Teaching Graphic Design at a Human Scale

(human scale = human-centered)

If we imagine that the teaching of graphic design exists as an extension of the marketplace and only in service to its needs, we overlook the discipline’s basis for existing. Graphic design studies cannot simply be an extension of industry since, in most cases, education precedes practice. If we assume that the market’s role is to draw students from graphic design programs we forget that the average university student exists already as part of a social class prepared to enter higher education regardless of the promise of paid work in a specific profession. Even in the absence of the promise of a career or at least a first job in graphic design a college-age student will still enter college.

Graphic design is not a single category describing a vocation but rather a series of activities related to cultural production and the expression of the popular imagination through words and images. It is also not simply a skill set, as multifaceted as it may be, dependent on specific technologies, but is in fact related to the need over time to communicate through those words and images. If we imagine that it is a skill set learned in trade schools, colleges and universities to serve industry we will isolate the craft and educate students dependent on perfecting a skill set that may cease to exist before they can appreciate its value. If we were to continue to teach in this manner we may at best maintain an institutionalized method for teaching design, keep pace with industry standards and the public’s desire to see their thoughts and feelings in print. At worst it is unsustainable, if seen simply as an agent of consumption.

Art schools provided much of the labor force that served the graphic design field in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century with little or no specific instruction in graphic design. The training was often almost completely divorced from the modern experience, especially in the U.S. where sources as divergent as the Bauhaus and the Beaux Arts provided individuals capable of basic hand skills and with a background in the history of art and art forms. Graphic design education has been theoretically based on what is believed to be formal instruction in basic design principles but what is in reality an expression of an ideology of design. This ideology developed in part as a curious strain and a sometimes, conservative reaction to modernism itself. This ideology persisted in art schools and departments beyond the point at which it was largely rejected by many artists and designers as being a product of large institutions and centralized power, as being authoritarian.

This manner of teaching, presented as basic design principles, existed along with many more experimental forms of teaching, learning and designing, although in most cases one existed theoretically as the antidote to the other. Great designers and teachers of design were seen as possessing both formal and informal design attributes and skills. This paradox was sometimes used to explain how they could also exist in the world of professional design without formal training in design while representing its essential qualities. This too was mirrored in a designer’s ability to conduct the business of design with one foot in the art world. A manifestation of concerns about feminized art spaces versus “the real world” of business and industry inflected the perspective as well. In the more experimental, informal methods of teaching a space was created to consider design methodologies that questioned design forms and systems of design but also offered the opportunity to reject the prevailing ideology of design: a graphical representation of the modern world that was centralized and dependent on maintaining large systems.

The Ideology of the Ideal

This formalist representation of design was an effort to codify design pedagogy but resulted in its reification as an ideal. Its representation as the ideal rather than as the ideological was perpetuated because it was located as the theoretical basis for future design practice in an ideal world where design would serve a permanent and substantial role. It was not truly forward thinking but was a static representation of the machine aesthetic, one that was already being replaced or perhaps transgressed to some extent by new popular forms such as television. Television was in fact an expression of a new industrial revolution of moving images, which created the seedbed for postmodernism. Design education emerging in the post-war period was ineffective in transforming design so it might tackle problems of sustainability that in the next century and in a postmodern, post-industrial design context would seem to suddenly appear as being beyond the reach of the profession.

What did emerge and did impact design practice and pedagogy was the tsunami of digital media that converged across creative production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The development of the personal computer and postscript printing was as Andrew Kirk describes in Counter Culture Green, in keeping with the attitudes and applied thinking of many of those influenced by Buckminster Fuller and as represented in the Whole Earth Catalog. Once adopted, these technologies also led to the absorption of the pragmatic counter cultural bent of the catalogs creator Stewart Brand as described by Kirk. This was an easy leap for designers already engaged in commerce through graphic design practice and the complexity of navigating consumption, technology and aesthetics. In addition, the Mac as the ideal form of the personal computer reflected the desire of most graphic designers to work beyond larger institutional models and at once seemed to personify this desire in a Lacanian dialogue with technology as image-making. The speed at which this paradigm shift occurred in graphic design clearly describes the creative impulses of the designer to be in tandem with technology and commerce. It also fit nicely with E.F. Schumacher’s description of sustainable technologies that were suitable at small scale, compatible with “man’s creativity” and in this case relatively cheap, at least to the creative professionals already engaged in designing. Ironically design as a practice was challenged in the convergence created by desktop publishing. The rapidly ensuing reality of the total means of production, easily obtained and utilized, led designers to question their role as mediators between people and ideas, essentially the fear that machines could replace them. This fear was also expressed by Schumacher and common to the era in which he wrote, rejecting technology as a threat to humanity on an individual and titanic scale. What wasn’t yet appreciated was the degree to which the mediated life would dominate culture and would cause the machine to become nearly invisible except as a canvas on which to explore ideas.

