Francois,
That was a difficult question for a monday morning but now that the sun is over the yardarm, I'll take a stab at an answer.
As I said, we struggle. And the more modest goals is to help students become people who think rather than teaching them to think. Since I was talking about using the act of making to reinforce thinking, I was thinking specifically about reflection as part of an iterative process. You're going to design a booklet. Instead of opening InDesign and setting up a document, first making a folding dummy means you can reflect on how the size and weight makes a person feel, what position(s) they'd be in when reading, etc. That, in turn, affects a pile of typographic choices. Then making tons of thumbnails (we're thumbnail nazis) means they can meditate on formal and communicative possibilities. In related discussion, we try to bring things back to what all this does from the reader/user/audience's perspective.
(This is slightly beside the point, but I've always been more comfortable trying to imagine real people using stuff. I don't know if it makes any difference if I say "This is the sort of thing Aunt Iona would be reading at her kitchen table and the light there isn't very good and her vision is deteriorating so I should make this type a little bigger" or if I say "The demographic for this piece skews older so it should have bigger than typical type." In both cases, the type ends up bigger so I don't know if it really matters but I think it moves my design in a better direction. Around the time I started thinking and talking about this, I ran across an interesting article by Dana Cuff. "Architects' People" centered on interviews with architects asking them how they thought about the people who would use their building. I highly recommend it.)
So, as was said in earlier posts, there's some tendency to want to make something that looks pretty on screen, hit command-p, and move on. Through the iterations of printing, making mock-ups, or otherwise making things real, a conversation can go on about various issues. Some of them are technical. Some of them are formal. A lot of them are about the various stakeholders and what their interests are. That includes functional stuff like why one version is easier to read than another but another more compelling, contextual stuff like when and where would someone encounter whatever you're designing, and emotional stuff like how does holding this little thing make me feel and how does holding this big thing make me feel. . .
We also try to squeeze in other issues by our choices about the subject or goals of their projects.
I probably haven't approached the "precisely" part and, despite valiant efforts, I don't claim to have made all of my students think about precisely anything, let alone actually teaching them to think about precisely anything.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
[log in to unmask]
c: +1 252 258 7006
h: +1 252 754 1980
On Oct 30, 2011, at 9:19 PM, Francois Nsenga wrote:
> Dear Gunnar
>
> Today, Sun, Oct 30, 2011, you wrote:
>
> "At ECU, we struggle to help our students become people who make stuff AND
> think (and who use the way they make stuff in order to think.)"
>
> I am curious to learn what precisely you teach your students to think
> about, and how you go about teaching them to think about it.
>
> Regards
>
> Francois
> Montreal
|