Greetings one and all.
I've just subscribed to the list after hearing about it via an email Ken
Friedman sent out to another list - so thanks to him for that. I've also
trawled through the most recent posts in the archive, and am fascinated by
the ongoing debate about design canons and 'design doctors.' Please excuse
me if the following observations are obvious or off-topic:
I'm a graphic designer and PhD candidate in Communication, with a primary
research interest in the political and cultural significance of designers
and ad creatives (treated as key members of the "new cultural
intermediaries", to use Pierre Bourdieu's term). Communication itself is
most often understood - at least by its theorists - as a field rather than
a discipline, not least because of its relative newness. Further, in my
adoption (cooptation? bastardization?) of various epistemologies, primarily
cultural studies (but also media studies and mass communication theory) I
find the discussion about canons on this list especially resonant. Cultural
studies is, of course, aggressively anti-canonical, with its specifically
British roots in what Stuart Hall has called the "crisis in the
humanities", and fueled by a conscious move away from/against the Leavisite
tradition of perpetuating a very particular (Anglocentric) literary canon.
Based on this here (inadequate) gloss, I'm wondering out loud if an
emergent design studies might be best understood/treated - initially at
least - as a field, or even, to take cultural studies' cue, as specifically
anti-canonical. (Of course, criticisms can be levelled at cultural studies
for being nothing but canonical; that to deny the presence of key ideas and
concepts - however surreptitiously they insinuate themselves - is
ultimately self-defeating, if not impossible.
Finally, my own bias is to press for an approach that can accommodate (but
not necessarily address simultaneously) all points on what Richard Johnson
has called the 'circuit of culture': production, the text, reception, and
"lived cultures and social relations more generally." (Perhaps this is a
no-brainer for list members?)
Best wishes,
Matt Soar
Matthew Soar
[log in to unmask]
Director of Publications & Design
Media Education Foundation
www.mediaed.org
413.584.8500
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Communication
University of Massachusetts Amherst
www.umass.edu/communication
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