Have Sign, Will Travel: Cultural Issues in Design Education
Ellen McMahon and Karen White
If you watched American television in the late afternoons in the early 1960s, you might associate the first part of the above title with a man named Paladin. His calling card inscribed with the motto “Have Gun, Will Travel” expressed his position (armed) relative to his changing surroundings. This essay is about a project intended to disarm design students by making them more conscious of their assumptions and more aware of the instability of signs as they travel between maker and receiver. This project, called “Exchanges: Culture, Place, Identity, Memory,” was designed to reveal how graphic design functions as a transmitter of cultural information, personal biases, and social values and to bring students face to face with the complex issues surrounding representation and interpretation.
“Exchanges” is a postcard exchange project that originally took place between our senior design classes at the University of Arizona and the University of Hawaii. Students researched their own histories and selected events that were significant in laying the groundwork for their sense of personal and/or group identities. They then collected (from memory, family interviews, and a variety of readings) verbal and visual material relating to those events. We encouraged them to work with a visual language based on metaphors, icons, symbols, indexes, and signs, and discouraged them from relying on direct literal narratives. The resulting materials were used to create postcards that were sent to exchange partners from the other class. The postcards were discussed with the entire class, and interpretations were mailed back to the designers of the cards. These were followed by email responses and, in some cases, extended conversations between the exchange partners.
The exchanges covered a wide range of subjects from day-to-day concerns to the long-term ramifications of sociopolitical phenomenon, adopted identities, and cultural assimilations. Through extended conversations, students discussed the differences in their design educations, the pros and cons of computers, the relationship between style and meaning, the commodification of images, and sexual stereotyping. Through the family stories of their peers, they learned about forced immigration, political exile, internment camps, and the Holocaust.
Students compared modes of communication used in the cards, from literal descriptions that did not invite receiver participation, to messages that offered some information but left room for interpretation, to those that were too obscure to hold interest. The compelling content of many of the postcards stimulated an urgency to understand the message in full. Suddenly, many students found themselves firmly on the side of legibility in the ubiquitous form-versus-function debate. Others enjoyed the more open cards that triggered a variety of interpretations and speculation. When the designers of these cards responded by email, it became obvious how the meanings of a particular sign shifted because of individual and cultural experience. The following interpretation illustrates this point:
We first noted the symbols: a background of blue sky, some incense sticks, a wood frame, and a black-and-white photocopy of a bald figure. We noticed these symbols and the absence of any type, and concluded that this piece seems to be about the senses: the smells of incense, the peaceful freedom of an open sky, and the claustrophobic positioning of the figure. All I can think of is that this piece is about some sort of Buddhism. The incense, the bald Buddhist-like figure, and the sky create an image of what a Zen experience is like.
There are some questions that I’d like answered. First of all, is our interpretation correct? Also, what is the figure and why is it crafted in such a manner? The numbers of the incense sticks vary. Is that in any way meaningful? We’ve noticed the intertwining of the sticks with the sky, but the numbers create some confusion. Finally, the wood frame: it cramps an otherwise open-feeling piece, and we are not sure why. This was an interesting postcard. It’s good that it was not too straightforward because it forced us to look into it more deeply and really search for your story. I cannot wait for a response from you, complete with a story or an explanation about your card.
The eagerly awaited email response from the designer read:
I find your interpretation of my postcard quite interesting. I guess I should start by explaining to you the story behind my postcard. My mom is a traditional Chinese who believed in ancestral worship. My postcard is about my grandfather, who passed away when I was two. We had an altar at home where my mom put my grandfather’s picture along with a plaque with ancestors’ names, incense, flowers, and fruits. The figure in the card is my grandfather. I only showed the top part of his head because that is what I saw when I looked up at the altar as a child. The incense represents my grandfather in heaven. You commented that the frame cramps an otherwise open feeling. The frame is about the portrait of my grandfather as it serves as a way to save his memories. By putting a frame around the card, I am also trying to preserve the memories of my grandfather because it is like another portrait of my grandfather. I thought a lot about putting text on the card, but I thought the “to:” was enough because it signifies my grandfather’s journey from one world to the next. . . .
Two of the Japanese Americans from the class in Hawaii devoted their cards to very different aspects of their cultural pasts. One student raised in Hawaii focused on her Issei (first-generation) grandmother who was a picture bride from Okinawa. A map of the Pacific, a photograph of her grandmother in a traditional Japanese wedding gown, and a lock of her long black hair depicted the common practice of Hawaiian Japanese plantation workers arranging marriages with Japanese women through photographs.
