Hi Gunnar,
Thank you for the thought provoking questions. I’m in the reflection phase—not enough data, so no real conclusions. Just speculation.
It’s interesting that you’d ask how a process like this might work if the subject matter (not the style?) was one where the designer did not share the problem’s context. I did have a project like that in the early 2000’s, when a class I taught in the States (non-Muslim) worked with a local Muslim group. In that situation, we started with client perspectives—what did they see as the most important cultural misconception held by non-Muslims? Students then interviewed the audience who held the misconception to see how much client perception and audience reality aligned. In that case, we found a primary misconception existed, but not the one that the client believed was primary.
If the cultural misunderstandings were well-researched (or if the designer worked with a writer who had generated the copy for the document), do you think we could tell the national/cultural origin of the designer based on stylistic features of the end product?
My quick answer would be no, unless you labeled it. Then it would be easier to see where the inspiration was coming from. But I also wonder if style rooted in, for example, present day Egyptian culture would feel different to other Middle Easterners than a style developed by Pakistanis. Would Westerners experience the Middle East as one homogenous region? Would style variation be too subtle? My bigger problem had been that students borrowed too much from the West, putting western culture on a pedestal instead of digging into less common approaches that tap into their own time and place.
Quick notes: I’m putting the use of different alphabets such as Arabic, Cyrillic, or Hebrew, as well as Middle Eastern styles of clothing to the side, because for me that's in a slightly different bucket.
In this project, students had a writing pre-req, so they created their own copy (and visual/verbal interplay).
To what extent do you think your students ended up abandoning Western stylistic assumptions?
I don’t know if that’s possible, but I wonder if it could be encouraged. I didn’t tell them to actively reject the West. I don’t know if I would have thought of it, but they're not advanced students, so that might have been a level of difficulty beyond their headlights. Maybe that would be possible with a group who had a better sense of what they were abandoning?
I also didn’t ask them to find their style in an historical view of their culture (even though we looked at historical views). Instead they looked to the time and place they currently inhabit, a hybrid of “karak and coffee” east and west.
Do you think national/cultural differences far outweighed individual differences within a national/cultural group?
Another interesting question that I find hard to answer. I don’t know their work over time, so it’s hard to know what individual preferences were part of the mix. But that said, I observed students who appreciated the differences they saw between what Pakistani students brought to the class, and how that differed from Egyptian, Qatari, and Palestinian approaches.
Do you think that the end result was documents that were more powerful, more genuine, more insightful, etc.?
Given other work that they’d done, I’d say that this project was more powerful and genuine for most students. How much of that linked to their desire to express their arguments or to delve into their own time and place, I don’t know. I saw growth over time as they found their way. It memory serves, we had four crits on the project (more crits than we could have on other exercises and projects), and each one had to be uploaded before class. I don’t want to undervalued those deadlines.
Do you think that, say, American students would learn more/differently if they did this sort of exercise in the company of a range of nationalities?
I think that would be a promising idea. In the argument/style exploration, the frustrations found in one culture were not necessarily shared by others. Those others pushed each team to find better arguments and ways of showing place and time, but because each team’s places tended to be different, there wasn’t a sense of the one best idea that I wish I’d found before you. My students, coming from different cultures, didn’t have the burden that American students might face.
Thanks for your patience (life kept me from putting this together earlier).
All the best,
Susan
On Jul 19, 2017, at 9:37 AM, Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Susan,
Thanks for the report.
I’m curious if you have observations on how the procedure you outlined would differ for a Western student or designer dealing with the Pakistani subject matter, a South Asian dealing with the Qatari subject matter, etc.? (Obviously, the theme of a misconception about one’s own culture that is the basis for the prompt is out the window if it is not one’s own culture that’s the subject matter.)
If the cultural misunderstandings were well-researched (or if the designer worked with a writer who had generated the copy for the document), do you think we could tell the national/cultural origin of the designer based on stylistic features of the end product? Or, to put it another way, do you think the students’ own cultural perspectives ended up outweighing the cultural subject matter?
To what extent do you think your students ended up abandoning Western stylistic assumptions?
Do you think national/cultural differences far outweighed individual differences within a national/cultural group?
Do you think that the end result was documents that were more powerful, more genuine, more insightful, etc.?
Do you think that, say, American students would learn more/differently if they did this sort of exercise in the company of a range of nationalities?
Interesting subject. Thanks again.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
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