Who Are We Now and What Do We Believe In?
Elizabeth Resnick
Part 1: I Am a Child of My Times
I am a child of my times, having been profoundly influenced and shaped by the time period in which I have lived. Each of us, in our own individual way, are part of a much larger societal structure, although it is very human to think of ourselves as completely unique; but in reality, few of us are raised completely in a vacuum untouched by the course of history.
I am a baby boomer. “Baby boomer” is the descriptive term for Americans born between 1946 and 1964. After World War II ended, twelve million American servicemen and servicewomen returned to home to resume their lives as civilians. Some would be reunited with spouses and children, others to fiancées, boyfriends, or girlfriends. Many had met someone special during their service activities. These relationships, fueled by common traditional values that included common destiny for the country, ultimately led to marriage and family production, which secured the American way of life with its dreams of prosperity during this very hopeful time. During the next two decades, a post-war euphoria would create a new generation of almost seventy-six million boys and girls—one baby every eight seconds for eighteen years. The 1950s and early 1960s were years of exceptional economic growth fueled in great measure by the emergence of the baby-boom generation and its influence on American culture—the economy was stimulated by the growth of new markets designed to serve a child-centered nation. This circumstance was in stark contrast to how their parent’s generation experienced their youth during the Great Depression and World War II when there was food rationing, massive unemployment, and when every penny was counted. 1
Baby Boomers, the indulged children of a new emerging middle-class, came of age during 1950s and early 1960s when racial segregation was legal, interracial marriages were taboo, and blacks and other minorities were marginalized, living on the fringes of American society. Women, suffering the same fate as minorities, were victims of discrimination routinely stereotyped in the job market, and sharply limited in their opportunities for higher education.2 Angered by what they perceived as senseless injustices and unfair treatment to minorities, “boomers” rejected their parents’ conservative and consumer-driven lives by challenging current societal standards toward sex, drugs, music, politics, and the acquisition of wealth. They became social cause oriented by embracing multiculturalism and diversity, calling for equal rights for women, civil rights for racial minorities, and bringing attention to the practice of racial, gender, and age discrimination in the workplace. They actively protested the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the tyranny and injustice of a war where thousands of young American men were routinely and unfairly drafted into military service, many against their will.
Part 2: Growing Up in 1960s America
During this turbulent time, my family lived in Queens, a suburb of New York City. I was fifteen when I entered the High School of Art & Design in the fall of 1963. I studied Fashion Illustration and Advertising Design along with the full course load of academic subjects required to earn my high school diploma. The school’s dress code mandated that women wore dresses or skirts, silk stockings, and small-heeled shoes to school. Fashion dictated that we wore lots of heavy eye make-up and styled our hair into towering bouffant hairdos. Our transistor radios were tuned to rock ’n’ roll stations and Bob Dylan was performing consciousness-raising songs in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village. In early 1964, The Beatles arrived in New York bringing with them a wave of British contemporary fashion styles like mini-skirts, go-go boots, and hip-hugger pants and long, straight hairstyles. The 1960s were truly synonymous with new, exciting, radical, and subversive events, and I lived in the epicenter.
At eighteen, I was a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design, a very small art college located in Providence, Rhode Island. Here we dressed very informally—bell-bottom jeans and turtleneck t-shirts. Musically, it was the time of the Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Janis Joplin, Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby Stills and Nash, and The Beatles gone psychedelic. What should have been an idyllic existence for the young, talented student body was actually a time fraught with fear and anxiety. Young men—our boyfriends, brothers, cousins, and neighbors—were pursued relentlessly by their local draft boards to enlist or be drafted for military service. Too many of these young innocents, sent off to war, returned in caskets. Young women were exempt from military service because of their female sex, although numbers of brave young women did enlist in the military to serve their country in supporting roles as military administration or in the field as nurses.
