Graphic Design
Journal 7
Graphic Design Journal No. 7
2018
In This Issue
Publisher
Society of Graphic Designers of Canada
2
Brutally Compromised
Nick Shinn
10 When Books Were Books
Chris Rowat
Founding Editors
Mary Ann Maruska RGD, FGDC
Ulrich Wodicka FGDC
22 The Forgotten History of the
GO Transit Logo
Greg Cunneyworth
Editor
Matthew Warburton CGD, FGDC
T 604 224 3125
E matt@emdoubleyu.com
28 From The Can To The Plate
Roberto Dosil
PICA 2014 Papers:
Co-Editor Journal 7
Aidan Rowe CGD
38 US design education prepares for
careers in the past, is standing on the
edge of the abyss, looking away and
singing kumbayah
Bernard J. Canniffe
52 Research on First Nations (Innu-Naskapi)
Iconography
Dr. Carole Charette FGDC
62 A Necessary Shift: Embracing
Research and Front-End Coding for
Experience-Centered Graphic Design
Dennis Cheatham
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© Society of Graphic Designers
of Canada, 2018
ISSN 1192-9871
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Return Undeliverable Canadian
Addresses to:
Society of Graphic Designers
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T 613 567 5400
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W gdc.design
74 Tracing the logic of graphic design in
Canadian design history
Brian Donnelly
86 Pedagogy of Engagement: An
Exploration of Community Projects in
Design Education
Layal Shuman
94 Social Responsibility and Design
Education: Design for the Public Good
Alison Miyauchi
Welcome to the long-awaited seventh issue of the GDC’s Graphic Design Journal.
First published in 1993 under co-editors Mary Ann Maruska FGDC and Ulrich
Wodicka FGDC, the Journal served as a flagship publication for the GDC through
to the mid-2000s when changing technology and the impact of the web
made a print publication seem like a bit of an achronism. Well, we’re pleased
to reintroduce the Journal in both print and digital formats.
Journal 7 consists of two narratives—the first is centred on design that touches
all Canadians, be it the iconic maple leaf which adorns our knapsacks or the logo
on the side of a commuter train, to the signage at the strip mall where we buy
our milk. The second narrative is a series of peer-reviewed research papers that
were presented at the PICA 2014 conference in Edmonton.
The PICA 2014 conference brought together academics from across North America
to discuss and disseminate research interrogating pressing issues in design
education. With research presentations, a workshop, PechaKucha talks and a
roundtable discussion a broad range of territory was covered.
Journal 7 features six of the presentations that have been further developed and
peer-reviewed for publication. These research papers cover a range of subjects
that are at the heart of current and future design education. For example, papers
explore the need for design education to further interrogate issues of social
responsibility and community engagement. Authors also ask questions concerning
the possibility and role for design history in regards to design curriculum and
the richness of opportunities of research concerning First Nation histories to inform
current design practices. Broader questions are also asked concerning how
we teach, the possibilities of employing coding within design practice and the
interrogation of the needs and requirements of design education to prepare
the designers needed for the 21st century.
To further the education theme three Bachelor of Design students from
the University of Alberta have created introduction illustrations contextualizing
selected papers. Particular thanks and recognition to Karin Jager CGD and Michael
Maynard FGDC for their work organizing and reviewing.
We hope that Journal 7 signifies new opportunities for thinking and writing about
the power and possibility of design in our lives.
— Matt Warburton CGD, FGDC and Aidan Rowe CGD
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1. Abject visual squalor of the
traditional low-end strip mall.
Toronto.
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BRUTALLY
COMPROMISED
It would be wrong to castigate the sign companies which
do the work, for the problem is systemic. To begin with,
the North American civic attitude considers retail zones as
a free-for-all where commerce rules, and big, cheap and
flashy trumps good taste. In mall after mall, from main
street to corner store, it’s understood that it’s okay for the
retail environment to be ugly as sin, because pretty is
a waste of money.
The tragedy of the common store front sign
We turn a blind eye to the many unpleasant consequences
of automobile dependency, building subdivisions of
double garages with living accommodation at rear. On
streets where cars take precedence over cyclists and
pedestrians, and in vast mall parking lots which nobody
walks for pleasure (given the option, one drives across),
low-rise stores are viewed through windshields from
afar, their signs restricted by area-of-facade bylaws to
thin strips into which text is crammed for “visibility.”
Less urban sprawl and taller buildings would help. The
big box stores which anchor shopping centres, and
chains with their own buildings of sufficient size and
distinctive architecture, fare better, but the signage
of rank and file merchants is severely compromised
before it is even begun.
Store front signage is arguably the most visible graphic design in the
environment. With the exception of upscale and historic enclaves, the inside
of malls, and some of the larger chains, the majority of store signage —
for independents and franchisees— is generally a ghastly blight on the
Canadian streetscape. Very little of this involves professionally qualified
graphic designers.
Nick Shinn
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Pedestrian shopping areas are fine: inside malls, signage
does not need to shout at motorists to be noticed, and the
same is true of “lifestyle” malls, such as the 2008
redevelopment of the Don Mills Centre, a mid-century
modern atrium-style mall, into The Shops at Don Mills, a
neighbourhood of shops with spaces where pedestrians
may idle, and an emphasis on walkability.
However, the overwhelming majority of retail developers
rarely provide buildings with the proper architectural
features to accommodate a variety of individual signs,
and it is crucial that signage be integrated into the
design of a multi-unit facade, as a distinct element of
architectural substance, for a street to have any
chance of aesthetic dignity.
Making signage an architectural feature doesn’t happen
when the emphasis is on reducing cost: there’s an
economy for the developer in providing a blank wall and
leaving signage to the merchant, just as there is an
economy in the merchant commissioning design from a
sign manufacturer, and in the sign manufacturer offering
design as a service performed by employees of limited
design education. None of these steps necessarily leads to
disaster, but in general they lessen the amount of quality
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time and material investment that is put into fascia
signage. Down the line the image suffers, with the result
that store front signage is at the bottom of the heap
for graphic designers. While it may be touched upon in
design school as part of corporate identity, it is not a
staple of the graphic design profession. There is little
incentive: it’s not a remuneratively rewarding genre of
work, neither is it creatively rewarding, constrained
as it is by elements beyond the designer’s control. In a
row of stores, individual signs are side-by-side and
willy-nilly, a crazy disharmony which taints all, not unlike
a stack of small space ads in a magazine, or banner ads
on a website. But worse, signs are often randomly sized
or butted up against one another, ignominies that would
not be visited upon print or web ads. Like pizza flyers,
store front signage is absent from awards competitions;
wayfinding systems have the cachet.
2
The sign company or design firm which presents a
small-store client with a sign proposal of subtlety and
restraint is asking for trouble. The merchant will want
it bigger, to snare motorists, and often not just the name,
but also a description of products and services offered,
with phone number and URL for good measure, cluttering
up and defacing the facade.
But there are towns where shopping streets are a pleasure
to walk, where one’s eyes are not continually offended
by aggressive, garish signs with distorted typography; in
Ontario for instance, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Huntsville,
and Orangeville. The game changer is heritage zoning.
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2. Type is distorted according
to the “Make It Big” principle.
Toronto.
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3. Considered as a whole, this row
of sign awnings is system design
with insufficient system, typified
by the lack of a colour palette.
Things wouldn’t be quite so bad if
all merchants restricted their signs
to a simple logo (as the franchisees
do), but most cannot resist the
temptation to bulk up with
superfluous information and cram
to the margin, lowering the tone
of not just their establishment, but
the whole strip. Etobicoke.
In 1985 a provincial planning act (the Ontario Heritage
Act) allowed for the provision of heritage zones, and
certain towns, prompted by a broad variety of stakeholders—residents, historical activists, heritage-attuned
BIAs (Business Improvement Areas), merchants, councillors and civic staff—began to place historically sensitive
restrictions on signage. Now that municipalities post
their bylaws on the Internet, they have become very
aware of what each other is doing, which has facilitated
this zoning movement.
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The most significant aspect of the trend has been
the prohibition of back-lit and neon signs. Although this
is ostensibly to avoid anachronism in pre-electric
developments, the result has been to turn down the
volume, as it were, and allow design space for subtle and
tactile qualities to emerge, away from the vulgarity of
the vinyl cut. This parallels another trend —the adoption
of hand-made and hand lettered signs in hip neighbourhoods, a high-touch antidote to the hegemony of
high-tech culture, with nostalgic overtones. Another
incidental benefit of heritage zoning is a self-regulated
harmonization of style, towards the classic, because
merchants are very much aware that there is a group
identity to the street, which they’ve all bought into,
otherwise they wouldn’t be there, they’d be out in a
suburban mall.
