Liberal Arts and Graphic Design: Six Cautionary Questions
Gunnar Swanson
Twelve years ago I wrote an article with the unassuming title “Graphic Design Education as a Liberal Art: Design and Knowledge in the University and the ‘Real World.’”1 I think it has been quoted more than anything else I’ve written combined. It also may be my most broadly misinterpreted writing. For many who have cited the article, it has been a source of pithy quotes about design, but for most it’s been a source to footnote for the idea that graphic design students should get more of a general education.
I don’t disagree with the promotion of liberal education for graphic designers. Liberally educated people are likely to be more interesting people; interesting people are more likely to be interesting designers. Broad education is good for people and it’s good for society. The only problem is that my article clearly and specifically stated that it wasn’t about increasing liberal arts in graphic design education. It wasn’t really even primarily about graphic design (although it was tangentially so). It was about a crisis in liberal education. It did not propose augmenting vocational training; it proposed ignoring it. (I share some responsibility for the confusion. The article appeared in Design Issues and in several graphic design writing anthologies, so I shouldn’t blame people for assuming that it was about graphic design education.)
Whether we view the relationship of graphic design training and liberal education with gleeful anticipation or with dismay, there are some questions we need to consider.
Q #1: Who Is Qualified and How Do We Know That?
I still think it’s an interesting idea: reinventing liberal arts education using a subject like graphic design or multimedia as the nexus of broad knowledge. I’d love to work on such a project (although I doubt it’s in the interest of any graphic design program to abandon professional education). I do have some worries about the implementation. The first is, who would teach in such a program? Why would they be qualified and how could we tell? It’s not an insurmountable problem for the first small program, but it is a serious impediment to scaling design-as-liberal-art up to a size where it could have a real impact.
What many of us see as a crisis in liberal education has a lack of integration at its heart. Liberal arts used to be defined as everything an educated man (yes, they were pretty much all men back then) should know. Now there’s almost nothing common to the knowledge base of all educated people. There’s not even a lot of common ground within a given academic discipline. The liberal arts have become like an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant menu—take two from column A and one from column B. Nothing can restore universality—there’s just too much to know—but a sense of coherence is important. Overspecialization seems to be the enemy of coherence.
But academic specialization has some distinct advantages. It promotes the goal of increasing knowledge and it helps ensure excellence. The concentration of knowledge raises standards in an era when complete general knowledge is an impossibility. As David Baker says about graphic design specializations, “There is something to be said for actual expertise.”
What happens when graphic design faculty wander too far from teaching graphic design? These academic squatters can dilute graphic design education and provide substandard teaching of other subjects. By encouraging students to define their projects by personal interests, often far outside graphic design, a graphic design degree no longer certifies actual expertise. It needs to be clear exactly what it does mean. Academic squatting can undermine curriculum by substituting, say, political science in what was scheduled to be graphic design class. It is an ironic twist that designers, the very people who are supposed to understand systems, often undo curricular systems in this manner.
Q #2: Who Understands and Speaks for Design?
Higher education is usually the purview of people with terminal degrees in the subject they are teaching. The nearly universal currency of specialized knowledge in academia is the PhD degree. Practice-based fields like art, law, and medicine have their own degrees. Design PhDs are becoming more common but are relatively rare and often based on research that is divorced from design practice. If graphic design education drifts away from specialization and a concentration on practice, then the imperative that design programs be run by designers with MFA degrees will not be as strong as it is now. This could encourage the academic bigotry that a PhD degree outranks other terminal degrees among university officials and that, in turn, could encourage academic carpetbaggers—PhDs from fields tangential to design and PhDs in design research who have no design experience—displacing designers in design programs.
Q #3: What Is The Price of Coherence and Relevance?
How, then, can we promote liberal education for graphic designers in a manner that is more integrative and coherent? One solution is “parallel content,” where liberal arts classes are timed to relate to the subject matter of a design curriculum.2 I was once on an advisory board for the animation program at East Los Angeles College, where they had a physics course specifically for animators. I’m sure the science department considered that strictly Newtonian world to be inadequate physics, but the class nonetheless seemed to be a success for everyone involved.