The notion that technology could both capture and transcend mediation was not in keeping with the ideologically based Swiss style of design that influenced so many designers in the post-war period. McCluhan had of course anticipated this convergence of self and technology through consumption but as ‘media’ not as ‘design’. That designers would design the ways in which we mediate and therefore ‘design’ our own experience is fraught with ambivalence because of the role of consumption in contemporary life and its material and spiritual fallout.

Style and the Vernacular

This material and spiritual fallout was further complicated by the sudden emergence of vernacular design forms in the 1980s and 1990s in what is sometimes referred to as “grunge.” This vernacular aesthetic followed the rapid rise of the personal computer. The old design guard assumed that the distressed type and disjointed grids were a manifestation of digital technology, as style, applied to graphic design. As David Carson asserts, it was not his intention to bring down established forms, but his naiveté and good timing led to his own meteoric rise. His imitators made good on the threat to the Swiss style in their application of digital technology in mimicking vernacular forms. The emergence of grunge as a stylistic trope named for a musical genre from the Northwest, United States is likely not accidental. It served as both an antidote to conventionality and an embracing of ‘the authentic’ at a time when alternative or counter-cultural lifestyles were entering the mainstream in a diversity of forms. The eclecticism of grunge further supports it as a defining aesthetic of, ‘the alternative’, in a space and time where ambivalence about alternatives lifestyles was emerging in a myriad of forms and from sources not always originally aligned with activist-based environmentalism.

Musical style as primary source material for lifestyle makes the generational shift towards a creative lifestyle clear as described by Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class. An emerging generation of digital natives reflected the principles of individual agency and autonomy expressed in The Whole Earth Catalog and began to influence the cultural landscape. The development of a new aesthetic in the Pacific Northwest, as a part of a leisure-based lifestyle in a urban environment enclosed, perhaps even preserved by water, trees, mountain and sky is indicative of what Kirk described as reconciling the “contradictory connections between consumption, leisure, technology and nature.” But what does all of this have to do with graphic design education and sustainability?

Human-Centered Pedagogies

In teaching design I was influenced first by the pragmatic. My concern was chiefly to prepare the student to work in the field or at least to prepare them to enter and then learn through working in the field. In practice this pedagogy was almost immediately subsumed by my desire to make immediate and meaningful connections with individual students. In the space between the individual and myself all my larger concerns collapsed into a concern for the individual. The classroom is a space where one learner and one teacher share in growth and discovery and engage the student’s potential to exceed the teacher and the increasingly limited scope of a teacher’s direct professional experience.

In graphic design we insist that the teacher possess direct and perhaps extensive professional experience. It is right to assume the teacher understands in practice the ways that design and commerce are products of each other and the manner in which each is constrained by the other. What we overlook is that experience, no matter how extensive, is always limited. Therefore experience cannot teach us everything if we are to depend on teachers. Teaching is not simply the job of instructing a group but is instead about the activity of learning and based in an ethos innate to the teacher. The teacher experiences a keen awareness upon first entering the classroom that she both possess a great quantity of hard-won experience but also lacks a great deal of what she needs to know to teach design. It is simply too broad a field. But when a design teacher enters, she enters as a teacher. By walking into a classroom she embodies the future hopes of her students and all the shortcomings of her predcessors.

