On May 16, 2014, at 10:21 AM, "Terence Love" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Gunnar, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this. I'm always surprised
> by what you write!


You got it.

[snipped and reordered]

> The game is to ratchet things forward by offering slightly more automation
> each year, enough to make it attractive to buy the next version  and
> simultaneously reduce  backward compatibility  so those who delay can't
> interact as well with those who have bought newer versions.  The
> automatisation drives that process.

Perhaps more than your description of conscious business planning lets on. Susan Blackmore posited a third replicator: www.susanblackmore.co.uk/memetics/temes.htm . If memes are social/informational analogs to genes, then temes are the technical version. Following a Dawinian approach, one has to look at each in terms of replication combined with variation and selection rather than as the result of planning in a conscious sense. I haven't come to any conclusions about how important/interesting/believable Blackmore's teme idea is. I'm in the middle of a binge of reading and thinking about memetics and can say that the way most people talk about memes is unimportant/uninteresting/unbelievable so she's going to be high on my pondering list.

> One argument that I've heard presented in a variety of fora is that graphic
> design education can provide the new 'Classics' education. I'm not sure it
> is anywhere near there in that role, but it seems an interesting avenue to
> explore. 


I made one such argument in 'Design Issues' twenty years ago: http://www.gunnarswanson.com/writing/GDasLiberalArt.pdf and Richard Buchanan wrote before that although more generally about design. I have a lot of quibbles--philosophical and practical--with what I wrote back then but the executive summary still resonates:

1) The rich history of liberal arts education makes little sense in a more complex world. The idea that someone learns all of the stuff that an educated man knows is as sadly quaint as the use of the male pronoun in the phrase "educated man."

2) As such, liberal arts education has devolved into the equivalent of a Chinese restaurant menu--Take one from column A and two from column B. . . .

3) We claim to value integration of knowledge but we atomize it and then demand that nineteen-year-olds put together what we fail to.

4) A possible solution for this is to choose subjects that are at the nexus of different fields and consciously teach with the intent of making connections. (Not surprisingly, I nominated graphic design as such a subject.)

> Universities have not been
> so wise in their planning of student numbers and it has come back to bite.

Universities should plan some things but there's a good argument to be made for markets over mandates set by the people who will not suffer when they are later proved wrong.

> would seem
> to be essential to have good graphic communication and current visual
> approaches are dreadful 
[snip]
>  The
> implied shift if this analysis is correct will be to concretise and make
> routine the knowledge about visual communication and instead focus on the
> use of managing abstract concepts and their relationships in the logic of
> other fields in which the graphic designer will participate. You can teach
> that in many ways.

Yes. There are many areas where graphic designers' having influence would be of great benefit. That's something that we are conscious of at ECU--trying to widen designers' understanding of what other people do. There are several good reasons for that but one is to allow graphic designers to have influence among those who do not expect or even desire to be influenced by graphic design or graphic designers. (IBM has recently opened themselves up to a large influence by designers including a lot of graphic designers after many years of a very small crew of graphic designers working to expand the cracks. It will be interesting to see the outcome.)

I also believe that design education is good preparation for a lot of other careers. Make that a foundation for preparation; I have several worries about the "design is all one" approach that is not uncommon on this list. One is that it leads to the "everything from a spoon to a city" egoism (not always limited to architects) that has historically led to some really bad spoons and naïve-at-best urban design. Another is that, although there may be important commonalities that should be recognized, there are also important differences. One of the most important differences centers on the levels of abstraction often discussed here.

One thing that engineering and the "art and design" fields have had in common and sometimes seem to be losing is making stuff. [Sorry about the quotes around "art and design." It's still a foreign phrase to me.] Engineering seems to have lost it more than graphic design but it's eroding everywhere. A few years back on this list, there was some discussion of thinking vs. making and I replied that what we believed in at ECU's design program was thinking through making. We realized that the phrase summed up our approach and it has since become the core of our planning and thinking. 

(As soon as I get through my current book project, I think a thinking though making book will become my next big project. I'm thinking I'll make it more rich and less of a burden by doing an edited volume rather than an authored one.)

Anyway, there is a sort of thinking that is dying out at least here in the US. It has something to do with the iterative thinking of "design thinking" but it also revolves around interacting with more-or-less concrete things. Most of us don't make stuff for many reasons including the fact that it's cheaper to buy stuff made in a Chinese factory than to get the materials to make stuff ourselves. Replacement parts are often more expensive that the thing that they are a part of so replacing the whole object makes sense. . . .

When I go to my local farm supply store, I see old guys with their shopping carts full of a range of stuff that makes me believe that, given an acetylene torch and a ball peen hammer, could make almost anything work. It used to be that some of the kids who grew up making tractors do tricks then went to college and that sort of concrete thinking influenced commerce, politics, law. . . you name it. The thinking that comes from routinely making stuff is on the endangered species list. The place it survives is some art programs and a few design programs.

This is somewhat disjointed because there are several things involved. One is how using your hands affects learning (for various reasons.) Another is the power of imagination being amplified by the joy of corporeal realization of imagination. Another is real world testing. (I believe this connects with David Sless' objection to readability being seen as a simple formula instead of something to be tested under real user conditions.)

Of course, this doesn't call for a reincarnation of William Morris or any sort of luddite stance. Quite the contrary. Kinetic and haptic learning combined with efficient prototyping allows objects a central role in interrogating ideas. I tell my students that I could be replaced by a parrot that just says "Make it real. Make it now."

I see this as a (slightly more pragmatic) flip side of my "liberal arts" article.


Gunnar

Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University 
graphic design program

http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
[log in to unmask]

Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA

http://www.gunnarswanson.com
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258-7006


-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------