Perhaps the most distinguished example of historic
zoning is postcard-perfect Niagara-on-the-Lake. There,
submissions for store signage must not only conform to
the bylaw, but also be approved by a heritage committee.
Colour guidelines that complement the historic streetscape are posted online, and merchants are encouraged to
keep things simple, avoiding excessive “earlying up”
such as ye olde blackletter script.
The success of Orangeville’s heritage zoning informs its
newest shopping development, Westside Market Village.
While its older malls are magnificently bleak and nasty
tracts of tarmac and concrete, Westside Market Village
channels the historic vibe of Orangeville’s downtown
Victorian main street, Broadway, incorporating the
traditional two-tone decorative brickwork of 19th century
Ontario and the staggered cornice profile of its main
street facades. Although the anchor stores have backlit
signs, the small-store strips —always the weakest link—
feature formalized, standard-sized sign-plates illuminated
from above by goose-neck lamps. The signs are not
substantially integrated into the architecture (seeming
somewhat like add-ons) and the borders are a bit busy
and large, but the overall effect is a dignified improvement over the typical random mess.
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4. The developer has gone to the
trouble of embellishing this facade
with two-tone tiling, smartly
coloured siding and pediments
above the doors. But there is poor
provision for signage, which has
consequently been squished into
long thin boxes that don’t align
nicely with the other architectural
elements of the building,
destroying any harmonious
proportion and logic it might have
had. Orangeville.
5. Sometimes, one wonders if this
is a civilized country. Orangeville.
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6. Westside Market Village,
Orangeville, Ontario. Architectural
nostalgia informed by the town’s
Victorian main street, Broadway,
featuring the traditional staggered
cornice profile and two-tone
decorative brickwork of 19th
century Ontario. Rexall Pharma
Plus abuses its anchor tenant
privileges with loudmouth
branding: an incongruous,
out-of-scale and garish backlit
sign.
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Westside Market Village, with its sign boards designated
as part of site plan approval, points a promising direction
for future improvements to main street and mall Canada.
The onus is on local councils, developers, builders and
architects to set the stage and make things easy for the
sign industry to do a good job for clients—because when
the prime movers ignore their responsibility to provide
a suitable frame and canvas for signage, they allow this
final design element the leeway to spoil otherwise
commendable projects. Who knows, eventually graphic
designers may even become more involved in adding
value to this aesthetically impoverished sector of the
built environment. n
7. The signage of small leasees is
discreet: no backlighting, and
carefully detailed, standardized
sign boards.
8. Newly built units await tenants:
despite the attractive scale and
modulation of the strip, the
signage to come will suffer from
“blank wall syndrome”—i.e. it will
be superficial, not a substantial,
fully integrated architectural
feature of the building.
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1
WHEN BOOKS
WERE BOOKS
A trip back to the mountain culture publications of yesteryear
Story and photos by Chris Rowat
I first met Cameron Treleaven at the 2007 Banff Mountain
Book Festival. His small but overflowing table of books
was stuck in the corner, lost amidst the numerous booths
of current publishers and authors. The quantity of new
books on display at the festival was overwhelming, and
I browsed without much focus—until I found Cameron’s
booth. Unfamiliar books stared at me from simple wooden
shelves. I was riveted by their appearance. They looked
strange. The titles were long and formal. The placenames
were familiar, but everything else about them was new.
As I flipped through Cameron’s 100 or so books on
display, I realized I had arrived at the source. These were
the original mountain books that contained the original
mountain tales: first ascents, first explorations and the
epic adventures that have inspired generations of
dreamers to explore the mountains of the world.
On the surface, these old books look more or less like
the books of today; they have pages, words and images.
But after that they bear little resemblance. The typefaces
are unfamiliar. The colours more muted. Some only
use text on the cover, while others have intricate foil
stampings depicting abstracted landscapes. There
is little in the way of photography, but the few books
with photos print them with Ansel Adams perfection.
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There are fascinating illustrations and engravings. In the
era of desktop publishing and short-run, on-demand
printing, these books are cultural treasures akin to long
lost relics. And finding them is just as difficult.
Old books look the way they do partly because of what
was technically feasible at the time. Text pages were
printed “letterpress,” with raised metal type, while
photographs were printed “photogravure,” with metal
plates etched with acid. These two processes were
radically different and hence were printed separately.
That’s why very old books have separate image pages or
“plates,” devoid of text, and sometimes on different
paper. Over time, with the advances in printing technology, it became possible to combine words and
images on the same page. Book designers were free to
explore new layout possibilities: text beside images,
text over images.
As you peruse Cameron’s books, you can almost date
them by how they look. It’s an archaeological dig—
Cameron is a trained archeologist—complete with the
unique sensory experience that comes with handling
old books: the worrisome sound of the spine cracking as
you open it, the soft feel of the fragile paper, the musty
smell of disintegrating paper lingering on your hands long
after you’ve put the book down.
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4. Alpine Flora of the Canadian
Rocky Mountains, Stewardson
Brown, 1907, 1st edition. A
beautiful example of stylized
lettering.
5. Through the Heart of the
Rockies & Selkirks, 1921, published
by the Government of Canada,
Department of the Interior, 1st
edition. This series of books
promoted the National Park
system, and included editions on
Jasper and Kootenay Parks. A
common but clever technique
when printing with limited colours
was to use the paper as an extra
free colour in combination with
the gold and black inks.
2
3
1. The Challenge of the Mountains,
1909, published by Canadian
Pacific Railway. This series ran for
about 10 years, promoting the
Rockies, and the CPR hotel system,
to North American and European
travellers. Each cover featured a
painting, many of which became
emblematic of the CPR and
Rockies’ heyday. It is worth noting
many of the cover paintings
featured a female mountaineer,
quite progressive for the time.
2. Round About the Rockies,
Charles W. Stokes, 1923, 1st
edition. The illustration is printed
separately and glued onto the
cover. Labour was cheap at the
time, and this was an easy way
to add value to the cover.
3. The Glittering Mountains of
Canada, J. Monroe Thorington,
1925. The dust jacket has the
identical text on the back cover,
and the panoramic photo wraps
around it, including the front and
back flaps. Note that the text on
the image is hand lettered. It is
rare to find pre-Second World War
books with their dust jackets still
intact. Dust jackets were often
printed on poor quality paper and
not intended to last.
4
Why are we so fascinated with old things? Is it simple
sentimental yearning? Is it holding a physical object that’s
100 years old, perhaps the last of its kind? Or maybe
reading the original book is like listening to the tale told
for the first time, the voice of Shipton or Kain or Palmer
speaking to us as if they were still alive. And by connecting with them, and with the past, we feel more in touch
with the present. Whatever the reason, we will
always need book hunters like Cameron Treleaven.
For more information visit aquilabooks.com. n
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6–7. Cover and spread from
Mountaineering and Exploration in
the Selkirks, Howard Palmer, 1914.
The illustration on the left-hand
page was printed separately from
the text pages of the book using
a process known as photogravure.
The impression left by the edge
of the bevelled photogravure
plate can be seen around the
photograph. The term “plate” still
exists today, often in reference to
a section of special images within
a book. In this book, every plate
is protected by a tissue insert,
printed with the caption
information. The tissue prevented
the more acidic ink of the plate
from offsetting onto the facing
text page. These labour-intensive
printing processes were once
commonplace, but are now the
domain of a handful of specialty
craft printers scattered around
the world.
8–9. Summits & Secrets, Kurt
Diemberger, 1971, 1st edition.
The autobiography of one of the
world’s foremost mountaineers.
As technology and techniques
evolved, so did the possibilities for
book designers. Though not a
landmark example, this book
shows the dramatic change in style
that accompanied technological
progress. It is interesting to
note that today, for the price of a
nice mountain bike, you can buy
software that has embedded
within it the collective knowledge
of 500 years of printing. What
once employed legions of artisans
and craftspeople now takes place
on your laptop.
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14. In the Heart of the Canadian
Rockies, James Outram, 1905.