Although limited by her experience the teacher is tasked with enlarging the student’s knowledge base beyond what can be learned in either the classroom or the marketplace. If successful the student will be educated in how to educate himself. In the area of sustainability this is crucial. The design student who learns to think through the act of designing and who is exposed to concepts related to sustainability is well-positioned to tackle problems and solutions for sustainability in ways inaccessible to those trained in other fields. The ways in which we might teach sustainability should be grounded in a pedagogy that is personal, and therefore sustainable at a scale that is human. Human scale begins in the space between two people, where the personal space of the two is delicately breached, in this case between one student and one teacher. Following that a set of criteria for modeling learning should incorporate elements of the non-institutional learning, professional practice or direct application and play.

Non-proscriptive learning produces outcomes with varying degrees of specificity. The design teacher must be grounded in a discipline and research area to learn with confidence along with the students. The teacher’s own research guides the methodology wherein the teacher teaches to her strength even if it reveals her weaknesses. This creates a space wherein experimentation and often, failure is also allowed. Success is achieved through one’s ability to continue a line of thinking beyond conventional outcome. The relationship between teacher and student is one in which trust is the basis rather than power. This strategy undermines the teacher’s inclination to teach to dogma. If we reject design pedagogy as ideology we will likely find new ways to teach. A continual re-questioning of the goals of the learning process must be applied if the design student is allowed to work in defining the question of what is to be designed. This method teaches the student to find connections rather than follow a path of study, to design an education.

A human-centered approach should focus on raising expectations. Raising the teacher’s expectations of the student raises the student’s expectations of themselves. Teaching at a human scale involves, by necessity, collaboration among students and teachers. The inclusion of other players from outside the student’s comfort area, for example hard and soft sciences adds interdisciplinarity to the dynamic, an essential aspect of sustainable design thinking. A dynamic defined not simply by collaboration with others but as a breaking down of disciplines as defined by market-driven career paths. Small groups working in parallel rather than strictly in competition allows groups to cross-pollinate ideas and techniques. Small groups can learn to manage themselves so as to avoid having to dictate too much to, too many.

Many of these ideas relate directly to ideas and practices that emerged through the appropriate technology movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. In this milieu, decentralized technology was rejected in favor of localized, vernacular and small-scale approaches to design. This design movement focused on tool-making, invention and hands-on learning by non-experts. It possessed little in the way of aesthetic sensibility except in its lack of polish. It did have parallels in the alternative and underground press movement and in the revival of graphic forms from the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements, along with vernacular imagery from the Victorian era, as well as the revival of craft traditions.

Archaic or even recently sidelined technologies such as the letterpress, a quickly diminishing form in the 60s among printers, were revitalized during this time. Poster workshops associated with civil rights and other social justice movements along with alternative papers and magazines facilitated a more pluralistic society that emerged through old technologies, to embrace difference as an aesthetic.

Design as antidote to technocracy and expert knowledge funneled progressive impulses toward what today is referred to as DIY. Both then and now there exists a desire through DIY practices to simplify and reestablish the designer’s relationship to both authentic or original work as well as to technology. It is in the complicated and ambivalent relationship of design to nature as expressed in preserving archaic or authentic ways of making that design is able to constantly resuscitate its relationship to technology and consumption. Today DIY production and consumption is being transformed not as transgressive to nature but in close association with small-scale, local and creative forms of commodity design. The boutique quality of these forms is rapidly influencing designers and non-designers alike in an effort to assert personal identity in the face of corporate consolidation of cultural production.

If we are to teach human-centered design to those who would seek to practice it we should make the design student first aware of their relationship to designed images and artifacts and then nurture them in defining and giving voice to who they are in service to their primary identity in a life that feels eclipsed by institutional identities. If per chance the design student leaves off practicing design past graduation they will have learned to form their self in relationship, not to brands, but as a product of their own making through design. This mode of individual agency is in keeping with many of the goals of a wide range of the countercultural sub-groups of the 1960s. The movement’s broader goals of collective action across a wide spectrum of smaller groups anchored by inspired individuals and leaders who lived their lives as activists and often as artists and designers points the way for establishing a human-centered design education.

