GRAPHIC DESIGN, EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE
Gunnar Swanson

About ten years ago I wrote an article that appeared in Design Issues.It had the unassuming title Graphic Design Education as a Liberal Art:Design and Knowledge in the University and the "Real World." It suggested the possibility of teaching graphic design as the nexus of various education fields while ignoring the tradition of vocational training.It has been widely cited,most commonly by people advocating additional liberal arts studies for design students or more writing assignments in design classes.Although I wouldn't argue against either of those ideas,my article didn't make that case.It clearly wasn 't about augmenting design training,it was about reconsidering what liberal arts education means. Not many graphic design programs would want to do what my article suggested.Although I made the claim that the students who would come out of such a program might become interesting designers and the process might advance graphic design in many ways,it is hardly a formula for professional training. The liberal arts article and,to a greater extent,my 1995 AIGA Journal article called "Is Design Important?" largely assumed that graphic design would advance in both knowledge and stature by being a subject of more-or-less traditional academic study. One aspect of the academization of design is the growth of the design PhD degree.This degree is some- what common in much of the rest of the world but is fairly new in the US.It 's now offered by several US universities.A third international conference on design PhD degrees is taking place in Japan next year and there is an active email list on the subject. One of my assertions in the liberal art article was that,unlike Blanche DuBois,we couldn 't depend on the kindness of strangers.Non-designer initiated research would always ask the wrong questions to show any hope of advancing design.It 's still a problem but after spending three years on the PhD email list I wonder whether design PhDs have more connection to designers and designing than anthropologists or organizational psychologists do. Perhaps the good news about American design PhD programs is that there are so few of them and they have so few students.That 's not the broad slam it might sound like.There is great value to building a more academic design field but one worry I have about design PhDs is a corollary of Gresham 's Law Ñ the one about bad money driving out the good.There are now some remarkable people who were design prac- titioners and returned to school to get PhD degrees (just as a lot of practitioners return for MFAs)and manage the best of both worlds.Unless universities decide that they should offer much more than begin- ning assistant professor pay to people who stop lucrative design careers,gain at least some of what one would get in a good MFA program,and then spend many years without pay on a doctoral degree,it str ikes me as unlikely that faculties will be filled with design doctors who are qualified to teach studio classes. Despite the grand suggestions of my Design Issues article,it also str ikes me as implausible that many de- sign programs (and even more implausible that many design students)would knowingly abandon study that leads to practice for a pure academic,theoretical design.This means that in a world with many design PhDs,universities will either need to realize that a person with a design PhD may not be qualified to teach when someone with a design MFA should be or they will have researchers rather than designers teaching design.Enough departments,universities,and even state legislatures have set the requirement that regular faculty have the highest available degree in a field that it could be some fun trying to convince people that a masters is actually a higher degree than a doctorate. As many journalism programs became communication departments many hired people with PhDs in communication but no journalism experience to teach journalism and now many of their former grad students are teaching journalism classes.Of course communication departments are more than just jour- nalism programs so some teach graphic design,web design,and multimedia,hiring people with PhDs in communication to do so.I don't doubt that there are some perceptive,experienced designers with PhD degrees in communication.I do doubt that there are many of them. Am I recanting my earlier writing and advocating that all design programs become great vocational pro- grams,a return to 1979 ArtCenter?No,although I do think some programs should be that.I 'm a pluralist in that I think the world and graphic design will be better off if there are graphic design programs focused on art,others on business,on analysis,on craft...you name it.All programs should have elements of all of those and more but nobody can do all of that well and thoroughly in three or four years. Just because our motives aren 't singular and simple doesn 't mean we can 't act logically and clearly on them.Back in 1993 when Andrew Blauvelt was putting together his Visible Language tr ilogy on graphic design history I wrote him suggesting that we need to ask questions about why we teach design history and saying: Clearly there are various possible answers to each of these questions.Those possibilities should be subjected to analysis.If,for instance,we say that graphic design history is just a window into social or cultural analysis,why do we teach the subject almost exclusively to graphic design majors?If graphic design history is a message about the nature of design itself,how does that affect (and how is it affected by)our definition of the nature of design? If graphic design history is a lesson in the form of intentional communication,which of the alternative perspectives illuminate issues of form and intention and which serve to obscure them? What I would caution against in making decisions on emphasis is the envious graphic design inferiority complex that comes out in so many ways.PhD envy is one of them.Don 't hesitate to rethink what design education is or should be about.Don't fail to consider where it fits best in a larger educational picture.But don 't accept academic prejudices that value similarity to other fields,that devalue craft and doing. Consider whether there is designerly knowledge,something more we have to offer the world.I think that craft and doing are a key part of that knowledge and that many important things do not lend themselves to full understanding by reading and thinking alone. It's up to all of us to figure out what designerly knowledge is.But I suspect we will find a large part of it in being designers.

 

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