Terry,

Again, while not disagreeing with Gunnar, I think there is a little bit more to say on this matter.

First, as an aside, I have a running argument with my partner (who is far nicer and brighter than I am) about what causes the ills of this world. I never loose an opportunity to blame the FRENCH for all such ills (my apologies to all individual French men and women who are, of course, not included in this category. Some of my best friends…). My partner always rises to the bait, which proves my point! One of my daughters is a violinist, and I found out from her that in her world you can easily substitute viola players for the FRENCH in my world. As she once told me, there was a terrible calamity when a bus load full of viola players fell of the edge of a cliff. The calamity was that there were some empty seats!

We all have our 'stupid_worthless_others'. I suspect that Graphic Designers fall into that category for you, as judged by the number of times you have a go at them.

More seriously, I don't have any argument with you about graphic design education. I have written a great deal on this subject and you will find me highly critical of many aspects of it. And I sometimes, after 50 years of involvement in the area, despair of its lack of capacity to change. 

Yet, despite the education system, some individual designers, and some design studios learn to practice their craft at a high level. As a researcher, I'm interested in these high level crafts. These are the areas where we do our research and when I talk about designing rules, it is at this level that I am working.

I cannot do your homework for you, but one of the things I do to find out what is happening at the pointy end of professional practice is look at the output from some of the studios that do the best work. Necessarily, these studios have their ups and downs, and many of the best are no longer practicing, but a shortlist of recent past and present would include Arron Marcus, Text Matters, Information Design Unit, Meta Design, Seigel and Gale, Pentagram, HK Henrion, Colin Banks... I could go on. My point is that you need to look beyond the recent design school curriculum and output to get an understanding of the current best practice in the field. You also need to factor in that graphic design is not just about the 'effective communication' end of things which interests people like me. It is also about sustaining our social desire for ritual display. This is the magical end of the craft which of necessity is concerned with appearance, showing off, and seeming to be impressive. Balancing these two things—the functional and the aesthetic—is what the best practice professionals achieve.  You can also, btw, look at our many case histories, project archives, and publications, to get an idea of what we mean by designing rules.

As to cms systems such as drupal, Typo3, Jumla, xoops, dialogue, etc. These are our daily working tools in developing design rules that are applied to complex multi platform applications. Even I know how to code c++ php, mysql, css, xml ,etc (though not very well. My code is always full of errors that clever people have to fix for me). But, from the beginning of such work, graphic design rule creation is at the core. And one of the things I can tell you from our research on rule making systems is that the current generation of object orientated software languages and ai systems are not up to the task. We can create rules that cannot be programmed. Some of these rules are incredibly simple to describe. Even an undergraduate graphic design student could articulate them! But they are beyond the capacity of current technology to implement and require manual intervention. Far from being at the pointy end, the current software is conceptually backward. Indeed, we applied for and got government approval for a project to develop a new type of computer programming language that might be able to develop this type of advanced graphic logic. That was about 20 years ago! Sadly, we have not yet been able to get the funding to do the work, but we live in hope. I should add that none of the recent advances in software language design have come close to tackling this issue.

So, from where I see it, far from us designers catching up with the technology, we wait for the technology that can catch up with us.

Perhaps it's time for me to abandon the FRENCH. I wonder how many design researchers it takes to change a light bulb?

Warm Regards,

David
-- 

blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au

Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA
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• helping people communicate with people •

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