What Is “Professional” about Professional Education?
Meredith Davis
In the 1970s, during the tail end of modernism’s reign in graphic design, most of us believed ourselves well prepared for long careers in professional practice. Our later moves toward a form not bound by rules in the early 1980s seemed enormous in their implications, but also entirely within our domain of expertise and the traditional knowledge base of graphic design. Since that time, however, the earth has shifted on its axis several times, with the source of each change for design residing largely outside the field. The introduction of the Macintosh computer and the rapid growth of technology, extreme highs and lows in the economy, consumer activism, increased public access to the means of production and dissemination, and concern for the environment have rewritten the value system of design and how it is perceived by others. The lessons in these shifts have less to do with what we deem to be our traditional “professional expertise” and more with the general notions that context is everything, that very little professional knowledge truly meets the threshold of “enduring understanding,” and that knowledge is relational and dynamic.
Graphic design educators have also adjusted to these changes. But because the adoption of curricula in academic institutions is both a democratic and bureaucratic process, our responses often come well after the need for them is apparent in practice. At the same time, we are in the “future” business; we make informed assumptions that our curriculum and instruction today will serve our students and their constituents well for the next fifty years and that, in doing so, we play some role in defining the future of our field. I believe that if we think of our responsibility as some positive, future consequence, made possible through both our teaching and our faculty research, we make different decisions about how we conduct the business of learning than if we see ourselves only as serving the current definition of professional practice.
I’m not talking about some highly general, warm-and-fuzzy ambition to make a better world (although that would be nice, too), but about consciously anticipating change in the profession of design and taking responsibility for the content and methods of that transformation. To gain some control over a future agenda, we must reconsider what it means to be a “professional” and what we define as “professional education.” In addressing this issue, I’d like first to draw a distinction between a “discipline” and a “profession.” A discipline is a branch of learning; it represents a body of knowledge and accepted modes of inquiry, as well as historical and critical perspectives on that particular subject. For example, chemistry and anthropology are disciplines.
A profession, on the other hand, is an occupation that involves the application of knowledge and training in a discipline. Being a chemist or an anthropologist is a profession. There is a discrete body of knowledge utilized, but we can distinguish such knowledge from that of the discipline itself. For example, the chemist knows how to structure an experiment and control some things while others are variable. An anthropologist knows that certain practices of researchers’ immersion in a culture can influence how the people being studied behave. These concepts are not knowledge about chemical elements and their behavior or about humans and their social interactions; instead, they are about the practices through which scientific and anthropological understanding are applied in the work of the profession.
Professions share some things in common: a documented history; a concern for the development of methods; a code of ethics and standards of fair practice; publication of substantive literature on the body of knowledge in the discipline, including theoretical and critical discourse; and components of practice devoted exclusively to research and the development of new knowledge. Graphic design arose from the “trades” of printing and typesetting, and, until recently, its practitioners were educated in working apprenticeships or vocational programs focused almost entirely on the technical and formal issues necessary to bringing image and text to print. Encouraged by the information age and the growth of the knowledge economy, however, the field has developed new aspects and behaviors that more fully express its more recent status as a profession.
The role of colleges and universities now engaged in professional education is to instruct students in both the discipline and the profession of graphic design. The underlying premise of professional programs is that a deep understanding of the discipline is an essential prerequisite to its application in a professional context. The contract between the institution and the undergraduate student is that the disciplinary knowledge imparted will be relevant in some respect, not only immediately upon graduation, but for the career lifetime of the individual. The contract between the institution and the profession is that this knowledge base results from an informed guess about what will serve the profession well into the future. This is not to say that the discipline or profession won’t change in unpredictable ways, or that some theories or concepts won’t lose their status in relation to others over time, but that the requisite knowledge and skill set will allow the individual to evolve with the field and its place in society. For this reason, a curriculum is not a job description.
Healthy professions transform themselves over time; they respond to changes in the social, technological, and economic context as well as to the infusion of new knowledge, modes of inquiry, and critical perspectives. History also shows that new disciplines and professions emerge to meet new conditions, often exhibiting simultaneously the demand for interdisciplinary degrees and specialization. In the evolution of a traditional field, we often see new practices arise. Initially, there are no titles for or consensus about the scope of work. But, it is clear that they deploy distinctly different knowledge and professional behaviors than the parent field. In graphic design, for example, the emergence of strategic design and interaction design demanded different skills and knowledge than the print-based, form-making activity of the past. For this reason, all professions benefit from their members being well educated in areas not currently defined as exclusive to the profession. Study in college subjects that are more frequently defined as part of a “general education” are not merely in support of the well-rounded individual, therefore, but essential to the future evolution of the individual’s chosen field.
Defining the “First Professional Degree”
Several years ago, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD, the accrediting body for college programs in art and design) agreed that the bachelor of fine arts with a fully articulated major in graphic design was the “first professional degree.” As part of that agreement, the organizations defined “essential competencies” as learning outcomes that should result from study in these programs and have published briefing papers that expand discussion of conditions surrounding professional programs (on faculty qualifications, technology thresholds, degree programs, and the role of general education—all available on the organizational Web sites).