Includes the first ascent of Mount
Assiniboine. This book is a
cornerstone of Canadian
mountaineering publishing.
16. Trail Life in the Canadian
Rockies, B.W. Mitchell, 1924, 1st
edition. Interestingly, this cover
reuses the same art from the cover
of James Outram’s book (fig. 14),
almost 20 years later.
15. Untrodden Peaks and
Unfrequented Valleys, Amelia B.
Edwards, 1890 reprint. Originally
published in 1870, this is a fine
example of a Victorian-era cover.
This kind of multicolour embossing
was a popular technique at the
time. Edwards was an early female
traveller, adventurer, and
Egyptologist who wrote numerous
books about her exploits.
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10. The Selkirk Mountains:
A Guide for Mountain Pilgrims and
Climbers, 1912. Normally
attributed to A.O. Wheeler, the
copyright page includes Elizabeth
Parker.
11. The Mountain World, vol. 9,
1966–67, published by The Swiss
Foundation for Alpine Research.
This journal ran from 1953 to 1969
and covered mountaineering
around the world.
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12. Where The Clouds Can Go:
The Autobiography of Conrad
Kain, edited by J. Monroe
Thorington, 1935, published by
the American Alpine Club, 1st
edition. This copy was owned by
William S. Ladd, who was
president of the AAC from
1929–31 and climbed with Kain.
It also contains personal letters
between Ladd and Kain. The book
is worth $500.
13. Camping in the Canadian
Rockies, Walter Dwight Wilcox,
1896, 1st edition. One of the first
books on the Rockies.
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17
17. Everest 1933, Hugh Ruttledge,
1934, 1st edition. An early
example of text being positioned
over a photograph.
18. Mountains of Tartary, Eric
Shipton, 1951, 1st edition. This is
part of the Shipton/Tillman suite of
15 books and a beautiful example
of an illustrated dust jacket printed
in four solid colours.
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19–22. In print for over 100 years,
and still going strong, these two
editions of The Canadian Alpine
Journal, separated by almost
80 years, show the evolution of an
icon. Above: vol. 1, no. 2, 1908.
Note the different paper used for
image pages. The smooth, shiny
paper allowed for better printing
of photos. This format lasted until
1970. Below: The CAAJ, 1990.
With the evolution of mountaineering also came evolution in design.
Words and images were easily
woven together to tell the story in
a way that wasn’t possible 80
years previously. Cameron has a
complete set of the CAAJ, from
1907 to today.
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Designers are usually the first to take note whenever a significant corporation
changes its identity—for better or for worse. They aren’t shy to voice their opinions or
post their comments online. And when a logo that is perceived to be “timeless”
becomes redesigned beyond recognition, the industry at large seems to mourn the loss.
In this digital world, much to the demise of the design community, designers have
discerningly watched companies carelessly overdecorate their Modernist identities
with gradients and meaningless Photoshop effects.
THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY
of the GO Transit Logo
Greg Cunneyworth
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EF6C84 / Itsik Marom / Alamy Stock Photo
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It’s becoming a rarity that a prominent brand would
go more than a few years without revisiting or changing
their identity. It’s even less likely that a company, who’s
been around for multiple decades, would look anything
like it did when it was first introduced. But when a brand
preserves their original identity for half of a century
or more, and still appears modern, some would agree
it’s obvious a true masterpiece was created.
1–3. Some spreads from the
announcement booklet produced
to introduce the new GO Train
identity in 1967.
GO Transit is one of the few brands to accomplish this.
But the designer and creator of the iconic logo is the most
under-appreciated Modernist in Canadian design history.
Here’s why...
It wasn’t until 2008, more than 40 years since the GO
Transit logo was designed, that Frank Fox, creator of the
logo, was widely known for his work. Despite the success
of the brand and GO Transit itself, Fox has been overshadowed by other, more popular Canadian Modernist
designers like Allan Fleming, Burton Kramer, and
Jim Donoahue.
1
A few years ago, while I was studying graphic design
in school, I wrote a paper on the history of the GO Transit
logo. During my research, I contacted Frank Fox directly,
now a retired NSCAD professor, and asked him to recall his
memory on the creation of the logo.
In an email, Fox states, “Over the years [Gangon/Valkus]
had developed a good working relationship with the
advertising agency, McConnell Eastman. They were the ad
agency for CN and had the contract to produce an brand
for the Ontario government and the new transit system
for the city of Toronto. With the support of CN, Gagnon/
Valkus was given a contract to develop the [GOTransit
logo] under the umbrella of McConnell Eastman.”
At the time, Gangon/Valkus was owned by Jim Valkus
who opened the office in Montreal and partnered with
painter/filmmaker/designer Charles Gagnon, to develop
the CN corporate identity as well as to compete for
Expo ‘67 contracts.
Fox remembers how the team came to a quick resolution
to the project. They wanted to bring the initials of the
Government of Ontario, into a unified logo. “I started
working on it conceptually right away. We started
thumbnail sketches and in one of those surprising things
that happens every now and again, the actual concept
of the GO symbol came up very quickly. We were thinking
of two circles with a letter “T” somewhere in them. We
had cut out two circles, then literally put a square into the
circle, then “Bingo,” there was the G, in green, and we
could lay a white “T” on it.”
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2
3
BRB7AC / Bill Brooks / Alamy Stock Photo
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Fox also says that sometimes a design becomes a happy
accident. “We had this feeling among us that this couldn’t
be true. We went off trying many other solutions, but
nothing else was good enough. I know we were surprised,
this thing happened rather quickly. We played with the
proportions a bit, because we did not want the overlying
“T” to disappear, when the logo would be reduced
in size.”
Massimo continues to say that, “Timelessness requires a
certain amount of dignity and strength, virtues completely missed by the GO Transit logo. Pretty, yes, appropriate,
no.” For him, appropriateness should be at the core of
any solution, otherwise the problem has not been solved.
“Prettiness is not enough,” he adds.
Regardless, the GO Transit logo has become significantly
woven into the cityscape of Toronto and is an prominent
identifier of the transit system that 50 million people ride
each year. It’s unmistakably one of the most iconic brands
in Canada and has certainly achieved an enviable goal
that most designers only dream to accomplish.
Fox admits “A lot of the work in the office was done in
a collaborative way. This meant that ideas and concepts
were developed in an atmosphere of team spirit. The
GO symbol evolved very much in that manner.” Jean Morin
was also one of the designers working at the Gangon/
Valkus office and as Fox states, was “a ‘key person’ during
the design process and should also be given credit.”
However, not everyone agrees that the GO Transit
logo is a true masterpiece. Massimo Vignelli, famous
Italian- American modernist designer and creator of
brands like Knoll, JCPenny, and American Airlines, feels
the GO Transit logo is too ‘playful’ for a government
transportation system.
Greg Cunneyworth is Creative
Director and Co-founder of We
Make Nice Websites, a digital
design agency located in
Rochester, NY. He graduated
from the Rochester Institute of
Technology in 2009 with a
Bachelor of Art in Graphic
Design.
If Massimo feels that timelessness requires a certain
amount of dignity and strength, why has GO Transit lasted
for of so long? In July of 2013, GO Transit announced
a slight adjustment to its colour hue, the first revision in
47 years. But with no other changes in sight, one must
wonder if a signifiant change, like the one Massimo
suggests, could ever be made to it? How would the City
of Toronto react to a such a distinct change? And would
it break the confidence in the riders, or help it?
The GO Transit logo is essentially unchanged from the
original release in 1967 with the exception of it going
under one minor revision a few months after its release.
The original design had the ‘G’ and the ‘O’ slightly
touching. Today, a gap between both letters, and a white
‘T’ distinguishes the letters prominently. The change may
have been subtle but it made a big impact and has stayed
true to this day—a true testament to its timelessness.
Soon after the final draft was finished, Fox states, “We
made a presentation to McConnell Eastman in Toronto of
the original concept, showing the GO symbol and it’s
potential application. The development of the concept,
etc. was a collaborative effort by members of the
Gagnon/Valkus office. After that presentation and an
okay from the client, McConnell Eastman took over
from Gagnon/Valkus and our role diminished.”
About the Author
4
4. Speaking notes from the
presentation of the GO Transit
identity in 1967.
Some feel that GO Transit should be applauded for
trusting the work of Frank Fox— they didn’t change the
design for the sake of change like other brands have
done or add any meaningless shimmer to make it look
3-dimensional. What would Paul Rand say if he could
see the current abc or UPS logo as they are today?
