute,
and film programs such as the Weight of Co-
lour and A New Divide? De Baets is also known
for his self-initiated projects, including Dark and
Stormy, an ambiguous fanzine he publishes
with Rustan Söderling featuring contributions
from an international array of artists, and Suc-
cess and Uncertainty, a poster series and pub-
lication made with Sandra Kassenaar during
an artist residency in Cairo amid the chaos of
2011’s Arab Spring.
The UK’s James Langdon has carved out a
unique practice that fully integrates his design,
editorial, and curatorial pursuits. As one of six
directors of Eastside Projects—an artist-run
exhibition space dedicated to promoting cul-
tural growth in its home town of Birmingham,
England—Langdon designs and edits many of
the organization’s publications and is responsi-
ble for creating a series of experimental man-
uals that explore its mission through ideas as
varied as urban renewal, adhocism, and public
engagement. In 2013, Langdon founded the
itinerant School for Design Fiction, working with
students to investigate the storytelling inherent
in the design process, the emotions embedded
within an artifact, and the benefits of living in
speculative worlds.
Minnesota