So wrote Ivan Illich in 1973.

Boy, oh boy! Wasn’t he prescient? Isn’t the whole political process a huge steaming pile of shit at the moment? The rationale for the political process seems to have become inverted in the last fifty years or so. Perhaps the power elites decided that the Second World War demonstrated that power from the people was too implausibly dangerous a proposition to be allowed in a nuclear world. What is certain is that the role of the politician as the representative of the (enfranchised) mass to the powerful has been inverted to become the interlocutor of the powerful to the mass. They no longer tell uncomfortable truths to The Power (I see Disraeli talking to Victoria in my head), but now explain to the people why not only are their aspirations impossible, but now explain that we are explicit in creating the horrors that haunt the world. We have become victimisers of ourselves.

So while our life turns to pain and shit we are told that it was our greed that set the fire that burns down the world. Was it, bollocks?

We’ve been greasing the machine (those of us fortunate enough to have jobs), not riding on it. Perhaps the point is that we cannot expect the politicians and the political process to fix things. They’re not in the fixing business. Nor will daddy dictator or mommy religion mend the world. But you can.

The article is a little less simplistic than the title (great title though ‘taint it?). But in truth, the thesis is in complete accord with the title and is, I’m afraid, as dumb as a sack of hammers.

Let’s go highbrow and work our way down from there and look at the real world.

Jacques Derrida tackled this one pretty comprehensively in his book Paper Machine where he addressed the confusion between the book as strata and the book as the contents. He pointed out that in a digital age we better get used to books coming in a range of forms many of which won’t be in series bound with glue.

Derrida states: ’Finally, the question of the book should not be conflated with that of supports.’ And in scholarly fashion he goes on to address the manifold ways in which the function of the book has already been supported in bookless fashions: but in truth Derrida does such a lovely job of proving the Book is not the book that I would be wasting my time repeating it here. Google carries the whole text (but not the book) here; the essay is called The Book to Come.

But on a more practical level electronic texts don’t mean e-book readers. I know that Sony and Philips have been trying to say they do, but they don’t really.

What they do mean is incredibly cheap access to books on demand on potentially on any web enabled device. They mean a class in rural South Africa being able to access the Project Gutenberg’s 30000 free texts. They mean a traveller being able to take a library on a plane. They mean Danish language texts being made available to Danes when their national publishers can’t afford the production costs. They mean trees not being cut down to print books that no one ever reads and that end up being turned into domestic insulation.

The argument over access to knowledge (and narrative) has always been one of elites attempting to restrict access for ‘the good of the little people’, who, it is implied lack the wit or expertise to consume wisely or contribute positively to the pool of literature. (Look up the debates around number of presses, the origins of the print unions and government control of printing in Western Europe following Gutenberg.)

So not only does increased access to text serve the little people of the planet it also means the end to literary pseuds at book fairs in Brazil. So huzzah for the e-book!

• Put the interests of their patients first.
• Not use their status and ability to gain advantage over those they work with.
• Respect their patient’s confidences.

This oath is over 2300 years old but despite its archaic formulation still covers the important parts of the doctor patient relationship. Now obviously some doctors do naughty stuff like murdering their patients, seducing their patients or extreme cases patching their patients up so they can be tortured; again and again. But this post isn’t about global politics, but is about the politics of design. What do we believe in? What do we stand for? What are our obligations to our clients and our users?

If VisCom designers were going to swear an oath what we swear on, what would we swear to do? The First Things First Manifesto (the original by Ken Garland) is a lovely and entirely appropriate piece of work. It tells us what, in an ideal world, we should do. I applaud the manifesto, but observe that when I was working designer my inclinations were quite simply to earn as much money as I can, as quickly as I could to cover those luxuries of being a designer in London: feeding my family, buying my daughter a buggy and getting an occasional haircut. Little things all, but they seemed important at the time.

In short the FTFM (the original) is the ten commandments of graphic design. As set of aspirations that are daily watered down by the general needs of graphic designers to stay alive and keep being a graphic designer.

It might be better to have a set of guides that would govern the relationship between designer, client and user. At least we would know when we were being bad, overstepping the bounds and letting ourselves down.

Perhaps something like this might do:

I swear by Schoeffer, the first art director, by Games, Tschichold, and Bass, and I take to witness all the great designers, to keep according to my ability and my judgment, the following Oath and agreement:

To hold the values of the society of designers and communicators to my heart, and to treat my fellow designers as my brothers and sisters.

I will design for the users of my designs according to my best ability and my truest judgment and never create designs that knowingly brings harm to the world.

I will not design work that brings harm to the world just because I am asked (with money or fame waved in my face), nor will I advise such a plan; and I will not allow harm to come to anyone when through my designs if I might prevent it.

I will render honest and truthful service to my clients and actively promote the well being of users through my work.

I will not claim expertise in areas where I have none and will not pitch for jobs where peers will render a better service; I will leave this work to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this field.

In every place where I come I will enter only for the good of my clients and the user, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves.

All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.

If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all people and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, I may no longer call myself a designer.

Semantics is the study of meaning in language. One of the subjects founders, Ferdinand de Saussure, famously said:
‘”The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.”‘
by which he means the relationship between the artefact carrying the meaning (a word, a symbol, a kiss) and meaning itself is random, based on individual understanding and needing no logic. This means That only because in this social circumstance we know the two are linked. Fair enough? All clear and understood?