This history points to a method of teaching where individuals reach their maximum performance level as students prepared to design as well for themselves as for others. This personal approach to design teaching is quite appealing to the pragmatic student personalities that populate design programs wherein individual creativity is seen largely as an apolitical act. In the present political milieu the conceit that the political has outgrown a complicated contemporary context is appealing to young people. They believe that politics rather than consumption is spiritually and materially polluting. This marks the end of the age during which baby boomers saw themselves as antithetical to commodity culture. The current emphasis on DIY cultural production lovingly nurtures an ironic and eclectic expression of consumption in a way that reframes personal identity as transcending sacred cows of the 1960s and 1970s such as race, feminism and sexuality.

The Politics of Design

Common among the current generation of design students in the U.S. is a general belief that the middle has moved to the right politically and therefore the content of reactionary right-wing politics positioned against environmentalism is in itself not political but drained like so many wetlands of its political content, its “ism”. The position of many students is that to be an environmental activist is to simply oppose the status quo in ways that are outdated and perhaps destructive.

Design education can overcome the ambivalent sometimes, cynical disposition of today’s student by employing them in directing and defining their own creative energy towards pragmatic and scalable design learning. Through projects that engage with real problems and that have a one-to-one relationship to their own role as consumer and designer they can quickly come to terms with their impacts as both and their real abilities as designers to make a difference. Students may remain ambivalent about the politics of sustainability but their pessimism can be dislodged in favor of design as a solution to nearly any problem and as a means to questioning dominant societal narratives. Design’s broad application across a wide variety of localized issues reinforces both its personal, small-scale and its non-specific power against its supposedly large-scale, specialized, technological imperatives.

Material and Materialism

Design’s power as a way of thinking in action rather than a purely theoretical exercise for the classroom is manifested when students work in small groups and on small projects with large potential to effect production and consumption. The insight gained from this experience is that individuals working in small groups over time can produce exponentially positive change. What is especially useful to the student is an intimate engagement with processes and materials. The material nature of design in dealing with production and consumption can lead to a serious and specific interrogation of not only the practical concerns surrounding how to pick and choose the best materials but also with materialism itself. Through careful consideration of what materials are best suited for each application, the student comes to understand how effiency and reduction of waste are vital to what they do. This ongoing research process begins then to insinuate itself into the ways students act to change their own consumption. The result is the application of creativity to everyday choices and a concrete way to consider what we buy and use and waste everyday.

A serious and specific discussion of materialism as a lifestyle based on systematic obsolescence has been needed in design education since at least the 1950s. An education in design applications for all students could very well provide that solution. Because design is not just about objects but also about ideas we can make sense not only of how we make things but why through a well-rounded education that includes design.

Design is also a way to demonstrate that we are neither separate from nature or from technology. The ground we occupy as designers is inherently ambiguous and therefore changing. It is furthermore not pure nor is it sullied by its interaction with so many of the problems of contemporary life. Pure design or as it has been called ‘good design’ needs not to be defined, rather it should be diagnosed, diagnosed as a problem that must first be overcome before we can actually set about securing solutions to the real problems we face. There is no ideologically pure design. It cannot be reduced to pill form. By seeking to create and then hold to a pure design we give up our strength as designers and make ourselves irrelevant by ceding that strength to others.

Today we are graduating more and more designers but what are we training them to do? What are we tasking them with? We have an overabundance of people trained as designers but their talent and training often goes unused. The issue of what resources we have or do not have is central to the debate on sustainability. What we value we use well; what we don’t we tend to waste. If we lack resources or access to them we will form or reinforce a world view based on scarcity, on the absence of resources, and one in which we are likely to seek to preserve what is left. But how do we use what we do have, make more and better use of it and continue to generate new resources? In the case of design education we may be wasting our time and students in pursuit of solving for problems of the past rather than the future.

The resources we possess in design education are principally time, students and teachers, but perhaps it is in truth the intellectual pursuits and process of discovery that generate the experience of a design education. When a feeling of scarcity pervades in the places we teach it can lead to us overlooking what is truly vital to learning. It is not simply a matter of making do with what little we have but of using it well and not overlooking what we possess in terms of students and teachers. These are our two most important resources. The third and at heart the principal resource in all of this is in fact creativity itself.

