Dear Don and List Members,
Back in February, I asked for help to encourage my Middle Eastern and South Asian students to explore design style from their own cultural perspectives. My experience had been that work tends to reflect Western styles. I am grateful for your insights and examples (and I must apologize because one note to me was lost despite my many searches).
Now I want to report back. (additional apologies for the lag time.)
The prompt asked students to create a multipage document (the class focuses on print) that addressed an aspect of a student's culture that she or he believes is misunderstood by an audience that had to be both defined and interviewed.
In terms of style, students needed to explore how style might reflect their own time and place. I have no IRB, and I’m not sure if this is a publication, so I’ll speak in hypotheticals. Hypothetically watching students work through style development might begin with very concrete approaches. For example, consider that Pakistan has colorfully decorated food trucks. Style attempts might start by showing the trucks. Egypt has old cafes that compete with new Starbucks. Style might be communicated through those competing coffee shop scenes. The project then would need to move toward finding an underlying essence that those scenes inspired.
Consider how two approaches might have resolved that incremental development.
Caveats: I want to be careful about claims. It’s difficult to describe visual information with language:
An Egyptian outcome might adapt those coffee shop views of style through the lens of the street. Style then becomes gritty color and texture that echoes city dirt, individual expression, and visual tension.
From a very different vantage point, a Qatari reflection might adapt the white and black of thobe and abaya (robes) to communicate a much calmer time and place through a monotone of black, white, and gray using white space much more generously in contrast to the other approach.
Where the first piece would communicate a more frenetic energy, the second would tend toward a deliberate sense of calm. While each design would be driven by its visual/verbal content, each would also be affected by its style.
A quick note about my take on the inventional/style connection and divide—I don’t feel that visual/verbal development of a particular problem and its solution necessarily drives visual/verbal style development, because many approaches to look and feel (if I can reduce the idea of style in that way for the moment) can represent content that reflects deep frustration.
That in a nutshell is that. Thank you again for giving me the space to explore this question, and taking it as a serious matter. I really am very grateful.
All the best,
Susan
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