On March 2, Aron Chang discussed the fusion and confusion between art and design, one that he believes needs to be “picked at more.” Chang graduated from Williams in 2005, majoring in studio art and German, before going to design school to study architecture. Whereas Chang felt an almost frustrating liberty in his art courses at college, he had to focus on materials and constraints at design school. These materials and constraints are the laws of design, whereas in the realm of art, the maker has the opportunity to imagine life according to different sets of rules.
Chang currently teaches design in the Gulf Coast. He describes the area as a microcosm of issues of sustainability and opportunity. With its combined challenges of sea level rise and environmental degradation, the Coast faces difficult decisions about how to continue.
Chang brought his students to visit Jean Lafitte, a small town South of New Orleans on an industrial bayou. Here floods are part of everyday life. People are building their houses up on piers: “it’s just a basic fact of life that you live with water in this terrible way.” Jean Lafitte is outside the federal protection system to New Orleans, which brings up interesting questions: What is worth saving? How should the government spend its money? How do you make a claim that coastal cities are important to the nation as a whole?
Chang made a “fanzine” for Lafitte, a little booklet with drawings of landscapes of the town and questions of what it means to live in that space. Interested in how graphic design can be used as a tool of communication, he distributed it throughout the town in gas stations and restaurants. This zine was his first attempt to put his ideas out into space without control of the reception. Chang wanted to know: Is it compelling enough for people to flip through? Does it encourage residents to become a part of the resiliency planning effort for the town?
Chang believes that the artist has an opportunity and a responsibility to ask unanswerable questions, to imagine the impossible. Artists, unlike designers, are not bound by constraints of the real and the possible. Both types of thought and creation are necessary to move forward.
The mayor of Jean Lafitte believes that he will raise the $300 million necessary to build a fifteen-foot high wall around the town to protect it from sea level rise and flooding. Townspeople aren’t sure how to respond. How do you raise a family on that faith? How do you imagine your future? How do you continue?
By Claire Lafave ’12
in photo: Andy Burr, Aron Chang, Bill Stinson