Energy

When speaking of production and consumption we often speak of energy, its generation and how much is expended and wasted. If we consider creativity in design as our principal energy source not dependent on a limited supply we will draw first from that source when in need of innovative ideas and processes. Nurturing creativity in students would therefore be the chief means of energy production in design and one which, if valued, will be less likely to be wasted. We then avoid morally bankrupt methods of teaching that treat the student as a consumable— a resource to be used and then discarded with each new batch.

A centralized, hierarchical, specialized, formalist and sillowed system of teaching and thinking have led to an impasse in the teaching of design. This impasse can be broken by re-centering design education upon collaborative learning amongst teachers and students on interdisciplinary projects that tackle the diversity of issues associated with sustainability. What if anything should we be doing as university teachers and students but creating new ways to research how design can effect positive change? What else should we be utilizing our classrooms as but incubators of critical explorations of design? Simply preparing the design student to enter a field ready to exchange his creative labors for a paycheck does not reflect a university or college‘s mission.

Teachers and students as our two primary resources in making positive change can be defined as capital. In Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken describes four types of capital necessary to an economy. He defines the first type, human capital, as capital in the form of intelligence, culture and organization (he then goes on to describe financial, manufactured and natural capital). Certainly design and education both fall under this definition of human capital. None of the latter types of capital can exist without the first type being supported and maintained.

By describing what designers do as capital helps us understand the value of both design and an education in design. If we can work within this sphere to both maintain design practice and its positive effects on natural capital beyond simply containing present impacts then we can begin to define what sustainable design is. As Hawken describes, industrialization devalued and marginalized natural and human capital in favor of output. If we are to teach design sustainably we will need to work holistically to reemphasize the value of cultural production. It seems logical to conclude that the same forces that are currently depleting natural capital are depleting human capital.

An example of this lies in the fallow fields of our landfills and is described by Heather Graham in her book Gone Tomorrow. Graham notes that by focusing on problems we overlook available resources. She relates the narrow focus on waste disposal to a trust in technology and experts and how we lost sight of what is most important, our abundance of natural resources. In the present we have lost sight of our human capital as it relates to teaching design in favor of digital technologies that seem to expand our vision but in fact narrow our field. By mistaking digital proficiency for design aptitude we enter into a whole series of mistaken assumptions about what it means to both teach and learn design. In untangling this we may be able to come to terms with our own complicity in what Graham describes as “creative destruction”, in the case of graphic design facilitating the over production and consumption of designed images and artifacts built into systems of waste that design also works to abstract.

We need to deliberately broaden our perspective to understand our specific role in creating sustainable design. We have reached the threshold of our own self-imposed ignorance and its significant impact on our continued dependence on consuming more and more. Having already mistaken our role as consumers for that of citizens in the developed world, it’s no wonder we are confounded by what we should now do as designers. The crucial subject of waste staring graphic designers in the face is that of e-waste, the detritus of a mediated life essential to the designer in the use of handheld digital devices and desktop technologies of digital reproduction. This is the very definition of what E.F. Schumacher described as the solution to a problem that creates ten more. Today each new technology seems to increase the amount of new waste ten-fold in the form of toxic waste from heavy metals, energy depletion and lost labor. This also seems to describe what Schumacher saw as an industrial system of cannibalizing the very foundations upon which the system rests. The devices that seem to create and reproduce a sense of connectiveness may in fact detach us further from humanity and nature. The principal question is, are the experiences created actually synthetic and therefore similar to what Schumacher described as the magical quality of synthetic materials able to resist degradation by natural forces? If so are they further alienating us from nature and therefore increasing our sense that we are able to conquer natural forces and maintain a lifestyle of privilege through the consumption of artificial experiences? At the very least attempting to buoy one problem through the creation of others leads to cultural and material imbalances that if not alleviated will cause the accumulation of more and more toxicity in all systems both natural and cultural. Our dependence on fossil fuels has certainly placed us in direct opposition to our own best interests. Our current dependence on digital means of communication and production of knowledge has, as Schumacher described, led to the accumulation of materials that are both equally dangerous and unpredictable.

