Experience Versus Education
Jeffrey Keedy
So, you want to be a successful graphic designer with big clients and lots of design awards? Well, why waste time and money in design school when you can easily gain credibility within the field by networking at design functions and entering design shows? Use the money that you would have blown on tuition for something useful like office space, entry fees, and computers. Then, all you have to do is hire a few young people straight out of design school who—thanks to a good education—are proficient in the latest technologies and up on the latest styles. Young designers don’t cost much because they are struggling to pay back student loans and buy new computers. And after they’ve been around long enough to qualify for a raise, you can get rid of them, because there are plenty more where they came from. After all, you are doing them a favor, you are giving them a “real” education.
Not long ago, all designers were self-taught or learned their craft as apprentices on the job. But today you would have to live under a rock to be unaware of contemporary design. Unlike designers of the past, today’s self-taughts are functioning in a professionalized field that has established a loose framework of options for practice, as well as a plethora of information covering all aspects of design—the numerous books, trade magazines, organizations, and conferences. However, because self-taughts usually do not feel indebted to anyone, they think what they are doing is new and “original”—ignorance is bliss. As “outsiders,” they feel no kinship or responsibility to other designers, leaving the rest of us with nothing but the privilege to admire their chutzpah.
Ironically, self-taught designers must establish themselves as “professional” to be competitive. This is accomplished by entering numerous design competitions and joining professional organizations—all the while reminding their peers in lectures and in magazines that they are, like commercial artists of the past, unencumbered by a formal education. But in our postmodern information age, what does it really mean to proclaim that one is self-taught? Should self-taught graphic designers be referred to as naïve or folk designers? For some, it is simply a means of removing themselves from a practice while simultaneously co-opting all of its advantages. So why is the design community so complicit in celebrating the outsider’s ability to exploit the rest of us?
Part of the answer may lie in the celebration of the self-taught as a particularly American phenomena. Although there are successful and celebrated self-taught designers around the world, only in America do they wear their lack of formal education like a badge of honor. There is nothing Americans like better than the self-made man—it speaks to our pioneer heritage, blazing a trail over the meek and inferior, and staking our claim to whatever we can take. Anyone familiar with our popular culture knows that Americans think there is something inherently honest in ignorance. We celebrate heroes that are kindhearted idiots (Forrest Gump), self-exploiting sluts (Madonna), tacky performers of bad sportsmanship (Dennis Rodman), and adolescent taste (Howard Stern). Conversely, there is something cold, calculating, and devious about the educated and intellectual. When was the last time you saw an American movie or TV show in which the bad guy wasn’t characterized as “real smart”? And it was our news media that described the Unabomber as a highly educated “genius.” How fortunate for Americans that naïveté is more socially acceptable than the corrupting influence of education.
Of course, it is impressive to see someone enjoying success in spite of his or her lack of a formal education. But in design practice, is it really that surprising? Given the largely service-oriented role that design plays, one could only expect that the closer you are to mainstream thinking, the more likely you are to enjoy popular acclaim. Conversely, the more specialized one’s knowledge and skills, the more difficult it is to achieve mainstream success. Uncritically celebrating the success of the self-taught designer, without qualifying such success, only serves to undermine our own credibility and history.
It is not my intention to single out self-taughts as parasites on an accommodating host, as the majority of them are ethical and responsible people. But a few high-profile self-taught designers exemplify an anti-intellectual undercurrent that has been grumbling away in the design community for some time. The proliferation of design schools, particularly the ones with graduate programs, have engendered a reactionary backlash. When was the last time you heard a design star talk about the importance of design education to practice? In contrast to the precocious vocabulary-abusing graduate student, the plain-talking self-taught designer represents a reassuring alternative to constant change and increasing complexity. Perhaps this is why some of the harshest criticism in design today is no longer directed at the undereducated, but at the supposedly overeducated.
The self-taught designers are not a big problem because there are not many of them, and most self-taughts are quick to exploit relationships with well-educated partners or employees. Our more serious problem is the fact that there are so many educated designers who view design education as a necessary evil instead of a lifelong commitment. As the saying goes, “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Unfortunately, too many designers are content to depend on just a little bit of knowledge. They are confident that they can learn most of what they need to know on the job. They fail to understand that design education today is much more than vocational training—it is a process of discovery and renewal.
Anti-intellectual designers are critical of design education, even though they have absolutely no idea what goes on there, except in the design programs that have not changed in twenty years. Before new ideas and explorations are even developed and fully articulated within design education, they have often been dismissed as ill-conceived or just plain wrong by uninformed critics who are insufficiently prepared to understand what they are discounting. The true source of their anxiety is not the new ideas themselves (which they usually misunderstand), but the fact that they represent a change in design thinking.