As a stark contrast to this volatile political atmosphere, played out daily on the nightly televised news, my undergraduate years as a graphic design major focused on learning reductive modernist formal vocabularies ideally suited to the needs of corporate business or advertising environments. My parents had anticipated that I would return home after college to work as a creative in one of the many New York City advertising agencies. That plan was irreparably altered when on the verge of my college graduation, the national tragedy at Kent State University happened.
On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen marched onto the campus at Kent State University and fired their weapons into a crowd of unarmed students who were gathered to protest U.S. incursions into Cambodia as a military strategy of the Vietnam War. Thirteen students were shot—four students were killed, and nine survived. There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed down throughout the United States as four million students went on strike.3 Students, myself included, poured into printmaking studios and letterpress labs to produce a multitude of anti-war visual propaganda, closely mirroring the activity of the Atelier Populaire (Popular Workshop) during the Paris student riots of May 1968. At the RISD “workshops,” we created placards for an immediate protest march on the state capital building in Providence, and five days later we sent these same materials and more to Washington, DC, where over 100,000 youthful demonstrators converged to protest the shootings and the continuing war. Caught up in the vortex of this momentous event, I became aware, for the first time in my life, how my skills could be put to good use for purposes beyond the promoting or selling of commercial goods and services—a revelation toward a new way of thinking about design.
Part 3: Forming a Cogent Teaching Philosophy
I was 26 in 1974 when I joined the faculty at the Swain School of Design, a small college of art and design located in New Bedford, Massachusetts.4 On a faculty of ten, I was the only woman and the youngest, while many of my students were older, Vietnam War veterans returning to school using their government benefits, many from the traditional working-class Portuguese American community, a majority group in the city of New Bedford.
During this uncommonly challenging academic year, I realized the existing modernist pedagogical models seemed an odd fit for these students, given their experience with guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Southeast Asia. In the United States, most introductory graphic design courses (like my own experience at RISD in the late 1960s) were based on abstract formalist exercises that were passed down from early Bauhaus training and the later Basel projects developed by Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder, which were widely disseminated through their publications.5 “These (Basel) projects either deal with completely abstract form—point, line, and plane, for instance—or they remove imagery from context. . . . Divorcing design form from content or context is a lesson in passivity, implying that graphic form is something separate and unrelated to subjective values or even ideas,” Katherine McCoy posits in her influential essay “Countering The Tradition of the Apolitical Designer.” By employing the “paradigms of universal form, abstraction, self-referentialism, value-free design, rationality, and objectivity,” designers have been distanced from their own social and cultural communities. “The challenge to develop subject matter stimulates the design student to determine what matters on a personal level. We must help students to clarify their personal values and to give them the tools to recognize when it is appropriate to act on them.”6
In the process of gathering visual materials to explain the basic principles of design at work, I discovered that much of the strongest and most potent conceptual work being produced were PSAs—public service announcements facilitated by The Ad Council.7 Public service advertising is the use of commercial advertising techniques for non-commercial purposes, often sponsored by a company, corporation, or government agency. PSAs are designed to modify public attitudes by raising awareness about specific issues. The most common topics of PSAs tend toward health and safety issues such as the dangers of smoking, obesity, or drunk driving. In contrast to much of the commercial design and advertising work of this particular time period, these visual messages evoke a strong emotional response—type and image working in partnership to deliver the content of the message.
Two of the PSA campaigns that were very influential in the 1970s were “Pollution: Keep America Beautiful” and “A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Waste.” With the pressing issue of mounting roadside pollution, The Ad Council partnered with the initiative Keep America Beautiful to create a powerful visual image that dramatized how litter and other forms of pollution were hurting our environment, and suggesting that every individual has the responsibility to help protect it. The ad, which featured Native American actor Iron Eyes Cody, “The Crying Indian,” first aired on Earth Day in 1971. The campaign used the line, “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.”8 To see the ads and play the commercial go to http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=132
In 1972, the United Negro College Fund (funds contributed make it possible for the 43 UNCF member colleges and universities to keep tuitions low and the dream of an education within every student’s reach) partnered with the Ad Council to launch a public service advertising campaign encouraging Americans to support the fund. The campaign slogan, “A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Waste,” which continues to this day, has raised millions of dollars while becoming part of the American vernacular.9 To see the ads and play the commercial go to http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=38
Throughout the 1970s social discontent continued as racial strife intensified and the environmentalist movement began to take hold. There were oil shortages, first in 1973, then again in 1977, causing an economic recession in the United States created by oil embargoes by Arab countries in the Middle East, that had us all waiting in long gas lines for short supplies and shivering from cold in our houses. Given the economic, social, and political environment at this time, I made it my goal to create a classroom environment where students were learning basic design skills and principles within ethically principled contexts.
