Hunt or House

The biggest issue in teaching ‘practice’ for a design subject is evaluating the value of the practice you teach. As design educators we need to ask ourselves the question ‘how do we ‘know’ the value of the information we build our pedagogic practice on?’: is it knowledge, habit or belief. Put simply how do we ‘know’ that what we teach is true and does truth even matter in visual communication?

In asking what design education is we are implicitly asking what design education is for. Design is commonly described as the search for solutions for real world problems.
It follows from this description that the design educator has to deliver a process to the student that will allow them to uncover viable methods for achieving this aim; across the varied technical and social environments they find themselves in and throughout their careers.

So should our education be modelled on Holman Hunt or Gregory House.

Hunt is rich in skills derived from a well established craft base. He is the atelier school of design. He represents the whole chain of design education from Morris, the Vkhutemas, the Bauhaus and onwards. He is the master serving as the model of practice that the student carries with them as a guide throughout their time in practice. He is Sam Marshall who taught me to paint as one of a long line of painters leading back to Sickert, Degas and Ingres.

This craft is an accretion of heuristic rules that are applied in ways that see existing rules serve new needs. Each work of art and design is a small qualitative step, modifying the cycle of rule of thumb practices taught to the next generation.
Hunt’s methods are an exercise of craft shoehorned into serving the user whatever need? If we are intent on preserving craft based design education, validated solely by reference to past success we need do nothing, our system works well.

We know that our design practice is true now because it was true in the past. Or is design education like Dr. Gregory House. House is a diagnostician. Unlike Hunt, House never knows the solution before he understands the problem: however he does possess a process that will allow him to discover what the problem is.
This process is valid for House because the diagnostic problems he is presented with on a weekly basis are too obscure for rule-of-thumb approaches to be valid. One case is too different from the next for past successes to be a worthwhile guide. Evidence provide House with points of reference that help him navigate his way towards the problem. Research provides an informed framework to on. He has a deductive process.
House’s cases are always the most intractable cases, failing to conform to the neat categories that would favour a heuristic approach. But possessing a process he can uncover the problem, and having uncovered the problem he can propose a solution.
In this House presents a better model for Graphic Design practice in the world we actually find ourselves in: culturally diverse, technically heterogeneous and geographically disconnected: where history no longer offers us reliable guides with which we can steer our practice by a reflective practice can.
Heuristics are excellent guides for operating in familiar environments. A research driven design process is a reliable guide for navigating the uncharted.

What does this mean for education? Mostly it means a change in attitude rather than a wholesale change in practice. Where the biggest changes must be made the burden of change falls most strongly on the teacher not the student.

Craft processes need to be taught. The industrial capacity for graphic design production is still heavily located within domains that demand craft knowledge.
An illustrator that does not understand the colour transformations wrought by the printing process is in for a disappointing time.
A typographer who doesn’t understand the effects of halation on light text on a dark ground is going to set an illegible mess.

However all this craft needs to be put in a context derived from an informed reflective process. The same illustrator, reflectively informed, will not only be able to navigate the vagaries of screen versus print based production but will able to see future markets and novel realms of practice. The typographer will be able to see halation, not as a design problem but as a design resource (and here I’m thinking about Matthew Carter’s Bell Centenial which although designed for a very specific purpose proves itself an able tool when dealing with onscreen halation).
However processes are only valid within a given context, a context that is socially constructed, a context that been made increasingly ephemeral and fragmented, by technical change. The historic models of design education; design practitioners doing and design theoreticians telling them why they have done what they did; are too slow and too broadly drawn to be valid.

The design student needs to graduate with a reflective process that allows them to read a user’s need, the specific social context and then respond in a focused way; the time of universal design is done.

The design educator needs to be instrumental in delivering a challenging curriculum that promotes reflective questioning, teaches strong research skills and doesn’t unthinkingly reinforce existing practice.
The educator can only teach that which they know, and here is the crux of the issue. Knowledge derived from industrial practice is foundational to the teaching of Graphic Design, and I am absolutely not advocating that design education needs to be defined by historians or theorists. Perish the thought.
But equally I am stating that a design education composed of industrial heuristics with some theory bolted onto the side is inadequate for teaching design for the Twenty-First Century.
A graphic design educator should embody balance: the ability to ‘do’ combined with the ability to assess and modify what we ‘do’.
Design practice needs to be led by those who have operated in an industrial context; blooded through contact with users, clients and producers; but who have the kind of wider view informed by the kind of academic reflection that industrial practitioners just cannot afford.
I am suggesting that a research led, design academic, who through their combination of theoretical and studio practice is testing their process in ways that industry cannot support, represents the best model for a design education. Design Theory and History needs to be integrated at every level of the curriculum, not as an adjunct but as part of a reflective process woven into the fabric of the teaching.
Contextual studies lecturers should be involved at the beginning of projects, contextualising briefs and in at the end connecting theory with the student work.

Further more we need to recognise that the natural state of design education is not a purely undergraduate enterprise, but one that exists across a range of interconnected strata from FE to undergraduate, to Master and beyond. All are important, all form supports for the other and for industry.

Focusing on one to the detriment of the others is a strategy for inertia in both the industrial and academic worlds. Studio lecturers and research students need to be extending their practice in informed ways beyond those supported by industry.
We need to be researching precisely those kinds of design activities that could not be sanctioned by industry, and then through the students we teach feed this research into industry, enriching it in the process.
Design researchers need to occupy the bleeding edge of research so that our students can lead industry from a position of strength through knowledge. We need to know the worth of that which we teach, nothing else will do.