Since that time there has been considerable debate as to the status of preprofessional degrees (the terminology referring to associate’s degrees and bachelors of arts, science, and fine arts with concentrations of less than 25 percent of the total coursework in graphic design). The position of AIGA and NASAD is that graduates of preprofessional programs generally require additional study to qualify for significant professional careers in design. The frequent arguments from faculty teaching in preprofessional degree programs, however, is that graduates of their programs gain employment in the field (this is usually followed by an anecdote about a recent graduate who has attained high-profile employment) and that the graduates have addressed the professional competencies and are simply lacking the unrelated general education coursework surrounding studio instruction in graphic design.
I would argue that what distinguishes a professional graphic design education from a preprofessional experience is not the one-to-one match between curriculum and the current skill set necessary for entry-level practice, but the essential competencies that enable design practitioners to be predictive and responsible for transforming the field across their professional careers. It is possible, for example, to meet most day-to-day demands of a professional office without deep knowledge of design history or how new technologies destabilize traditional theories of mass communication. But without such disciplinary knowledge, it is far less likely that the young designer will anticipate and respond appropriately to the rapidly shifting context for design. If the changing task of the designer is viewed simply as transferring traditional skills to new problems—a recycling of form and technique—the relevance of the field in the future is in question.
To describe the dimensions of the contemporary design task, I refer to the message cycle diagram below.
In this model, visual communication is described as consisting of message creation, reproduction, circulation, reception by individuals, and assimilation of message content by culture (which, in turn, defines the context for the creation and interpretation of future messages). Preprofessional degree programs focus design coursework almost entirely on the first two steps of this cycle: message creation and reproduction. The limited number of credits devoted to design study makes it less likely that issues of message circulation (what meaning messages gain or lose through their distribution), reception (how the individual perceives and processes information), and assimilation (the future meanings that result from message ideas being adopted by the culture) will be addressed in any way other than through the most general faculty description of assignments. It is with respect to these later stages of the message cycle that issues such as design history, communication theory, understanding of systems, and the explicit connections made between design and general education coursework become distinguishing aspects of the professional curriculum. The assumption is that designers with this disciplinary knowledge will create messages differently than those without it.
Making Professional Use of General Education
AIGA and NASAD discuss the relationship between general and professional education in their briefing paper, “General Education and Professional Programs in Graphic Design.” The paper encourages integrated relationships between the professional and general education components of curriculum, in contrast to relationships of proximity in which the nondesign coursework is seen as ancillary to design study.
Under proximity relationships, nondesign content may enter the design curriculum as the subject matter of project texts or images. For example, an assignment to design posters on scientific phenomena may require students to research theories of evolution or what makes a firefly glow. In authoring the text for the poster, students also exercise writing skills. In such projects, however, the information on evolution or fireflies is not integral to the students’ mastery of a design principle, nor is it fundamental to the development of a problem-solving strategy that is applicable to other contexts. Such content is rarely discussed as representative of a class of concepts that places particular cognitive demands on audiences or changes perceptions of the surrounding information context. Design faculty rarely checks content accuracy or debates the students’ selection of concepts from a larger body of information about the subject. The appropriateness of content has more to do with how well it allows us to design particular types of communicative forms (i.e., diagrams, explanations of invisible processes, relationships of descriptive text to image, etc.) rather than with general applicability to design theory or communication strategy focused on audiences and contexts. Alternative content—a battle from the Civil War, for example—could be equally effective in achieving the outcomes of the assignment.
In relationships of integration, however, design faculty refer to general education content specifically for its relevance to the outcomes of design and issues that transcend individual projects or formats. The role of design faculty is to make explicit how such information from other disciplines informs design strategy and decision-making. In these classrooms, form is frequently evaluated in terms of its responsiveness and consequences in larger systems that are not visual or spatial. For example, an assignment to design a Web site for an online bookstore requires students to think of the site as one part of the user’s much larger experiences with reading and buying books, as well as a component of more complex cultural and economic systems and the associated attitudes and behaviors. Under integrated relationships, content from outside the discipline of design informs students’ understanding of the nature of inquiry, audience or users, and contexts in which design solutions must perform.
Accomplishing the Outcomes of Professional Education
Therefore, among the defining characteristics of professional curricula, as opposed to preprofessional curricula, are the depth and scope of design content in both the discipline and the practice of graphic design; the relationship of such study to the broader academic context; and the deliberate intention to create individuals who can manage complexity and change at the highest levels of practice.
There is enormous variety in the professional curricula that achieve these outcomes, and I have long been reluctant to publish model curricula or even exemplar projects that depend almost entirely on particular faculty expertise, student qualifications, course position in a scaffolded curriculum, and institutional context. But excellent professional programs in design demonstrate that, regardless of their structure and the particular skills of faculty, it takes time to produce a professional and even longer to produce a leader in the field. I’m not talking about specific amounts of “seat time” in classrooms, numbers of credits assigned to particular areas of study, or even the age of the student, although these factors play some role in the development of essential competencies. There are reasonable limits to how quickly results can be achieved.