Schumacher’s view was that our position of privilege requires us to consider what good we can create to counter the excesses of our lifestyle, that it would be better to conserve our limited resources in order to produce new and unlimited means of production. As designers well-placed to influence production and consumption as well as the users of a variety of digital technologies that produce a significant degree of e-waste, we should use our position to both reduce waste and to educate others about their use of these technologies. As designers we should not focus too exclusively on graphic design as a discrete skill-set applicable to a limited set of solutions but as significant in its ability to influence how and what we produce and consume, not as Schumacher described, “partial knowledge” which he forecast correctly as being destructive when applied on a large scale. We should seek to understand the broad application of our particular skills to curtail waste on our part. As Schumacher described, when a system is based on greed it cannot also exist to meet the needs of humanity but results in failure even when applied to highly successful endeavors. Is there a means to channel creative energy through the current culture of connectivity in which we live that though dispersed through a large number of individuals is also highly centralized and therefore too large to manage its own waste?

The Synthetic

The question of whether we as designers are contributing to a synthetic culture equal in its destructive capabilities as any forged in the hearth of the industrial revolution while also being seamlessly beautiful in its aesthetic should give us pause. If this process is being abstracted to such a degree that its fallout is out of sight are we being deceived into believing that this system is some how different from previous industries that produced mind numbing, stultifying and toxic-ridden labors? When we assume that graphic design deals only with the surface of the page, package or screen we fall into the trap of believing that only the surface matters. Furthermore we accept at face value the logic of a system that subsumes most facts in service of a few and at the expense of many.

When design becomes a function of simply polishing a surface, it undermines our creative potential. We cannot continue to operate as if only we matter and stop considering the skills that we offer in the form of services, at only their face value, as a commodity that exists in relation to all other things as equal to all things on the open market. To continue in this we would have to ignore the costs to us as well as others and ultimately undermine the very qualities that make we ourselves creative. What we do for money is not separate from what we do to enrich ourselves creatively and what then we can offer to others not just as a commodity but also as a means of enrichment in terms of social value.

Though we often deal in abstractions and have a facility for making meaning, people who live downstream of the systems of design in which we operate are not themselves abstractions. We cannot in reality put a price our own creative potential, much less on the health of others and the planet. In order to operate sustainably as designers we should not only seek our own creative growth but how it affects the growth of others. Growth is so very often used to describe economic growth alone rather than how it originated as expressing organic processes. As designers we can seek to grow professionally but we will not truly succeed if we fail to recognize the ways in which we exist in relationship to humanity and the natural world. What stymies us is both a certain degree of design specialization and a myopic view of the process of design. Even though we are generally trained to make connections and create contexts for understanding material things in visual form we are enamored of our mediated work-flow and feel we might be immune to its excesses. This is not the case, and the notion reeks of hubris and indifference. We need a greater depth of field concerning digital technologies in the same manner as any previous generation of designers to print design, which required not only effective design skill but also empathy.

Because the technologies we employ hide both production and consumption beneath a shimmering surface we can remain forever entranced by what floats above the dingy and dangerous apparatus of production and the rickety scaffolding of consumption. The speed of both production and consumption of digital imagery suggests both an infinite supply but also hides labor and diminishes the value of it all in one click. Though these technologies seem to reduce labor, they only increase the labors of others. This work is not the type that we seek, which is creative and fulfilling but ultimately toxic and debilitating ,mentally, physically and spiritually.

The digital spaces in which we work only appear neutral and benign. Good design is design that offers proofs that model best practices. Design at its best is an an antidote to the simplistic worldview where all is reduced to the economics of production and consumption, a view that eliminates both humans and humanity. The designer can employ what Schumacher termed, “technology with a human face,” which asserts that people are not meta-economic. Technologies that degrade environments also degrade people and are violent in nature to both. Inhuman technologies are not as some might assume by this to be simply metaphorically dehumanizing to an elect class of people whose sensibilities are at risk of being injured. We are perhaps less than halfway through the information age or digital revolution and have the capacity to reverse the flow and secure and sustain ourselves. Once again creativity is our most vital resource and it is infinite.