Even though design education still has a long way to go in establishing parameters and standards, this certainly does not justify the lack of credibility it often seems to have. Designers who have been out of school for a while have no way of finding out what is going on in schools today unless they spend time in a classroom, attend an education conference, or read about it in design magazines. Unfortunately, most professional organizations dealing with education do so with segregated events that are primarily attended by educators and students. Or they hold a portfolio review in which practicing designers review student portfolios without the slightest idea of the students’ curriculum, and then pronounce their approval or disapproval of the outcome. Design magazines are mostly uninterested in educational issues, except for reproducing snazzy-looking undergraduate work with little more than captions for explanation. They rarely publish graduate-level projects, fearing they are too complex or in-depth for their readership (Emigre magazine excepted).
The climate of anti-intellectualism in design is often bolstered by a false sense of professionalism based on real-world experience. Typically, this type of “professionalism” amounts to little more than platitudes and bromides—problem solving to get the ultimate correct solution, and the pursuit of timelessness that supposedly transcends its own era. These entrenched clichés are responsible for the banality of the cornball visual puns and pedestrian aesthetics that constitutes the majority of graphic design. As long as such simplistic thinking is tolerated in design, what little meaningful dialogue there is will be drowned in a morass of mediocrity. As you may have noticed, the harping and posturing by anti-intellectual professionals is not moving the discipline closer to becoming a real profession or increasing its recognition as being an important part of culture. Nor is it helping the next generation of designers to find their way.
To be professional is to be impartial and objective, guided by established precedence in your field. Although the word “professional” is used freely in design practice, graphic design is not a profession. Designers have no obligatory regulating body that oversees and safeguards standards of practice. Today, anyone can be a member in most graphic design professional organizations for the price of admission, and can print “graphic designer” on their business cards. The true professionals in graphic design are in design education. They are certified professionals whose credentials and practices are monitored by organizations like the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (nasad) and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (wasc). However, design educators are only professionals as educators, not designers. It is one of the ironies of the pseudoprofession of graphic design that the only true professionals in the field are frequently criticized by design practitioners for not teaching students to be more professional.
Many graphic designers do not understand that academia is not just a hothouse of wanton self-expression, but is actually the bastion of tradition. Design practice relies on design education to train people in the latest technology and to develop basic skills and literacy. But what many designers fail to recognize is that academia’s most important role is in establishing continuity from the past to the future. It is the place where the canon is constantly being elaborated and reformulated. If certain values are deemed important to design, such values will most likely be articulated and perpetuated through education, not practice.
Graphic design will not grow up into a profession or fine art until it can view itself in a larger historical and cultural paradigm. And this is where design education comes in. One of its most important functions is exploring and defining the context of design and establishing a shared core of ideas, issues, and values that define practice. Personal experience teaches how to repeat the successes and avoid the failures of the past. Education teaches the value of past successes and failures, but in an unbiased, professional fashion. A personal experience is only one person’s experience and never exceeds his or her limitations and biases, but education is based on a shared cultural past that includes many viewpoints and possibilities. Design education is not just for training designers how to use tools, it is a process for developing and refining our understanding of ourselves as designers. Regardless of whether you believe design is a problem-solving profession of information architects or a socially responsible art form, education will broaden your understanding and strengthen your convictions. The more articulate we are in describing the issues and ideas that concern us, the better we will understand each other and others will come to understand what we do. Education and experience are the foundation of our future. If they remain at odds with each other, we will be building on shaky ground, and whatever we make will not stand for long.
If this sounds like more “preaching to the choir,” then you have missed my point. Although it is important for designers to reach out and educate the public about design, actually, the ones who need to be educated are the designers themselves. The majority of practicing graphic designers are ignorant about the history, theory, and ethics of their discipline. They know how to use the tools, make out invoices and entry forms for competitions, but are at a loss when it comes to placing their work in a critical, historical, or cultural context. Graphic designers have to get a lot smarter about who they are and what they are doing before they will be able to convince others what they do is important. You may admire the moxie and talent of a self-taught designer, but the fame of an individual is limited and fleeting in comparison to the respect accorded a profession or cultural institution.
Great strides have been made in the past decade in design education, even though it has been faced with its greatest challenges. It is important that we recognize the wealth of experience and knowledge that designers have acquired and build upon it. Designers need empowerment, and knowledge is power. The design educator’s job is to make graphic designers smarter. However, practicing “professionals” are not only needed to support design education, but to encourage it to go further. With the help of real-world practitioners, design educators must work toward establishing design as a vital part of cultural communication that is integral to, but not submerged by, the new global information environment. Graphic design is bigger than any one of us, so let’s start acting like we believe it.