Fox, who has been modest about his own work, hasn’t
asked to be recognized for it. The GO Transit logo, which
can be seen on every train, bus, and GO advertisement
in the GTA, proudly speaks for it self. Fox may never admit
it, but I bet he knew all along the GO Transit logo would
still be in use almost 50 years later because he designed it
with the intention to function not with the concern
of aesthetics.
Besides, isn’t that the real definition of design? n
Massimo confidently states that there are less
‘gimmicky alternatives.’ “I think, that it could have been
more dignified. For example a plain Futura Heavy or
similar typeface, could have been more appropriate for
the task. In the GO Transit logo, the letters ‘GO’ are
too toy like and the resulting sideway ‘T,’ is not serious.
I like the idea of the two discs, as formed by the letter
G and O, but it could have been achieved without
contriving the letters. A transit system should convey
the feeling of reliability, which is just the opposite
of playfulness. I find the logo rather ephemeral as style
therefore not timeless.”
26
Graphic Design Journal 7
27
Le journal de design graphique 7
1
FROM
THE CAN
TO THE
PLATE
The maple leaf as the symbol of Canada
My family and I landed as immigrants in Pearson International Airport February 2, 1978.
It was dark and cold, the wind was blowing hard and there was the maple leaf flag
weathering blizzard conditions in an open field, stoically welcoming us.
I had seen the Canadian flag before. Printed in maps and books, and live for the first
time at the Embassy in Madrid where it was hanging limp, wrapped around the flagstaff
behind the front desk. It looked sad; flags are meant to be outside, being torn to pieces
by wind and rain. The one at Pearson was. It looked stiff, like those planted by astronauts
on the moon, cut out of cardboard, except that this one was translucent; I am not
sure where the light came from because it was dark all around, but the flag was glowing.
It looked so natural, no planets, unicorns, hammers, just a leaf... a dead leaf to boot.
I asked myself who designed the Canadian maple leaf flag. How and when did the
maple leaf gain this special status?
Roberto Dosil
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Le journal de design graphique 7
The maple leaf was a brand long before it became the
official national symbol. The forces of commerce and
government, and more importantly, the people of Canada
had already recognized it as such.
In 1895, the enterprising Victoria Canning Company
of British Columbia was the first company to register the
use of the Maple Leaf as an export brand. It can be
said that the leaf started lobbying then for international
recognition. The records of the Canadian Intellectual
Property Office demonstrate that thousands followed,
and to this day, the trend continues.
Government was not far behind when in 1897 called
a competition inviting women to paint Canadian imagery
on blank Doulton plates; however, the 130- piece service
never went into production. Finally, in 2005 a porcelain
Maple Leaf Service was commissioned by The Right
Honourable Adrienne Clarkson and designed by Bill
Reddick, of Picton, Ontario.1
From a label to a dinner set, in the short span of 110 years
the maple leaf made it from the shores of the Fraser River
to Rideau Hall.
2
6
3. This General Service Badge of
the Royal Canadian Regiment was
worn by its members who served
in South Africa in 1899, further
evidence of the early and
widespread use of the maple leaf
motif in the Canadian military.
4. 77th Canadian Infantry
Battalion, First World War.
5. Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada,
Second World War.
3
1. As the Flag Debate came to a
boil, this design being promoted
by the Native Sons of Canada
drew broad support. It appears to
have originated in Quebec in the
1930s, when it was proposed by
the Ligue du drapeau national and
promulgated by means of a
booklet entitled Pour un drapeau
national/For a National Flag.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
Its province of origin may be part
of the reason Réal Caouette and
eight other members of the
Crédiste caucus in the House of
Commons publicly supported this
design, which was green and
white with a red maple leaf in the
centre. (The photograph and
model date from 1958).
4
2. The first registered Canadian
trademark to employ Canada’s
emerging national emblem was
the Maple Leaf Brand trademark of
the Victoria Canning Company of
British Columbia, registered in
1895. But before 1895 there were
probably many hundreds of
un-registered commercial insignia
5
that marked their wares with the
sign of the maple leaf.
31
6. A souvenir of Canada circa
1938. Although the sugar maple
doesn’t grow anywhere near the
Rockies, here its leaf helps say
western Canada. The postcard
itself provides a nice visual
summary of the symbols that faced
off during the debate of 1964: the
Union Jack and the Red Ensign on
one side of the flag divide, the
maple leaf and other home grown
emblems, like this iconic Mountie,
on the other. The equivalent
postcard could be purchased
today, sans Anglo references.
Le journal de design graphique 7
In the process, it has been hanging out with beavers and
astronauts, it branded hockey, lacrosse, and basketball
teams, bus lines, marketing boards, motels, and North
America’s oldest brewery. It has been part of the Canadian
military forces identity since 1899, and the national airline
since 1939. It has also found its way into postage stamps,
songs, poetry, and stereopticon images.
7. In the years leading up to
Confederation a number of
publications employed the
“native” Canadian symbol as a
picture or in words, among them a
periodical anthology of proose
and poetry that began publishing
in July 1853 and called itself simply
The Maple Leaf. The contents
page of the first number reveals a
mixture of imported fare from
Britain and the United States,
including the first instalment of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with a selection
of homegrown writing.
12
15
7
8–10. The beaver took a very brief
star turn on Canadian postage.
From the 1870s until the 1920s
Canada’s stamps usually featured
pictures of the reining queen
or king. Nonetheless, as early as
1897, stamps dominated by
the stern, grandmotherly face of
Queen Victoria included a
decorative flourish of maple
leaves. But the national leaf didn’t
take the centre of the philatelic
stage until 1959, when it appeared
on two postage stamps: The Battle
of the Plains of Abraham issue and
the St. Lawrence Seaway Opening
issue. As with the Quebec
Conference Centennial issue of
1964, in each case the now well
established Canadian emblem was
used in a nation-building context.
11. By the 1900s, most Canadian
athletes in international
competition had adopted a maple
leaf as their badge. Shown here
is the 1911 Maple Leaf basketball
team of Calgary, Alberta.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
16
8–10
14
11
13
12. The maple leaf appeared
with increasing frequency during
Canada’s early years. In 1909
when it came to costuming “Our
Lady of the Snows” (a metaphor
coined by Rudyard Kipling) for
a stereopticon image, the model
simply had to wear a maple leaf
pullover.
13. Since April 1939, when
Trans-Canada Air Lines launched
its passenger service with flights
between Vancouver and Montreal,
the airline has always flown under
some version of the maple leaf.
It changed its name to Air Canada
in January 1965, just before the
new flag became official.
33
14. The Air Canada logo from
1973, designed not long after
the new flag was born, clearly
belongs to the same design
family but doesn’t nearly have
the same presence.
15. Some of Canada’s most
ubiquitous and successful
enterprises communicate their
nationality by means of a maple
leaf. Canadian National Railway
Company dropped the leaf in
favour of Allan Fleming’s
modernist letterforms in 1961.
16. The Toronto Maple Leafs is
one of the most recognized leaves
in Canada, even though it’s blue
in colour!
Le journal de design graphique 7
By the time, that in 1963 Lester B. Pearson made the
creation of a national flag for Canada an election promise
it was taken for granted that the flag would include a
maple leaf. The parliamentary committee charged with
selecting the flag received almost 6,000 design proposals
from the public. Many of these proposals included Union
Jacks and the fleur-de-lys, grizzly bears, geese, salmon,
moose, the north star, aboriginal symbols, crossed hockey
sticks, and of course an overwhelming amount of maple
leaf interpretations.
21
The leaf was so widely accepted as a distinctly Canadian
emblem that no other candidate—including the biggest
rival, the beaver—stood a chance. The maple leaf had no
political affiliation; and nobody owned it. It was present in
native cultures and embraced by European settlers; it
engaged all people. Anyone could look at the maple leaf
and see an unassuming, neutral symbol that posed no
threat to their identity or interests. Besides, why would a
self-respecting country adopt as a symbol a rodent that
often forgets to get out of the way of a tree it has felled.2
17
22
19
23
18
20
25
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Graphic Design Journal 7
24
17–25. In its determination to
consider all reasonable possibilities, the 1964 Flag Committee
reduced the thousands of designs
submitted to the government by
Canadians since the end of the
Second World War down to a
visual pool of a few hundred. It is
interesting to speculate how they
decided which designs made this
first cut. The selection reproduced
here, now held at Canada’s
National Archives, ranges from the
refined to the jejune but indicates
the tidal wave of creative energy
the flag question released.
