Legacy of a 1960s Credo
Kenneth Hiebert
It doesn’t matter as much
what’s behind us
or what’s ahead of us
but what’s inside us.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (paraphrased)
Credo
In 1966 I was asked to develop a new graphic design program for the Philadelphia College of Art to replace an advertising program. Outsiders had referred to PCA as a rendering school of design. Rendering in this sense is to make something show worthy, and, in fact, projects need to be rendered in order to be presented to others. But used the way it was, it was a pejorative. It suggested that the emphasis on show preempted the rigor of process, that simulation and decoration took precedence over structure and depth, that persuasion preceded information.
The following is the credo on which my colleagues and I based the program back then, and, by comparison, the ideas and ideals I would apply to education today.
Credo is a loaded word.
I don’t mean dogma; I do mean belief.
I don’t mean doctrine; I do mean principles.
I don’t mean gospel; I do mean philosophy.
At one extreme I mean a word that sounds similar: cradle. A cradle is a womblike, nurturing surrounding for growth, as in the “cradle of civilization.”
At the other extreme I mean a manifesto that defines change. For example: Before the programmatic change, students at the Philadelphia College of Art had been instructed in letterforms by rendering a plethora (thirty or more) of faces while they were projected for fixed amounts of time. Our revolutionary change was to make letter design a truly perceptual drawing process, accounting for all aspects of form in an original design based on structural fundamentals that had general applicability in design. This meant intensive, generative experience with letters replaced rendering the surface beauty of letters.
The credo was thus a set of guidelines, a statement of purpose. It had a base in my own experience in a studio school—the School of Design in Basel—augmented by my previous experience teaching at what was then called the Carnegie Institute of Technology. And it was formulated to morally confront society, in particular the world of visual communication.
Legacy
Legacy could mean an obsolete throwback or a vital, ongoing tradition, a groundwork of durable value. Since it could be either, it is honest to look at it from both sides.
The 1960s
I wanted to know if what we set out to do in the late 1960s had relevance today and how today’s situation challenges those earlier precepts. Or, to ask it another way, if I were to design a program from scratch today, what would be its basis?
Since the 1960s we’ve experienced radical change:
• The vernacular revolution
• The computer revolution
• The feminist and sexual revolutions
• Alternative medicine
• New wave and all the small isms
• The information explosion and infotainment
• The Internet and burgeoning subcultures
• Globalization and xenophobia
• Mixed media
• Project complexity
• Design of loose parts
• Postmodernism and deconstruction
• Commercial penetration into noncommercial content
• Speed of change
• Death of heroes
What I observe is that programs in design today tend again to be rendering schools, seeking effects that entice the viewer without the thought and work that go into original design. “Now that form is easy . . .” was the way one design teacher prefaced her remarks. This is, in a way, a natural, expected outcome of demands on education that are beyond the time resources we have.
But form is only easy, I find, if you abdicate your process to software and appropriation—if you look for ways to give someone a free ticket to material success without the underpinnings for success in a larger sense.
In 2001 I had another look at educational purpose and wrote a set of discernment skills that I posited against the generally negative real-world pressures we face. They’ve been updated somewhat in 2005.
Discernment skills are what I call basic skills: separating the valuable, relevant, fresh, and true from the worthless, trivial, stale, and false. (Any skill requires guidance and practice. It is not a matter of lip service or perfunctory action.)
I place them in five categories:
• Veracity
• Clarity
• Vital Form
• Self
• Service
Veracity
Each category consists of foundational attitudinal and work skills that transcend stylistic and technological shifts. Below, I’m showing them in confrontation with common real-world pressures. Then I will compare these discernment skills with the way we stated similar concerns in our late 1960s credo. You can judge if what I’m describing as a key skill set and the antecedent in the credo have validity for our current situation.