By time I mean the progressive and integrated experiences in design education that build insight; the maturation of thinking skills and elaboration of concepts that can only happen through significant, ongoing immersion in the work of a discipline. This is a scholarship of design that continues as designers progress from school through their practice career. The goal for design faculty in professional programs, therefore, should not be simply to monitor student completion of a menu of required professional courses or to verify inclusion of each professional project type in the student’s portfolio (annual report, poster, Web site, etc.). Instead, the mission of professional curricula should be to instill in students a disposition for scholarship in both the academic and professional settings; to use Carnegie Foundation President Ernest Boyer’s terms, the scholarship of discovery (mastery of new knowledge), the scholarship of integration (making connections), and the scholarship of application (service).
The Preprofessional Mission
If integral to the notion of being professionally educated are deep and enduring knowledge of the discipline, design understanding in relation to the work of other disciplines, and appropriate application of skills and knowledge in ever-shifting contexts of practice, what meaningfully different missions can pre-professional programs serve? Articulating these alternate missions is the challenge for design education and a necessary step in full disclosure to prospective students who must choose among a myriad of program types.
Liberal arts degrees involve, by definition, broad exposure to the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, with somewhat deeper experiences in a focused area of study. Many college art and design programs offer concurrently the bachelor of arts and bachelor of fine arts, often under the same disciplinary titles. The presence of the BA encourages students to transfer from nondesign majors without losing credits toward graduation and to experiment with an array of interests without committing wholly to a focused career path. A recurring pattern in institutions with both the preprofessional BA and professional BFA, however, is a “professional lite” approach to the BA curriculum; students enroll in the same beginning studio classes as their professionally focused BFA counterparts, but stop short of completing the fully scaffolded sequences of coursework.
The underlying assumption of this approach is that capping the preprofessional student’s design experience after completion of beginning level coursework provides a general understanding of design issues. This might be the case if the typical course sequence moved through content from general overarching concepts to specific applications. However, this is rarely the way in which studio-based coursework is designed. For example, the organizing principle of most sequences of typography courses places study of the letterform and word in early classes and defers the design of typographic systems for later, upper-level courses. As a result, students who take only one typography course miss even the most cursory exposure to entire dimensions of typographic design. The same is true for sequenced graphic design studios; beginning courses usually focus on organizing visual form and ignore the full range of issues implicit in design problems. In freestanding BA programs, curricula frequently integrate typographic issues into general graphic design offerings; students never engage in discussions or assignments that illustrate, for example, the explicit ways in which written language and typographic form structure the interpretive task. What is needed is the development of liberal arts curricula that distill the overarching concepts of the discipline and provide instruction that asks students to reflect on these concepts in deeper ways, recognizing that the opportunity to understand them through professional studio practice will be limited. This calls for a different course structure and pedagogy than we find in the typical professional program. Faculty must ask what truly constitutes a liberal education in design and invent challenging but realistic missions for preprofessional curricula. Further, curriculum and advising can direct students to combinations of design and general education coursework that address emerging and less traditional needs in design practice. For example, students with strong backgrounds in the social sciences and design offer interesting skill sets for the emerging research practices in the field; anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies provide much-needed perspectives on audiences and contexts for design.
Other equally viable missions could serve the profession well. The preprofessional design education in two-year programs represents an even more challenging landscape. Once the center of technical education, two-year programs now serve the dual purpose of educating students who will only spend two years in college and those who expect to transfer to a four-year professional program for their last two years of undergraduate study. The latter population usually finds that few design-based credits will transfer to meet the requirements of four-year curricula because course content has been compressed or abbreviated for vocational students who will not continue their studies beyond two years. For example, a typography class designed to be a two-year student’s only typographic experience is unlikely to mesh with the first class of a four-course professional sequence in typography. And because students’ first design experiences are formative in their development of a perspective toward the discipline, the technical and often software-driven orientation of many two-year programs leaves some transfer students behind their four-year peers in grasping the larger disciplinary concerns of design. As the economics of higher education encourage expanding populations of students to begin their baccalaureate studies in two-year institutions, the need is greater for four-year programs and community colleges to coordinate curriculum planning.
Unfortunately, the ongoing debate over what constitutes a professional education has been polarizing among graphic design faculty in institutions that represent different degree programs and curricular models. Motivated by misperceptions of curricular status and competitive program viability, such arguments confuse students, employers, and the clients for design, as well as other educators who sit in judgment of graphic design faculty performance and curriculum effectiveness within institutions. Few other professions demonstrate this level of equivocation over their essential natures; various schools offer different “flavors” of professional preparation in response to a variety of value systems and segments of practice, but rarely express their disagreements about minimum qualifications through radically different degrees and durations of academic study in the discipline. The time has come for the graphic design education community to refocus its attention on the challenges represented by a maturing and diversified profession and on the roles design can play in educating broadly an informed citizenry; to be accurate and responsible in describing what various curricular options can and do deliver. We need to design solutions for an evolving practice.