35
19, 20, 21, 23, 24 and 25 were
among the nineteen designs
shortlisted from the almost 6,000
designs considered in 1964.
19. Artist unknown
20. Adam Casson
21. Alain J. Esariste
23. George Bist
24. Arnold Weir
25. Alma Diebolt
Le journal de design graphique 7
26
Any number of people could and did claim to have
‘designed’ the maple leaf flag. Each of them contributed;
but the truth is that the maple leaf flag was created
over the course of about two hundred years by
the people, which identified with it and adopted it
to mean ‘Canada.’ n
With excerpts from:
Archbold, Rick. I Stand for Canada:
The Story of the Maple Leaf Flag. Vancouver,
Canada: Stanton Atkins & Dosil Publishers
2002. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.
Sources
Gotlieb, Rachel. “Home Plates.”
The Globe and Mail, 7 October 2006
27
26. The maple leaf on the front
cover was red and so were quite a
few faces at Weekend Magazine
when the popular Saturday
supplement, which appeared in
newspapers across Canada on
January 23, 1965, flew the wrong
flag. This was the earlier
thirteen-point version, not the final
eleven-point design [both drawn
by Jacques Saint Cyr]. On Monday
January 25, the Weekend
switchboard “exploded with calls
asking why our flag on the cover
had 13 points.” Sacks of mail soon
followed. Which all went to prove
“the pundits who claimed
Canadians were bored with the
flag shenanigans are dead wrong.
Canadians are very much aware
they have a new flag, and take a
passionate interest in it.”
28
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Graphic Design Journal 7
37
27–28. Canadians have an
interesting relationship with superheroes. They invented one of the
most famous comic book
superheroes (Superman) yet they
tend to tear down real-life heroes
whenever they get too full of
themselves. In the early 1940s,
homegrown comic book heroes
flourished, including Nelvana of
the Northern Lights and Johnny
Canuck. After competition closed
down most Canadian comic
book publishing in 1947, these
mythic figures disappeared
until the 1970s, when they often
reappeared in satiric guises,
poking fun at the whole genre.
One of the first of this new breed
was Winnipeg artist Ron
Leishman’s Captain Canuck, the
first superhero to wrap himself
in the new flag. A more recent
Canadian-born superhero is
Northguard, who first appeared
in 1984.
Le journal de design graphique 7
US design education prepares for careers in the past,
is standing on the edge of the abyss, looking away and
singing kumbayah
Bernard J. Canniffe
Abstract:
This paper will highlight how, in the United States,
design education persists with the same pedagogy, by
preparing students for careers that no longer exist.
Educators seldom ask what is motivating design,
and more importantly, what role design is playing in
society at large.
Fifteen years ago The United Nation’s Millennium Report
predicted that if the world’s socioeconomic trends do not
change then the future would look like this: the world’s
poverty class will grow exponentially; the world’s middle
class will disappear; a world super-rich class will emerge.
The Report sounds more like a prophecy today in light
of the economic recession of 2008 and the subsequent
lopsided recovery, rather than a projection when it was
first issued. We continue to find ourselves at a planetary
tipping point with: the icecaps melting; fossil fuels
destroying the environment yet becoming scarcer as our
dependence continues unabated; and our efforts to
reverse the damage we have done to the planet and its
inhabitants are a mixed bag at the very best.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
Against this dire need, a majority of design educators
continue to think in a vacuum and teach in a bubble.
Many are either unwilling or incapable to bring societal,
economic, cultural and political discussions into their
classroom. By failing to bring these discussions into the
studio classroom, institutions are graduating students
who are one-dimensional and can only understand the
world through the lens of graphic design as a service.
The service-provider model does not work today because
many businesses and communities are looking to
designers to help them understand where they fit and to
help them understand who they are. These types of
questions might be a reaction to globalization or they may
be fulfilling a societal need for design to play a bigger
and more comprehensive role. Whatever the actual
reasons are, communities and corporations are calling for
a new type of designer, a new type of educational
experience, and finally a new breed of educator.
Yet the issue cannot simply be solved by developing a
new educational experience and looking for a new type of
student and instructor. The elephant in the room is tuition
cost, and if we do not first solve this, then the other things
cannot come to the forefront.
In the US, student debt, and specifically private college
design student debt, is crippling and prevents students
from making their dreams a reality. They graduate with
more debt than their starting salaries can sustain.
Educators are called to fuel student aspirations and
prepare them for the future. But the sad fact is that many
institutions are institutionalized and the only way they
understand their future is to continually raise tuition,
while at the same time offer the same educational delivery
system as they have always done. The design profession
and design education must work together to address
and solve this imbalance. If we do not engage and work
together we are designing ourselves into an uncertain
and fragile future.
Keywords:
Social
Community
Collaborative
Participatory
Economic
Cultural
The paper will also provide a theoretical construct of
how to prepare students for multiple careers within the
design field as well as prepare them to be adaptive
thinkers and cultural responders. Finally, the paper will
demonstrate the failures and successes of leading
students through this new and unchartered territory by
including several project case studies.
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Le journal de design graphique 7
Illustration:
Andrea Monterroso
Scientists agree that we are at a dangerous point in
regards to climate change—a planetary tipping point.
Politicians appear to be incapable of working together to
create policies to reverse these calamities, and they
lack the vision to enthuse the population to care. We live
in a world that embraces and rewards a societal malaise
of apathy—as long as my way of life is not threatened,
I don’t care what is happening.
Against this background, student debt, specifically design
student debt, is crippling, and prevents students from
making their dreams a reality and taking on big issues.
They graduate with more debt than their starting salaries
can sustain. Students are, quite rightly, outraged about
continued tuition hikes.2
“You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you
have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with
your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the
one suffering you could have avoided.”
— Franz Kafka
I love the title of the book, The World Must Change,
by Ten Duis and Haase. This book celebrates the history
of Dutch graphic design and traces how Dutch designers
were motivated by idealism to change the world.
Today, we are compelled to ask does the proposition
that “The World Must Change” hold true and can
we be motivated by our idealism?
Circumstances dictate that we must continue to propound
these questions. Fifteen years ago, the United Nation’s
Millennium Report predicted that the world’s poverty class
would grow exponentially; the world’s middle class would
disappear; and a small super-rich class would emerge.1
The Millennium Report appears to have been looking into
a crystal ball. The Report identified the world’s central
challenge as ensuring “that globalization becomes a
positive force for all the world’s people, instead of leaving
billions of them behind in squalor.” The Report advised
that the remedy to the economic disparity lies in a global
economy that has a “more solid foundation in shared
values and institutional practices—it must advance
broader, and more inclusive, social purposes.” Design
needs the middle class to survive, and poor people
do not have the luxury of being handed badly designed
products. We are compelled to engage with the disenfranchised, and it is a detriment to all when we do not.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
This quote seems as important as ever. Regardless of
our own challenges, we have the choice to engage or not.
If we do nothing then, sooner or later, it will come
knocking on our door, in one way or another, whether the
knocking is from inside of us or from the outside actions
resulting from our societal neglect. Can design occupy
the space that Kafka describes? And if it can, then what
would this space look like?
The Future of Design Education
The question is who will address and define graphic
design’s response to the state of the world—Educators?
Educators are called to fuel students’ aspirations and
prepare them for the future. But the sad fact is that many
institutions are institutionalized; and the only way they
understand their future is to continually raise tuition,
while offering the same educational delivery system as
always. The design profession and design education
must work together to address and solve this imbalance.
If we do not engage and work together, we are designing
ourselves into an uncertain future. This uncertainty
could be made more fragile if tuition increases in higher
education are the next economic bubble.3 If this is true,
then not only will there be a student debt crisis, but many
colleges and universities will disappear.
If students cannot afford to attend colleges and
universities because of the tuition cost, then student
enrollment will drop. Lower enrolled programs will
close because they will no longer be fiscally viable.
In some cases entire institutions will close their doors
either from mismanagement, or from not being nimble
enough to change their curriculum or because of fiscal
irresponsibility.