• Illumination versus Deception
• Substance versus Posturing (Expression versus Dazzling Effects)
• Allowing Reflection versus Evasive Speed
1966–68
• Recognition of situational exigencies today: thought and attitudes, issues, materials, functions, change
• Study of historical forms in terms of their material-spiritual necessities (nonimitative)
• Relating to historical matter in an essential way, finding the common and universal threads
• Developing a method of problem solving independent of preconceived notions
• Providing a sequence of projects, gauged in such a way that the knowledge gained in previous problems can be directly utilized
Clarity
• Semiotic Precision versus Mixed Signals
• Coherent Simultaneity versus Raging Illiteracy
• Breathing Room versus Congestion (Transparency versus Murkiness)
1966–68
• Preparing a student to recognize and work within valid limitations; at the same time to see through arbitrary or purely conventional ones
• Cultivation of the objectification of feeling: common perception, relevant gestalt, consensus gestalt
Vital Form
• Generative Process versus Stealing (or Appropriation)
• Invention versus Stylistic Overlay
• Craft Authority versus Craft Dependence (Perceptual Proof versus Stylistic Dependence)
• Paradox versus Banality (Poetry versus superfluity; Positive-Negative
• Dynamic versus Simplistic Form)
• Abstraction versus Literalism (Structural Narrative Integration versus Narrative Safety)
1966–68
• Knowledge-by-experience of the language of form, color, and relationships; a command of the generic design means that we define as: point, line and plane, module, proportion, sets, rhythm, scale and dimensionality, texture, color, series, direction, motion, confrontation, symbol, metaphor, thought processes, reproduction processes
• Avoidance of premature style, effects, mannerisms, prejudices, fads, clichés.
• Generative, noneclectic formation of visual vocabulary
• Development of superior manual and technical skills as an integral part of the conceptual process
• Organic growth of a result
• Preservation of the reality of the material means
• Development of a student’s awareness and aesthetic sensitivity and appreciation
Self
• Connection to the Inner Self versus Outer Slickness (Passion and Ecstasy versus Cynicism and Jadedness; Overcoming Resistance versus Seeking Ease; Essentials Are Key versus Wants Dominate)
• Relatedness versus Alienation (Wholeness versus Fragmentation)
• Fairness toward Others versus Status Seeking
1966–68
• Encouraging self-confrontation: developing an individual point of view and independent judgment
• Tireless questioning, evaluating, revising, testing of alternatives
• Internalizing the design process through extensive experimentation that allows for failure (process above result)
• Developing a capability in the student to isolate and define a problem for oneself and a personal commitment to and philosophy about one’s problem-solving activity
• Providing an educational environment, which will induce students to work on the highest possible level qualitatively and allow all to progress according to their own capacities
Service
• Accountability versus Exploitation (User Advocacy versus Cavalier Superiority)
• Long-term Benefit versus Opportunism
• Ecology and Resourcefulness versus Excess
1966–68
• Cultivating discernment concerning moral-ethical implications of design (social responsibility)
• Preparing a student to face creatively the technological and use shifts throughout a lifetime and conversely, to avoid indulgence of momentary and exploitative fads and fashions
• Professional competence instead of professionalism
Summary
1966–68
To provide a climate and a controlled series of experience possibilities that will prepare the student to deal intelligently, sensitively, and inventively with the whole range of problems in visual communications through fidelity to intrinsic properties of forms and ideas and to self; to enable the student to interrelate with the serious worker in allied professions and the positive strivings of humans generally.
2005
A prime purpose of education in design is to cultivate the generative, creative spirit. The essential benefit to society is that it frees the student from the bonds of purely commercial interests, from the mass culture of the empty self, and from moribund tradition. The creative spirit both defines society and gives it direction. It neither condescends to insulting levels nor joins in empty hubris.
For the designer dedicated to the common good, the creative spirit yields results resting on qualities of accessibility in material and perception rather than the superficial slickness of style.
The genius of creativity is to begin with a very limited, modest circumstance and find in it an expression of surprising breadth and wider significance. Addressing the local and immediate in ways that are not prescriptive, dogmatic, or formalistic places the onus for success on learning—learning of long-term value—and thus on the quality of the teaching.
Education must be seen as a real world in which deeply nurtured discipline and sense of self are cultivated, a place to build essential honesty, authenticity, and concern for the human condition, where the skills to develop communications appropriate to content are fostered. This nurturing requires time and reflection, accorded now to lesser and lesser degrees because of a nervous desire to match external “real-world” demands.
In teaching the rhythmic interplay of experiences of the radically simple and the typically complex, both experiences must be kept vital and generative. While building blocks in design education might look outwardly similar, the learning processes and effective outcomes may be completely opposite, depending on the quality of the teaching.
Form construction might be seen as a “technicality” but it is so only if it is sought as an end in itself, rather than linked to meaning. Form-making is, finally, still the outcome and form quality is at issue. Distinctions have to be made between valid aspects of visual language universals and stylistic entropy ensuing from blind repetition of basics.