Another Japanese American Sansei (third-generation) student explored her mother’s internment during World War II. On this postcard, the war is depicted through images of soldiers and the proclamation number that forced Americans of Japanese descent into internment camps. Through the visual juxtaposition of American icons and imprisonment, she expressed the personal and cultural tragedy of this historic moment. The following interpretation from the student in Arizona reveals his perspective:
It appears you are someone of Japanese descent whose parents or grandparents spent some time in an American reeducation camp. It seems that innocent Japanese people were sent to these camps to get educated about American politics and so forth. Many of the Japanese people probably felt as though they were being locked up (which the chain link represents on the postcard). I felt that the use of black and white to represent the whole issue was very effective. Black and white can say many different things, and I believe that what you are saying with your piece is that Americans saw it one way and the Japanese being locked up saw it completely differently.
I also noticed on the back of the card that there was no return address or anything. It just had the word “to” printed on it. I don’t know if this was intentional, but if I was going into one of these camps I wouldn’t know if I was coming back, where I was, or even how to get mail. So, I think that not putting a return address is equally effective at carrying out the whole idea of being stuck somewhere. . . .
The email response from the designer clarifies the original message and provides a different perspective based on her family’s history:
For the most part, you knew exactly what I wanted to say. The camp that the Japanese Americans were sent to was not an American reeducation camp, it was a relocation camp that these Americans were sent to because the government was afraid they might leak out secret information to Japan about the U.S. military. They were innocent people who were herded into these camps because they were easily recognized as being different looking. . . . What’s funny to me (not really) is that my mom was there too. She doesn’t even speak Japanese. . . . Right now, I work part time in a Japanese restaurant, and most of our customers are tourists from Japan. They don’t even consider American Japanese as Japanese. They consider us Americans.
In the process of creating representations of personal and cultural experience, many students developed insights into their relationships to one or more cultures. A student raised in Phoenix, Arizona, the son of Czech political exiles, constructed his card out of rusted metal grating smeared with dark red paint—a reference to his parents’ suffering. The backside of the card spoke of his visit to Czechoslovakia where he found a cherry tree his mother had described to him as a child. The simple act of picking a cherry himself helped him understand his parents’ difficult past and reconcile his own position caught between two cultures.
Two other cards from the class in Arizona addressed the immediate influences of commodity culture. One student who felt his main influences were television and product advertising identified himself with a Universal Product Code and created a postcard that was an elaborate and seductive package containing nothing but a relatively small photograph of himself. Another student presented a dismal picture of his roots in “technoburbia,” with rows of identical little gray houses, and the only distinctive symbol a looming McDonald’s sign. The former celebrated his freedom to create himself as a commodity, the latter lamented his isolation and separation from his ethnic history.
One student from the class in Arizona received a card made of woven vellum strips covered with gritty crescent-shaped black-and-white imagery and Chinese characters. Since no one in the class read Chinese, another student took the card home to his Chinese paternal grandmother for a translation of the writing. It turned out to be a recipe for (very) American macaroni salad (lots of mayonnaise). This new information allowed us to see the forms as elbow macaroni. The interpretation of the card dramatized the investigative aspects of the project, turning the reading of signs into the solving of a mystery and also pointed out the unintentional effect that the method of production can have on the message. The designer’s name was Carmen, which inspired the opening line, a reference to the children’s show on PBS, Carmen Sandiego:
So, Carmen—if that is your real name—thought you could throw a smart guy like me for a loop using incongruous formats, illegible hieroglyphs, and cloaked subject matter, huh? Well, it didn’t work. I see through your pseudotechnical presentation in diffusion dither and right to the heart of your fetish for macaroni salad. Never mind all your efforts to sidetrack me into thinking this is a piece about scanning electron microscopy or germs or viruses or any other creepy-crawly things unnoticed by the naked eye. . . . It was so simple, a lesser-trained eye may have missed it. Your computer is a Macintosh SE, SE/30, Classic, Classic II, or PowerBook running a Chinese Language Kit, with no color capabilities.
Many issues were raised about culture and design as these diverse student bodies participated in “Exchanges.” Throughout the research phase of the project, students discovered the roots of their own perspectives; through the design phase, they enriched their own visual vocabularies by translating this information into form; and in the exchange phase, they learned about diverse cultures on a one-to-one basis.
As design educators, our role is not to censor or ban our students from using any particular kind of imagery, but rather to foster an understanding of the ways that images carry meaning. The bonds that formed between students in the process of “Exchanges” created a personal interest in some of the important issues presently facing professional design practice, like stereotyping, appropriation, and the commodification of ethnic images. Through direct interaction, students got a sense of what they don’t know about the experience of others. Our hope is that the humility gained will make our students more responsible visual communicators, and more responsive to the complexities of representation and interpretation.
Special thanks to Stacie Widdefield for her thoughtful suggestions about this essay.