There may already be some indicators that this is already
happening, and here are three examples:
On Friday, September 14, Robin Forman, Dean of Emory
College of Arts and Sciences, released a letter stating that
Emory University would be closing their Visual Arts
Program. The economic downturn in 2008 has led to many
liberal arts colleges and universities across the country
reshaping their curriculums. In many cases this reshaping
is not enough or responding fast enough.4
The College of Visual Arts in St. Paul will close its doors
in June 2013 because it was unable to weather the current
economic crisis and continue to meet the financial and
academic needs of its students.5
In September 2014 the Corcoran Museum and College of
Art and Design, located in Washington, DC, closed its doors
125 years after it had opened.6
The educational model for graphic design must change.
Both the scope of the profession and the marketplace’s
expectations for what graphic design should deliver have
evolved dramatically in the past thirty years, necessitating
a shift in how graphic designers are trained to meet those
demands. However, the educational delivery in US design
schools has either resisted or been incapable of meeting
these demands, resulting in a widening gap between
educational instruction and professional practice.
Students seek a realistic and professional educational
experience grounded in design theory and history,
which is not only important to their education, but also
necessary for acquiring the appropriate skill sets to enter
the competitive work place. Graphic design instructors
are faced with the complicated task of giving students
both technical and theoretical skills in a discipline that is
segmented and structured. The resulting assignments
end up being ‘artificial’ projects with open, generous
parameters and easily achievable time constraints.
If instructors buck this pedagogical trend and attempt
to implement real-world projects, they are faced with
the struggle of first finding an appropriate client and
project, second identifying a workable budget, and third
engaging a willing client committed to enriching the
educational experience of the students. The typical result
has been the implementation of various classroom design
assignments, which fit neatly into the academic structure,
yet these types of projects lack the professional benefits
necessary for the students’ development. Thus, the
students end up lacking experience in client management, project management, team-centered solutions,
access to and engagement with target audiences, and
development of multiple delivery vehicles—ultimately
missing the opportunity to create workable design
solutions for the real world. As corporations and businesses compete in a marketplace that is global, complex, fast
moving, culturally sensitive and volatile,7 graphic design
education needs to embrace and meet these challenges.
It should also be noted that very few College and
University graphic design programs have courses that
focus on preparing students to engage in and with
disenfranchised communities to develop innovative,
entrepreneurial and sustainable projects. It’s far easier
and more predictable for instructors, for example, to
deliver theoretical posters projects for fantastical events
like designing interiors for multi-million dollar homes
and hotels. The critiques become backslapping occasions
where everyone is praised for their creativity. The entire
class coming together to join in a resounding chorus of
singing Kumbayah concludes the critique.
These educational delivery problems are made worse
because instructors, for the most part, are only teaching,
reading, researching and responding to graphic design.
They are working in a bubble and teaching isolationism
from what is occurring in the society at large. This
isolation may have been appropriate in the 1970s, but
not today.
Another factor to consider is the type of student who
is entering undergraduate graphic design programs from
high school today. Educators are confronted with a
completely different type of student that came to graphic
design, say fifteen years ago. The high school student
of today embraces social media and understands technology, they are interconnected and have the ability to
multitask, as well as being adaptive learners and deeply
caring about global social and environmental issues.
Many higher educational programs find it very
difficult to adapt their curriculum to respond quickly
and nimbly. Many programs find it impossible to
change their circumstances and develop programs that
match the needs, desires and expectations of today’s
incoming students.
The higher educational system bureaucracy is too slow,
ill prepared, risk adverse, and designed to maintain the
status quo. Change is hard, because many curricula
changes have to move from one committee to another.
First, the department needs to meet, discuss and vote.
The College and University Committees follow these exact
same processes of discussion and voting. It is important
to note that each committee can suggest changes and
vote to approve or deny what is before them. If changes
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Le journal de design graphique 7
are needed to the proposals then it has to go back down
to the lower committee. It takes time, a great deal of time,
to convene committees, deliberate and then vote. This
system is made even slower because there is another
committee that has the authority to ultimately pass or
reject certain and substantive changes. In many US
Universities, the final decision is made by a State-level
appointed committee, and at many Colleges, the Board
has the final say.
This, as you can imagine, is a slow and demoralizing
process. It has been said that academia moves at a snail’s
pace and the world is moving at light-speed. It is no
wonder that many institutions are teaching in the past for
students who are looking to the future. This widening
educational gap can be seen in the following four charts.
They highlight and emphasize different academic
structures in graphic design education and provide
examples of what can happen if nothing is changed to the
curriculum; what happens, over time, if no change
continues; what happens if change happens and finally
the possibility of continued and substantive change
continually occurring.
Graduating High School Student
High Desire
High Enthusiam
Understanding of technology,
world-issues, social media and
the possibilty creativity
We live in a complex interconnected world that
is paradoxical because, at the same time, it is more
fragile and disconnected. We need to educate students
to be adaptive thinkers, experiential learners,
and entrepreneurs with an understanding of social and
economic issues as well as graphic design. We need
to be clear that graphic design should be taught in the
context of all these other important factors/issues.
The Importance of Entrepreneurs
The importance of preparing students with the skills to
create their own career path seems more important now
than ever. Economist Justin Wolfers gave an interview
on NPR’s All Things Considered, hosted by Melissa Block,
on September 27, 2011.9 At the time of the interview,
Wolfers was a Professor of Business and Public Policy at
the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The
interview entitled, “Who Are The Job Creators,” was a
reaction to the Republican Party critique on the Obama
administration’s policies that would allegedly hurt
“job creators.”
Graduation into Profession
Courses. Print-based and formulaic.
Project outcomes are restrictive, and
course titles are name after delivery
vehicles: e.g. Poster Design
Generalist. Student is
not prepared for career.
Has been taught in the
past and caught in the
middle
“Wolfers argues that, although there are many
small businesses in the United States, and many new
businesses fail over time. A dry cleaning service is
a small business and so are estate agents, hairdressers,
lawyers, and doctors.”
Wolfers goes on to say that these types of small
businesses are not interested in innovation, neither do
they bring new products to market. They do not add
to the engine of economic growth whereas innovators do.
Innovation is at the heart of graphic design, and design
is a different animal than small businesses because it has
the capacity to bring new ways of making, new ways
of thinking as well as being a catalyst by engaging with
communities, small businesses and corporations alike,
in the creation of innovative strategies and new and
previously unconsidered businesses.
As designers, we continue to ask ourselves what is
motivating design, and more importantly, what role is
design playing. Does the motivation come in the form
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Graphic Design Journal 7
Behar was recently interviewed by the CBS Sunday
Morning Show on an episode entitled “Designs For Better
Living.”10 Behar has devoted his life to bringing design to
the disenfranchised.
Graduating High School Student
High Desire
High Enthusiasm
Understanding of technology,
world-issues, social media and the
possibility of using creativity and
technology.
Graduation into Profession
Student is not prepared for career.
Has been taught in the past and is
caught in the past.
Entry into Art and Design Education
Restrictive Educational Experience
Student is prevented from building on
experiences, desires and skills.
Entry into Art and Design Education
In this model we can see how
failing to change the curriculum
affects incoming students. High
school students enter the College
experience with higher technical
skills as well as aspirational goals
but the institution fails to challenge
the students’ imagination, to
help define the students’ careers,
and provide skills for students
Design as an Agent of Change
There are several examples of how the design profession
is leading the way and giving hope for the future. One
such designer is Industrial Designer Yves Behar. Behar is
known for developing a $100 laptop capable of being
powered with a fifth or less of the energy that it takes to
power a regular laptop. Today there are more than three
million of these laptops used around the world.
Courses
Foundational courses are the high-point
in the student’s educational experience.
Courses, in majors, are restrictive, and
disassociated from each other. Courses
have not been changed in many years.
Flatline Educational
Experience. Student cannot
build upon experiences,
desires and skills
Fig 1. Flatlined Education
of business and product innovation that Wolfers’ calls for
or does the motivation have to do with investing in poor
people in the hope that this investment will lead to a great
middle class in the future, and importantly who will lead
this charge? Will it be education or the design profession
who takes the lead?
Fig 2. Declined Education
to adapt their skills as circumstances dictate. This system fails to
prepare students for careers after
graduation.
In this model we can see, over
time, how the continual lack of not
changing the curriculum affects
incoming students. The same high
school students enter the College
experience with higher technical
skills as well they are aspirational,
and after entering College, they
are not academically challenged
and neither are they delivered
an educational experience that is
relevant. This system fails to
prepare students for careers after
graduation.
