Platform 10 is the latest edition of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s annual compendium of selected student work, events, lectures and exhibitions. Pentagram has created a design for the book that highlights its theme, “Live Feed,” documenting the 2016-2017 school year in a timeline of images and activity.
Inspired by the timeline of social media feeds, the design of Platform 10 recounts the year in reverse chronological order, from July 2017 to August 2016. Pulled from a crowd-sourced database of 117,518 available files, this “live feed” of the institution samples 728 images—from students, faculty, and staff alike, revealing the fluidity between the place, production, and people of the Harvard University School of Design. The book’s editors also wanted to explore the idea that live feeds are just as mediated as the old analog forms of documentation. (If all the crowd-sourced images had been included, the 362-page book would be 160 times thicker than it is now.)
The book has been constructed with a French fold, giving it the conceptual feel of a long strip of uninterrupted paper. The layout employs a loose, flexible grid, reflecting the idea that things happen organically. Full bleed images are used to show student work, and gaps of white space indicate periods when not much was going on. Dates are used instead of page numbers, and image captions and text appear in a section at the end of the book, which bends time back around again with a normal chronology and is printed on a different stock.
