AIGA Minnesota Faculty Forum

April 9, 2011

Keynote presentation:

Thomas Fisher is Professor an Dean at the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. He has written extensively about architecture.

The promise and paradox of design education in the 21st century
Four dilemmas we face as design educators: there is a promise and a paradox in each

1. Change in Media: the IPad effect

Are ipads productive or disruptive tools? They transform space and time, just like the printed book did. The IPad presents a new change in media that is as revolutionary as when the printing press was invented. People now have the web, social media, and their own web of interconnection all on one devide that they can carry with them at all times.

Prior to the invention of the printing press, a handlettered book cost as much as a house, so only the very wealthy could afford to read. The printing press changed all that, making reading and information available to the masses. The Gutenberg effect is the idea of rationality as a way of understanding the world, viewing the world as a machine. It also derailed the Catholic church and ushered in the scientific revolution.


Bran Ferren, former Disney Imagineer and futurist asserts that Ipads will profoundly shift every industry.


2. Change in Metaphor: DesCartes Effect

Today we view the world, not as a machine, but as a network or web. The brain is no longer a supercomputer but neural network, cities are now connected communities.

The role of design thinking in all of this is that other industries want our thought process. Design thinking is a weblike way of looking at the world— abductive. Abductive is the third piece of inductive and deductive thinking. It’s the moment in the design process when we intuitively know a solution to the design problem. It is lateral, intuitive and linked, not linear.

Design thinking will be as important in the new world as math was in the old world. This is the promise. This is the paradox: people want design thinking on a plate, everybody thinks they are a designer. They ask us to explain our way of thinking to them over lunch.

3. Disciplinarity: breadth vs depth of knowledge. Foucoult Effect: discipline is punishment, forces people into boundaries

If the world is a web, interdisciplinarity is everywhere. Fascination with breadth.

There is a change in method with interdisciplinarity. Power becomes whoever has the most links. The way to accrue power is to have as many interdisciplinary connections as possible.

Design thinking can solve the really difficult problems that are left in the world, and can only be solved be everybody getting together to form a solution. Problems like poverty, climate change, and population control. Like the Gutenberg effect, disciplinarity is a change in the method of communication.

The University of Minnesota has adopted a challenge curriculum in their design school. Students major in a discipline, minor in a challenge. Education is a T shape: deep in one aspect and broad in the other.

Designers will be on bigger teams and our skills will be used to solve bigger problems. This is the promise. The paradox: how do we go from disciplinary to interdisciplinary?


4. Design Education: Richard Ford or Daniel Pink Effect

Design pedagogy is evolving from a marginal to a central model. Engineering, which has seen the world as a machine, is trying to figure out what we do in the studio.
Students need to think entrepreneurially about problems.

Promise: this encourages outliers. The term outliers refers to a Malcolm Gladwell book of the same name that describes people like Mozart or Bill Gates as essentially people who have such passion about something that they spend 10,000 hours doing it while still at a young age, making them the top in their field. Outliers think divergently, rather than convergently.

We need to innovate more and more rapidly to solve today’s problems.

Paradox: our form of education will become more broadly used in other disciplines.

Our students are heading into a world that is a vast delta of opportunities.

Discussion after the keynote (open to all attendees):

Portfolio reviewers want to see the process that led to the end product. What did you eliminate and why?

The number of letterpress studios opening up on campuses is boggling.

Design thinking is taught by what problems go into the sketchbook, they can solve bigger than graphic design problems.

Studio pedagogy is mostly conversational based learning.

This is a great time to be alive, like the Renaissance and the Gutenberg eras.

Get the students out of class and walk around helps students link ideas to place, they always rate those classes higher.

Leaders tell new stories about the world in compelling ways.

Politicians are still arguing about 20th century problems. There is a lack of leadership in that arena.

Graphic designers are engaged in telling stories through media.

A panel discussion followed:

Panelists:

Paul Bruski is an assistant professor at Graphic Design University. His interests include cultural iconography and mapping, and has presented on information design, design education and visual literacy.

Alex DeArmond is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at UW-Stout, worked as a senior designer at the Walker Art Center and is fluent in exhibition and signage design.

Bill Moran is a 3rd generation letterpress printer, graphic designer and professor of printing history at the University of Minnesota. He teaches “travels in typography,” which looks at the history and evolution of the printed word.

Doug Powell is a designer, entrepreneur and business strategist at Minneapolis-based Schwarz Powell Design and is incoming national president of AIGA.

Bill Thorburn opened Thornburn Group in Minneapolis, specializing in brand development.


Panel Discussion

Bill: Telling the story of what we do is critical. What is the value that a designer brings to the table? We sell innovation, we think visually (the new global language), we have the ability to grab mission/vision ideas and distill them into logos, we think systematically into the whole brand experience, which ends up being trust. We sell experiences. We also print business cards on letterpresses, and these make our fingers smile.

Alex: first year teacher. Typography is the DNA of his design practice and the critical skill for graduates. It is the discipline that we can claim as ours as graphic designers. Typography translates between print and digital media.

Paul: artistry and craft are the pillars of design. It shows that someone cared about something. Architecture, interior design and graphic design, landscape design, integrated studio arts students at his school are together in their first year, then diverge into their own discipline, then are brought back together in their last year, an I model. The more interesting design problems are broad. Students want to get to the end point but need to be encouraged to go back and generate more ideas and concepts.

Bill: Writing is really important in the class, find out what students are experts in. Give them a piece of history and ask them what is the contemporary analogy? Blog format = many to many. Students are asked to comment on each other’s commentary. If they write a paper it just goes to the teacher but if they blog it gets many more views.

Stephen McCarthy, U of M: We merge the literary and the visual. You can’t teach typography without teaching writing. What do the words say, what do they mean? Why does Zapfino work better to say I love you than Cooper Black?

Alex: Give them fantastic content and high quality images to work with. Spend time outside of the classroom.

Seth Johnson: When we went to school, we were not content creators. Now we have the ability to make typography real instead of tracing it. We need to develop our own content.

Bill: What does that mean to a design curriculum that has limited resources? How do you incorporate these new ideas. Our students need to acquire new skill sets.

Who is our audience? What is our client trying to say? Get into the head of a baby boomer when you are a twenty-something.

Bill: We can’t teach everything. Typography is an essential component to communication. Type is a foundational element but so is color. So is texture. These create cues that our audience picks up on and responds to. THis is how we bring these stories to life. What is the relevance in the cultural landscape? What can we own? We don’t want to make Apple look like Microsoft.

Tom Fisher: pidgin languages are emerging on the web. What about Arabic typography, Chinese calligraphy,

Bill: There is an exhibition on the 2nd floor of MIA that has Chinese characters in bone, in jade, there is a permanency of iconography.

Stephen: went to see rosetta stone as an icon of typography.

Alex: Holland’s designers are required to be multilingual.

Paul: Designers are problem seekers as much as problem solvers.