This all becomes more than a little tricky when we’re dealing with meaning in the real world. Why? Because the world and the ways we communicate the world are also symbols: symbols which are arbitrary and formed by local social context. And so on all the way down. The whole thing is fractal, with levels of granularity that are consistent (and never conclusive) as deep as we look.

But knowing this we all still fall pray to the error of letting our own internal interpretation override those people who made an artefact in the first place. Humans make meaning whenever they open their eyes and ears, letting the world in. We’re hard-wired meaning makers. We stare at the stars and tell tales of gods and monsters; we gaze at the clouds making shapes in the sky. More dangerously we encounter things made for reasons of communication by others and read our own messages onto them.

In this photo we have the logo for the  Seaview Yacht Club. An institution founded in the Victorian Era. But what does the logo say to us?

Seaview Yacht Club logo

Perhaps it’s just me, but I started looking for any other visual clues that the Nazi party was alive and well on the Isle of White. Now I’m quite sure that there is no connection between the yacht club and the Nazi party, but the symbolism is remarkable. The four ‘S’ forming a typographic swastika, the colours – red, white and black; semantically it’s all quite indicative of unpleasant associations. Did the designer make a mistake, was the designer intending to encode a secret message? In all likelihood not. But the associations are there.

So what can we learn from this? Well perhaps that the term Semantic Engineer is a bit optimistic. ‘Engineering’ is a somewhat precise term for the kind user led work we do except in one important way. The engineer always has an aim that must be addressed, and aim which if not achieved allows us to qualify their work as failing. So while we can be said to be intentionally reordering pre-existing semantic components to communicate, as an engineer works with other artefacts to compose a new meta artefact, the medium we work in is so plastic as to make the precision implicit in the term engineer an ambition rather than a statement of fact. We are engineers, not artists, in aim if not in objective. In this we should be happy to adopt the name.

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.

In the past critics were rightly vilified for being journalists who commented on those who made things. As if the ability to write in newspaper prose ever blessed a person with an detailed knowledge of the world. Now we seem to find the critics as the only game in town. Forming opinion around work that many will never themselves experience.

There are some critics who have a deep and profound love for their special area of interest: the majority write across areas so broad that their commentary is as debased as a waste tip: full of everything but with no structure. I could talk about the fool who contributes to a broadsheet media section and every time a Fist Full of Dollars is on the T.V. says ‘It’s a remake of Yojimbo you know?’ Yes, of course we bloody well know! If it’s Miller’s Crossing the comment becomes ‘It’s a remake of a Fist Full of Dollars, which is a remake of Yojimbo?’Never realising that their shallowness of knowledge is masking the more interesting truth of a gangster story by Dashiel Hammett (Red Harvest) being used as source material by Kurosawa to make a samurai epic, being used by Leone to make a cowboy movie and in turn being used by Hill to make a gangster movie: all of which shows the power of the original tale of a modern day Odysseus, shilling and shooting his way to justice. It’s only worth showing your knowledge if by doing so you are illuminating some otherwise hidden truth. This is being critical as opposed to being a critic.

But we, the readers, lap this pap up. In the mistaken belief that uninformed criticism is informed criticality and doing so in the belief that we are acquiring something of value that makes our understanding of the world richer. Crap! We’re soaking up someone else’s words to the point they start to dribble from our mouths. Think for yourself you lazy bums.

What has sparked this outburst? It’s simple. I’ve been watching The Watchmen, I confess that I like it very much. I loved the original comic (I can’t make myself think of it as a ‘graphic novel’; graphic novels are pale, anaemic things about wistful love and bad haircuts. Watchmen is a comic. Colourful, brave and tackling issues just to big for the page). Snyder has done a damn fine job of working with dense material to make movie that understands its origins without being hamstrung by them. Loosing the Black Freighter was smart. The psychic alien casus belli was a bit overplayed (even in the eighties) as a deus machina. After 9/11 we all instinctively recognise the big war starting or war ending maguffin and so the film required a more subtle spin. Dr. Manhattan served well without unduly messing with the plot. We see an intelligent adaption of an original text. Robin Hood changes with each generation, Dracula is a mirror of our sexual fear and is different with each telling. Even The Bible is dressed with different clothes for different times. Is The Watchmen so very special?

What we saw in the critic’s hostile response to the movies is a clear confusion, on behalf of both the public and the critics, of opinion and criticality. They are not the same. Apparently being a critic and being opinionated are. Sometimes it is better, when exercising critical judgement, to be honest and just say ‘I have no opinion right now. Give me some time to think about it and I’ll get back to you.’ But the pressure of journalism driven by commerce erodes the ability to act in this way. Asked to have an opinion in time to go to press the critic produces one: as journalists they have to hit that deadline even if they have nothing to say.

So rather than look at the film and say:

‘A story that in the eighties showed a hero saving the world from nuclear annihilation in spite of itself, now asks us to judge those who would stage horrors in the great cities of the world in order to promote their vision of a better world.

After 9/11 we cannot view this film in the way we once could.’

We are asked to look at the film as a flawed attempt to make the comic with actors. Which rather ignores the age old cycle of stories being retold to speak about the times we live in.

You wonder whether Homer had the same problem, back in the day?