Graphic Design Curricula: Visualizing Design Processes and Skills
Thomas Briggs
Wouldn’t it be useful to have a chart, something like a medical chart in a hospital, that displays information throughout a process in time, allowing teachers and students a means to determine objectives and measure attainments in postsecondary education? A matrix of progressive competencies is already a common component used to build effectiveness in a design curriculum. Identifying the constituent skills (and areas of knowledge) needed by students for the practice of design while visualizing these interactions as they occur during the process of making design would be an additional boon to teaching. Viewing intellectual and representational resources, in concrete form, related to the process of designing as experienced in the studio or classroom, and measuring the student’s abilities as demonstrated by specific assigned tasks would be another way to observe student progress. Developing better visualization of these interactions provides a way to more effectively support student learning while identifying the most relevant educational components for graphic design study. Using this method to revisit longstanding assumptions about teaching graphic design also fosters curriculum development, which embodies evolving concepts of design theory while representing the expectations of practice.
How do we determine what to teach designers? There are many likely resources to start with. Graphic design resembles other image art in so many ways that we could probably assume that designers need to know the same basic visual dynamics and principles of perception as painters, filmmakers, and many other visual artists. But good design solutions are also often closely related to knowledge of the practical circumstances of time and place, that is, to context. If, as Christopher Alexander asserts in his classic Notes on the Synthesis of Form, “Form is the part of the world over which we have control” and “Context is the part of the world which puts demands on this form,”1 we should look to relevant contexts for sources of existing knowledge that would provide the most appropriate support for the process of designing.
A method for displaying the functional relationship between intellectual and representational resources of the designer and the process of designing is proposed in a model that details these linkages and embodies the premises that: (1) Design process can be described as a set of recursive cycles in which planning and refinement take place in distinct and identifiable stages, (2) specific skills and areas of contextual knowledge are instrumental to successful design development, and (3) those skills and resources can often be identified as knowledge resources and defined as “teachable” academic or “making” disciplines. The concept model proposed in figure 1 shows a triadic idea of design constituencies with an emphasis on three domains that characterize how/what/for whom aspects of a creative process context and are labeled as spheres of Volition/Implementation/Location. In figure 2, these domains (instead of the individually named resource components shown in figure 1) are used in temporal representations, showing an aggregate quantity of those constituents (e.g., Research Methods, Information Theory, Typography), represented as disks or spheres, moving through various stages of a generalized design development scenario.
Figure 1. Graphic design: A triadic model of domains and resources
Among other good reasons to recommend the use of new methods to visualize the skills and knowledge components that support ongoing graphic design education planning is the perspective that communication design can be really effective only if we are aware of and receptive to the beliefs and preferences of our readers, a context in constant flux. While design curricula at leading art schools have been substantially founded on the assumptions of earlier twentieth-century theories about how we perceive visual messages, a continuing reliance on those interpretations has fostered an attention to surface and form that decidedly no longer characterizes the direction that more recent trends toward an increased interest in design authorship and reader interpretation suggest. As an observer of “things” in their social context, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi contends in his essay, “Design and Order in Everyday Life,” “Visual values are created by social consensus, not by perceptual stimulation . . . like other values, visual values can be unanimous or contested, elite or popular, strong or vulnerable, depending on the [integration of the] culture.”2
Figure 2. The interaction of resource domains and design process
Inclusion of concepts and theories of various branches of social sciences and information/communication studies in design curricula would support a more humanistic orientation for (particularly young, undergraduate) student designers, while knowledge of the domains of methodology and technology would make established design-making scenarios as well as more current means for prototyping and implementation increasingly usable.
Visualizing design process in terms of knowledge and skills that demonstrate a clear and observable role in given stages of development provides a means of making a more visible, and therefore, causal and empirical evaluation of content choices in design education curricula. While this model illustrates prescriptive uses in developing curricula, similar tools would be equally useful in demonstrating both educational constituents of individual courses and finely articulated student assessments. Modeling the interaction of design processes and resources, shown with a simple 3d illustration in figure 2, is also done here with the assumption that an interactive display, computationally animating a variety of points of view and finer-grained details, is an indispensable development.
To meet the educational requirements of an evolving profession, where graphic designers are increasingly responsible for authorship as well as fluency in specialized areas of knowledge, creative visualizing concepts will need to play a continuing and important role in curriculum planning for design educators. The relational process described in this model informs graphic design curricula while providing support for inclusion of more relevant knowledge, skill, and methodology through the evolving pedagogy of design education programs.
Notes
1. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).
2. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Design and Order in Everyday Life,” in The Idea of Design, Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995).