Physics for animators is a good example of the pitfall of such curricular customizing: While the approach can make the point that there is a world of knowledge out there that applies to design, both the subjects and the nature of general education are necessarily distorted by this approach. One admirable goal is to breed a generation of designers with a general craving for education and a broad perspective. It should be noted that a model of education as vocational support and the covert message that learning is worthwhile only when it serves design directly could undermine that goal.
Q #4: Who Will Do the Work?
Customizing classes for design students can be a substantial amount of work and requires insights into design to make it work well. The practicality of the parallel content approach depends on context. An art school that provides all general education classes as an auxiliary to a design curriculum can, perhaps, specify the content of social science classes to correspond to the students’ current design issues. When humanities faculties are hired as support staff for the arts, they are likely to be willing to tailor their subjects to design students’ needs.
Many general subject areas can be approached strictly from a design point of view, and a large population of students required to take a course can make such tailoring attractive to another department. In many cases, however, humanities faculty are no more likely to take the time to rework their specialties to conform to the desires of design students than designers are likely to jump at the chance of developing classes specifically for those with only a passing interest in design.
Anyone who has dealt with people from another discipline attempting to make their work “relevant” will recognize one of the pitfalls of this approach. It is too easy for an outsider to drift into specialized subjects and do damage to standards by advocating naïve approaches. “Parallel content” requires a high degree of cooperation and significant work on both sides of the parallel.
Q #5: Are Designers Willing to Leave Their Specialization?
In the end, are designers willing to do the work that they’d like others to do? Instead of consumers of liberal education, could designers be providers? What does graphic design have to offer to nondesigners? What is it that designers know that others don’t?
A general awareness of design and design in culture is a fairly weak answer to those questions, and designers may tend to overrate their abilities in that arena anyway. Design as culture and cultural analysis may be better left to anthropologists and others with analytical frameworks that make them better equipped to deal with culture broadly.
By the nature of design practice, designers are ahead of many fields in dealing with complexity. Designers’ iterative work patterns are well suited to dealing with uncertainty. Several years ago I was involved in a campus navigation system project that included computer science, business MIS, marketing, and graphic design students. Most of the students seemed to want to solve the problem during the first class, divide up the tasks, and reappear late in the semester to put it all together. Only the graphic designers were used to working in a manner where this week’s work led to next week’s discovery, which, in turn, led to throwing away last week’s work. Although hardly unique to graphic design, experience in working concretely toward discovery for large, under-defined tasks is needed throughout a range of fields.
Finally, systemic thinking—an understanding that, as John Muir put it, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is bound fast, by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe”—is a hallmark of a design perspective. Although ecology is now an important part of biology, the discipline was slow to accept the approach of looking at organisms’ common habitat and relationships. Many other areas of academia could benefit from the ecological understanding that comes with design practice.
Q #6: Can Design Start Small?
It’s clear that graphic design can make a real contribution to general education, but maybe before design declares itself to be the nexus, it should show itself to be one important part of liberal education.
No matter how graphic design programs resolve the question of the role of liberal education, two things are clear to me. The first is that the models of graphic design education as narrow craft training or as applied fine art are insufficient for the changing role of design. Increasing competition from software-savvy untrained designers is likely to continue eroding graphic design as limited object making. Whether liberally educated or vocationally broadened, graphic design must reach outside itself.
The second is that graphic design programs at universities will have to meet the same challenges as other subjects. For many years graphic design programs have expanded as other visual arts areas (and many traditional liberal arts subjects) have become less popular. Traditional graphic design programs are already finding themselves left behind by “computer graphics” and multimedia at some schools. Counting on recognition and program protection based on ever-increasing student numbers is not a viable long-term plan. Unless graphic design is visibly moving forward or engaging the university in some vital manner, then it will be vulnerable in the ever-changing budgetary landscape of higher education.
Notes
1. Design Issues, MIT Press, X, no. 1 (Spring 1994); reprinted: The Education of a Graphic Designer, ed. Steven Heller, (New York: Allworth Press, 1998); reprinted: Looking Closer 2: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, ed. Bierut, Drenttel, Heller, & Holland (New York: Allworth Press, 1997).
2. See Mark Salmon and Glenn Gritzer, “Parallel Content: Social Sciences and the Design Curriculum,” Design Issues (Fall 1992).