Miller, J Abbott

Bio Sketch

J Abbott Miller (b. 1962, Indiana) is an American graphic designer, writer and curator — a partner in the New York office of Pentagram (from 1999), where he leads a team designing identities, exhibitions, environmental graphics, books, magazines and interactive projects; notable commissions include the Sotheby's identity system and the Barnes Foundation's environmental graphics. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, and in 1989 founded the multidisciplinary studio Design Writing Research, where — in collaboration with Ellen Lupton (his wife) — he pioneered the concept of the "designer as author," undertaking projects in which content and form are developed in symbiotic relationship. With Lupton he co-authored Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design (1996) and received (jointly, 1994) the first annual Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design; his own AIGA Medal came in 2014. He is the designer and editor of 2wice magazine, a visiting critic in the Graduate Design Program at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author of Dimensional Typography (1997) and the monograph Abbott Miller: Design and Content (2014). His curatorial work includes Design for a Living World (The Nature Conservancy/Cooper Hewitt, 2009, co-curated with Lupton) and extensive museum exhibition design; his work is held in the collections of Cooper Hewitt, SFMOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His projects "are often concerned with the cultural role of design and the public life of the written word."

Key Works

*Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste* (1992/2006) — with Ellen Lupton; the MIT List Visual Arts Center publication (The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination, 1992; book edition Princeton Architectural Press 1996/97), reprinted in Intimus pp. 204–213 — the wiki's source for the excretory-aesthetic thesis, the process of elimination, the hygienic bathroom/kitchen prehistory of streamlining, and the psychoanalytic design mechanism.
Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design (with Ellen Lupton) (1996; Phaidon ed. 1999) — the pair's collected critical essays and the name of their studio practice; the "designer as author" programme.
The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (A Process of Elimination) (with Ellen Lupton) (Princeton Architectural Press book edition, 1996/97) — the expanded book form of the 1992 exhibition publication from which the ingested excerpt is drawn.
Dimensional Typography: Case Studies on The Shape of Letters in Virtual Environments (1997) — the letterform-in-virtual-space study.
2wice (designer and editor, from 1999) — the performing-arts/culture magazine as designed medium.
Abbott Miller: Design and Content (2014) — the Princeton Architectural Press survey of his design work.
Design for a Living World (2009, co-curated with Lupton) — the Cooper Hewitt/Nature Conservancy exhibition commissioning ten designers to prototype products from ten endangered landscapes' materials.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

streamlining — the 1930s style he and Lupton theorize as an "aesthetic of waste."
process-of-elimination — his and Lupton's master concept: digestion, consumption and simplification as one pattern.
bathroom — the room-type whose history the essay founds ("The bathroom as an architectural space did not exist prior to the late nineteenth century").
creative-waste — Frederick's oxymoron the essay recovers as consumer culture's self-theory.
consumerism — the 1890–1940 consumption culture the essay documents at its formation; packaging as industrial design's model.
kitchen — the "continuous kitchen" and the kitchen door as consumption's entry and exit.
fabrication — the shell-construction register: stamping, molding, extrusion and the "distinction between inside and outside, structure and skin."

Relevance to the Core Research

Miller co-supplies the wiki's consumerism-at-formation source and its exhibition-form: the Streamlining essay (with Lupton) links the wiki's advice-literature lineage (the elimination idiom) to the consumer-economy cluster, and gives the interior its psychoanalytic product-scale register. His exhibition practice (Design Writing Research; Pentagram's museum exhibitions; 2wice) parallels the wiki's exhibitionary and display clusters — the exhibition as the medium where design history is constituted (the 1992 essay is itself an exhibition publication, the catalogue-as-argument). His "designer as author" model is the graphic-design analogue of the wiki's authorship debates (the designer as content-maker, not service provider).

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (1992/2006) — with Ellen Lupton; the Intimus reprint of the 1992 MIT List Visual Arts Center publication.