from Terence Love sent: Tue 5/22/2007 9:57 AM
> UK and Australian figures from the Design Council and the DIA
> seem to suggest that in reality the primary function of design
> courses is general broad-based degree-level education - perhaps
> a bit like Classics previously. The figures suggest only a small
> proportion (perhaps 10%?) of design graduates finish up within
> design sector and a smaller proportion become designers. A few
> graduates undertake postgraduate study which implies the
> majority of design graduates use their skills in other occupations.
>
> Thoughts?
Terry,
I scribbled about graphic design education as a liberal arts education in Design Issues in 1994. You can read it on my website at:
http://www.gunnarswanson.com/writingPages/GDasLibArt.html. It's a bit long winded so here's the summary:
The notion of a liberal arts education has somewhat fallen apart because there is no way for anyone to have general knowledge of one field, let alone all. The Chinese menu solution of requiring one class from column A and two from column B leave nineteen year olds to integrate what we educators refuse to. Instead we could take a subject that is an intellectual crossroads of some sort--graphic design being one example--and use it to explore the connecting threads.
Some obvious problems with the suggestion include scalability--where do you get faculty for such a program--and the fact that many (okay, most) people are attracted to the field as vocational training rather than as a classics-like academic pursuit.
Dick Buchanan wrote about design more generally before that in “Design as a New Liberal Art” Papers: The 1990 Conference on Design Education, Industrial Designers Society of America.
The graphic design program where I teach does much much better than the 10% employment rate you cite but I don't have any figures for the long term. Graphic design tends to be a young person's field but I don't know where older former designers go to.
Gunnar
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