News 2020: Dr. Uchill's Book, Being Material, Wins AIGA Award

The book integrates graphic design, printed ink, machine learning, and computer vision to create a book that is a hybrid of being digital-material.

Being Material, co-edited by Dr. Rebecca Uchill of Art Education, Art History, and Media Studies at CVPA, is a winner of the 2019 “50 Books | 50 Covers” competition of AIGA: the Professional Association for Design. Selected from a pool of nearly 800 book and cover designs from 32 countries, the 50 winners will, according to the AIGA announcement, "become a part of a permanent, accessible, and historic collection of notable graphic design in the AIGA Design Archives. The books become part of the AIGA collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University’s Butler Library in the city of New York.”

The book Being Material integrates design and content in new and ambitious ways. Overall, the book considers the worlds of materialities and materialisms in a digital age. The design for the book reflects these relationships: the layouts of printed pages interact with smartphone cameras to deploy digital content online. This content includes musical compositions produced for the book, videos that illustrate the written texts, and texts authored specifically for the web, including one by Uchill and co-editor Stefan Helmreich.

The competition jurors reflected; "We think this book offers something unique: a way of employing graphic design, printed ink, machine learning, and computer vision to create a book that is a hybrid of being digital-material.”

Author/Editor: Marie-Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, and Evan Ziporyn
Publisher: MIT Press
Design Firm: Math Practice, MIT Self-Assembly Lab
Book Designer: E Roon Kang & Minkyoung Kim
Jacket Designer: E Roon Kang, Skylar Tibbits, Marcelo Coelho, Lukas Debiasi, Lukas Eigler-Harding, Evan Ziporyn

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