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Le journal de design graphique 7
“There’s a great proverb I learned from Finland that
says, ‘The poor can’t afford bad design, cheap design,
low-quality design…’”
— Yves Behar
“A beautifully-made, well-made, high-quality
product is understood exactly in the same way here
than it is somewhere else.”
— Yves Behar
Bad design breaks and you have to buy it again, and
again—something the poor cannot afford.
One example of a corporation that embraces design
innovation is the Apple Corporation. Design is integral to
everything they do, and every product they make.
We emotionally connect to them, and them to us. They
define who we are and what we aspire to be. There is a
before and an after, and in the after, both our behavior
and perception are changed forever.
“The notion that because somebody is poor they don’t
have the same appreciation for beauty or function is
completely erroneous,” said Yves Behar. “It’s incredibly
insulting, if you really think of it.”
— Yves Behar.
His most recent project has been to design glasses
for poor kids in Mexico. The Mexican government hired
Behar because poor children, who needed glasses,
were choosing to go without them, rather than wear the
un-stylish glasses that the government had been issuing.
Today, millions of Mexican schoolchildren are wearing
his glasses.
Sophomore and Junior Years
1
Graduating High School Student
High Desire
High Enthusiasm
Understanding of technology,
world-issues, social media and the
possibility of using creativity and
technology
Senior Year
2
Entry into Art and Design Education
Student builds upon experiences, desires
and skills. Student has peak educational
experiences and opportunities.
In this chart, we can see a logical
and first step in providing a
program that embraces change.
There is an initial period of
generalization and the senior year
is focused on specificity. It is
important to note, that in this
model, the high school students’
skills and aspirations are exceeded
when they enter college.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
It is also extremely important to
note that some college and
university programs have already
embraced this model. Because the
senior course is structured as
project-based, no curriculum
changes need to be made to
embrace projects that come into
the course.
Finally, in this model, we can see
how the educational structure
prepares students for a rapidly
changing world. It exposes them to
internal design studios allowing
students to have experiences with
client-driven projects.8 Students
also have multiple opportunities to
travel, and study outside of the
Objectives
Outcomes
Assessment
Courses
In two phases. In the first phase students
embrace new skills, new ways to think, to
strategize, and make. In the second phase
students develop their own personal
vision, voice and projects.
Fig 3. Optimum Education 1
Fig 4. Optimum Education 2
By Program
By Year
By Semester
By Course
By Project
By Tertiatary
Critiique
Reviews
Competitions
Sophomore and Junior Years
Graduating into Profession
Student is prepared for career.
Has been taught in the future and for
multiple futures. Can lead today and
tomorrow.
institution. Finally, it should be
noted that the entire experience is
nomadic, and the overall
educational experience better
prepares students in the future
and for the future.
Reviews by Years
Internal Studio
1
Graduating High School Student
High Desire
High Enthusiasm
Understanding of technology,
world-issues, social media and the
possibilty of using creativity and
technology
Critiques
Individual
Group
Class
Preliminary Critiques; Work in Progress/Process
Final Critiques: Refined Project Ideas
Final Presentation: Work is Finished
There are different outcomes and objectives
between each catagory. For example, in the final
presentation, the focus shifts from strengthening the
creative strategy and shifts into the delivery of the
idea. Students will be assessed on their presentation
skills, body/verbal language, articulation and attire,
along with the creative and technical aspects of
their project
Senior Year
2
Exhibition
External Studio
Graduating into Profession
Student is prepared for career
Has been taught in the future and for
multiple futures. Can lead today and
tomorrow
International Reviews
Internship
Competition
Competitions NOMADIC Experiences
Classes inside studios, coroprations,
Multiple Critiques
governments, Countries
Multiple Critiques
External Studio
Sponsored StudiosStudents and Faculty embedded in profesInternal Studios
Real-world projects
sional studios (methodology, project-based
* Design Center: RCAD
learning either real or theoretical projects)
** Design Works: MCAD
***Center for Design Practice (CDP):
Reviews
MICA
Entery-Level
***** Working Class: SCAD
Mid-Program
International
Scholarship
Cultural Emersions and Project-Base
Learning Experiences
Competitions
Short and Long Exposures
* Ringling College of Art and Design
** Minneapolis College of Art and Design
*** Maryland Institute College of Art
**** Savannah College of Art and Design
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Senior Exhibition
Le journal de design graphique 7
Preparing Students For an Ever-Changing Landscape
In 2013, I came to Ringling College of Art and Design
to head the Advertising Design (AD) and Graphic Design
(GD) programs, and I was also the interim head of the
Business of Art and Design (BOAD) program. Managing
three undergraduate departments with students who
had different skill sets allowed me to think of potential
inter-disciplinary educational opportunities. One
such opportunity presented when the Sarasota Police
Department (SPD) contacted me requesting assistance
in developing a new brand.
In my initial meeting with SPD liaison officer, Linda
DeNiro, I asked why they needed a new identity and she
explained that there were two main reasons. The first
was that SPD had a new Chief of Police (Chief Bernadette
DiPino) and not only was she a charismatic leader, but
was also a visionary on how she envisioned the police
engaging in and with communities, the second was that
SPD needed to re-engage with the local community with
the goal of the community recognizing that the police
officers and SPD were both a part of the community and
that both constituents needed to work together.
I declined the opportunity to produce a new brand,
but offered to help them develop creative strategies to
engage with and in the community. I was clear that a new
brand might be an outcome of developing these creative
strategies, but would not be the purpose of the project.
Avoiding the project as strictly “brand development” was
important for two reasons. First, we needed to move the
client away from understanding the role of design as only
a service provider. Second, this allowed us to introduce
the idea of design as tools for community engagement
and strategic thinking—moving from design superficiality
into design specificity.
I selected a group of nine students for the SPD Project
that both comprised of BOAD, GD and AD students. I also
selected a Digital Film student to document the course
experience as well as to look for creative avenues to
engage with the community.
Nine students were selected who had web, branding,
copywriting, business and entrepreneurship expertise as
well as community engagement expertise. One Digital
Film major student became the project documentarian
whose project became important to him as a portfolio
piece, as it was to the course and SPD.11
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Graphic Design Journal 7
In my experience, the most effective way to engage
with community projects is to embed yourself in the
community. The most effective way to change behavior
is to listen to everyone’s needs, desires and opinions.
From listening, the designer can identify the solutions that
the community needs, wants and will adopt as their own.
Presentation of the BLUE+YOU
campaign.
And to this end, they met inside the SPD building every
week and every week we would tour different areas of the
police department as well as having police officers make
presentations to us. The presentations were from the
K-9 Unit, The Bomb Disposal Unit, SWAT, as well as many
individual presentations from senior and junior police
officers and community leaders. We toured all departments within the building and attended many police
community events. We used the SPD classroom as a venue
to present our creative strategies to the police officers.
Through meeting with the community and appreciating
the physical design of the Police Department building,
the creative strategy developed was the launch of a
free movie series called BLUE+YOU. The movies were
presented on one of the exterior walls of the SPD building.
We developed a new brand, a new website and a new
methodology and protocol of how to engage in and
with community as well as how to engage in and with
social media.
All these interactions allowed the police to present a
face of SPD to the community that was human, welcoming
and collaborative rather than solely authoritative, and in
return, the community came to respect SPD.
I always try to accomplish two things when I teach a
course. The first is to make the student experience as real
as possible, and second to relate the course projects
to the local community. There are larger goals that I am
trying to achieve with this framework, which relate to
my beliefs about design and design education. I believe
that engaging with local communities, organisations and
corporations leads to relevant outcomes and provides
peak learning experiences for students. I am also mindful
whether the institution has the capacity and passion to
embrace the socio-economic and cultural issues that face
the region and the ability to see the institution as a
responsive and proactive engager for social change. It is
my fervent desire that art and design education should
always be used as a primer for cultural inclusion and social
advocacy as well a catalyst that engages locally and
affects internationally.
SPD Facebook page showing
the movie night promotional
banner.
The BLUE+YOU identifier and
showing an example of how the
identifier could be made a flexible
system.
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Le journal de design graphique 7
Students interviewed by local
media about the BLUE+YOU
Campaign.
Students tour SPD Building.