At the end of the academic year 1974/75 at the Swain School of Design, I resigned. The long commute from Boston to New Bedford and the sexist and condescending attitude I experienced from the older male faculty took its toll. Nevertheless, when I think back on this challenging and stressful year, I realize that it was the genesis of my teaching philosophy, based on the belief that the teaching of communication design cannot be divorced from the culture in which it serves. I wasn’t particularly surprised when I later found out my full-time faculty position was offered to a young male designer who studied at Basel.
Part 4: Encouraging Design Students to Find Their “Voice”
It is 2014 and I have worked in professional practice and as a graphic design educator at Massachusetts College of Art and Design for over forty years. At MassArt it is still my job to teach critical and strategic thinking, and formal visual language skills to undergraduate graphic design students. Yet still, the vast number of undergraduate assignments design educators write for their students are designed to meet corporate business needs, essentially devoid of any purpose beyond meeting industry expectations and the demands of a professional design practice. Our students do indeed need and expect to have these types of experiences in their undergraduate design training. But as their mentors, shouldn’t we be mindful that our students are also members of society, and as such, they need to know that their visual and critical thinking skills can be a powerful tool for social change for any number of issues they personally consider important to the well-being of the communities in which they live?
Providing our students with the opportunity to experience making a meaningful and positive contribution to society through graphic design empowers them to play an active role in improving the way they live, interact, and communicate with each other. As I was profoundly influenced and inspired by the times in which I came of age, I am ever hopeful that such experiences will have a profound and meaningful effect on our students today and in the future.
The main trouble with design schools seems to be that they teach too much design and not enough about the ecological, social, economic, and political environment in which design takes place.—Victor Papanak
Notes
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Boomer
2. Tom Keane “The Greatest Generation” in The Boston Globe Magazine, July 27, 2008
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
4. Swain began as the “Swain Free School” of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1881 through the provisions of the will of New Bedford philanthropist William W. Swain. In 1902, the trustees redefined the school mission as a School of Design, with the purpose of providing a more complete and thorough course of instruction in the fundamental principles of design. In the 1970s, there were only 100 students enrolled at any time, creating a very close-knit environment for both students and faculty. In 1988, the Swain School in New Bedford merged with Southeastern Massachusetts University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, which has since been renamed the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
5. Armin Hofmann. “Graphic Design Manual: Principles and Practice,” New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1965; Emil Ruder. “Typography: A Manual of Design,” tri-lingual publication (English, German and French), Switzerland: Arthur Niggli Ltd., 1967
6. Katherine McCoy. “Countering the Tradition of the Apolitical Designer” in “Looking Closer 2: Critical Writings on Graphic Design,” New York: Allworth Press, 1997
7. The Ad Council serves as a facilitating and clearinghouse for nationwide PSA campaigns. It produces, distributes, and promotes thousands of public service campaigns on behalf of nonprofit organizations and government agencies in areas such as improving the quality of life for children, preventative health, education, community well-being, environmental preservation, and strengthening families.
8. Created by Marstellar, Inc, this ad became one of the most memorable and successful campaigns in advertising history and was named one of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th Century by Ad Age Magazine.
9. The United Negro College Fund has had a profoundly positive impact on the lives of millions of minority students. The organization has helped more than 350,000 minority students graduate from college.