Chicago Design Through the Decades

The Chicago Design Through the Decades project is a swift, exciting journey through the history of Chicago design spanning the last one hundred years (1920s–2020s). I had the opportunity to lead the national collaboration between Chicago, New York and NASA in this project, which is based on the vast collection of the Chicago Design Archive (CDA), a permanent online record of Chicago design, currently holding over 3200 examples of work by over 1100 Chicago designers. It was exhibited at ART on THE MART, one of the world’s largest digital projection viewing area in the world — 2.5 acres (approximately two football fields) — on the front of a massive (has its own zip code) Merchandise Mart architectural landmark building on the Chicago River in downtown Chicago.

Investigating a human-centered approach and following engaging characters and textual tidbits from archived design works, the journey begins in the 1920s with the era’s painterly and illustrative techniques. Forms then evolve under the modes of photography, minimalism, futurism, three-dimensionality, and postmodernism throughout the 1930s–2010s. Ultimately, the journey ends in the 2020s with digital portraits produced by using neural networks, a machine learning (ML) approach that formed the foundation of much of modern artificial intelligence (AI)—technologies becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary art. This part is a tribute to Chicago as an alma mater of neural networks, where in 1943, Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and logician Walter Pitts from the University of Chicago, proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network.

For the team, the project opened new avenues for collaboration between design, science and digital humanities to elevate the appreciation of Chicago design history, and to contribute to the recognition of Chicago as an international modern design center through their use of innovative technologies.

The exhibit is dedicated to Wayne Stuetzer (1938–2020), a founder and director of the Chicago Design Archive.

Daria Tsoupikova, UIC School of Design & UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory
Sharon Oiga, UIC School of Design & Chicago Design Archive
Guy Villa Jr, Columbia College Chicago
Krystofer Kim, NASA
Jack Weiss, Chicago Design Archive
Cheri McIntyre, Chicago Design Archive
Lauren Meranda, Chicago Design Archive
AI/ML contribution by Fabio Miranda, UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory
Music by Louis Schwadron, Sky White Sound
Featuring vocalist/activist: Nnelolo Karen Wilson-Ama’Echefu, and rapper Elijah Robb
Curation by Cynthia Noble

ART on THE MART website