The course was divided into three phases. In the
first phase students went through a series of exercises
that focused on using design to engage with and in
communities. The second phase was subdivided into
socioeconomic, demographic and cultural research as well
as research on the SPD, and other police departments
throughout the world. This research was essential for us
to understand what the Sarasota community looked like
and how other police forces were presenting themselves
and what they were struggling with. Students also
went out into the community and interviewed people.
The questions were more aspirational in nature, and not
confrontational or directed. For example, we wanted to
ascertain what the community felt the SPD was doing well
and poorly, and what they would like to see improved.
This research helped us understand how the community
perceived the larger issues of police, crime and civic
engagement. We shared all the research information
with SPD in the form of presentations. Each presentation
was followed by a series of questions designed to
engage the SPD giving them the opportunity to respond
to the students’ research. The final phase comprised of
developing creative strategies into a single strategy and
funneling these strategies and implementing them.
BLUE+YOU
The creative strategy we decided on was to bring the
community and SPD together through the launch of a free
movie series, and the movies would be presented on one
of the exterior walls of the SPD building.
SPD Officer Linda DeNiro listens to
student presentation.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
Press release image.
This coming together was also represented in a typographic representation entitled, BLUE+YOU. BLUE+YOU
is a simple and malleable logotype—it represents the
fact that SPD is empowering the community as well
as it reflects a need for a shift in the community’s social
experience. Both are connected by the “+” symbol.
The “+” symbol both connects and empowers both
communities as equal partners for positive change.
BLUE+YOU means “WE,” where both communities are
in this journey together—they need each other. They
cooperate to celebrate positive behavior and positive
outcomes. The beauty in this mark is also in its flexibility,
and that flexibility is based on the typographic hierarchy.
The community, represented by YOU is empowered
to engage with SPD represented by BLUE. BLUE serves
YOU, BLUE feeds YOU, YOU welcome BLUE, YOU help
BLUE, BLUE+YOU. In the promotional movie poster
we see the use of the typographic subset that represents
the community and SPD coming together to celebrate
a community event. The script subset strengthens the
primary logotype as well as broadening the experience.
For example, how the use of “serves” is used as a
manifestation of SPD empowered to engage with the
community. BLUE+YOU was used on all promotional
vehicles as well as on the new website.
Website
The existing SPD website was visually complicated with
informational clutter. It was difficult to navigate and the
most important information was buried in hard-to-find
locations. For example, one would see crime statistics on
the home page and most of the information, although
relevant and needed, was of little actual interest to the
community. The information of who had been arrested
and what the police were doing in the communities to
combat crime was alienating communities and portraying
the SPD one-dimensionally.
In the first stage of the website redesign, the students
presented a Strength, Weakness, Assets and Threats
(SWAT) analysis of the current website. Many of their
observations are mentioned above. This information was
shown visually with snapshots from the website that
was followed with a hierarchical map. The map clearly
demonstrated the ineffective navigation as well as
the clutter of repeated information. The map allowed the
SPD to visually understand why their current website
was not reaching their communities with the message
they wanted to send.
The new website embraced and supported BLUE+YOU,
both aesthetically and intellectually. The visual clutter was
changed to a clean typographic approach with an easy
navigational system. In the new website, the community
information was front and center, and that information
depicted positive police and community stories, that were
reinforced with photographs. The website embraced SPD
and the Sarasota Communities working together.
The Event
On Wednesday, April 23rd the SPD held a press conference to announce the launch of the BLUE+YOU brand,
introduce the new website and announce that the movie
night would be held on Saturday, April 26th. Every local
TV news affiliate as well as many of the local newspapers
were at the event. The media helped promote the
upcoming movie night. The press conference concluded
with the Chief inviting the community to the free movie
night, asking them to invite a friend and grab some free
popcorn while the movie “Despicable Me 2” was to be
projected on the wall of the Sarasota Police Department.
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There were over 150 people at the movie night. There
were off-duty police officers and their families who were
sitting alongside the Sarasota community residents. The
audience consisted of young, old, African American,
White, Hispanic and Asian people. The uniformed SPD
went through the crowd and thanked them for attending.
The movie night started with the student documentary
that contained interviews with police officers at
community events and ended with the Chief discussing
the importance of the BLUE+YOU brand.
Students expressed how rewarding the educational
experience had been and through this experience they
understood how graphic design could be used as a tool
to empower communities as well as bringing disparate
groups together. They also expressed that the course had
been both a challenging as well an enriching experience.
Students also stated that the real-world nature of the
course and being able to engage with communities was a
rewarding and empowering experience. Many students
indicated that they were concerned how they would
respond to their other studio courses where the projects
would be theoretical and the pace would be a lot slower.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the benefits outweigh the risks. There is
a need for graphic design students to become involved in
real projects involving real clients in real communities in
order to broaden both students’ educational experience
and their understanding of client management. The
students have expressed that they find out more about
themselves as designers and individuals from interacting
with the community. Students have also expressed that
they have benefited from understanding the needs of the
client, time management, and project constraints. These
classes inevitably involve a great deal of reflection as
the student questions issues about inequality in inner city
communities and the effectiveness and limits of design.
For the student, the class opens up a wider understanding
of the complexity and interconnectivity of the world,
and their role as a designer within that complex system. n
Notes
1
‘We the Peoples’; the Role of the United
Nations in the 21st Century, (2000),
http:\\www.un.org./en/events/
pastevents/pdfs/We_The_Peoples.pdf
(accessed Sept. 13, 2015).
2
“The (sic) key issue that students are
concerned about is the commercialization of higher education, which many
feel has led university leaders to
prioritise financial goals over the needs
of staff and students.” Rebecca Ratcliffe,
University Protests Around the World:
a Fight Against Commercialisation,
The Guardian, March 25, 2015, accessed
Sept. 13, 2015 http:\\www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/mar/25/universityprotests-around-the-world-a-fightagainst-commercialisation.
3
Both the SPD and the Sarasota community were optimistic
about the movie night. There have been many more free
movie night events held at SDP and the SPD has increased
their presence in local communities where they walk
around neighborhoods and engage with residents.
It is too early to say with any clarity what the impact
of this project will be since there was only one project and
then I left Sarasota to come to Ames, Iowa. What is clear
is that the institutional profile has been raised in the local
community, and the students who took the course had
a positive and enriching experience.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
“The rate of growth in tuition far
exceeded real estate appreciation even
during the housing bubble. That’s just
one of the interesting nuggets in
“Student Lending’s Failing Grade,” a new
report in which the staid agency warns,
‘[f]ears of a bubble in educational
spending are not without merit,” Equal
Justice Foundation, “College Tuition
Growth Rate Is the Biggest Bubble of
Them All,” U.S. News & World Report,
Sept. 28, 2011, accessed Sept. 13, 2015.
http://www.usnews.com/education/
blogs/student-loan-ranger/2011/09/28/college-tuition-growthrate-is-biggest-bubble-of-them-all
4
Lilly Lampe and Amanda Parmer, Emory
University Eradicates Its Visual Arts
Department, Portending an Ominous
Trend in University Education, art&education, accessed Sept. 13, 2015.
http://www.artandeducation.net/
paper/emory-university-eradicates-itsvisual-arts-department-portendingan-ominous-trend-in-universityeducation/
5
Marianne Combs, College of Visual in
St. Paul Sunk by Recession, MPR, aired
on Jan. 17, 2013, accessed on Sept. 13,
2015. http://www.mprnews.org/
story/2013/01/16/arts/college-ofvisual-arts-closing
About the Author
6
7
Elena Goukassian, In a Pseudo-Funeral,
Mourners Grieve the Closing of the
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington City
Paper, Sept. 29, 2014, accessed on Sept.
13, 2015. http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/visual-arts/2014/09/29/in-a-pseudofuneral-mourners-grieve-the-closingof-the-corcoran-gallery-of-art/
Thackara, J. 2005. In the Bubble:
Designing in a Complex World.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 5. (“[In] one
single day of [2004], as much world
trade was carried out as in the whole of
1949; as much scientific research was
published as in the whole of 1960; as
many telephone calls were made as in all
of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as
in 1990.”).
8
Although there are some programs listed
with internal design studios, this is not a
comprehensive list.
9
Melissa Block, “Who Are the Job
Creators?,” NPR, aired on Sept. 27,
2011. Accessed on Sept. 13, 2015.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/
27/140854971/who-are-the-jobcreators
Bernard J. Canniffe is Graphic Design Chair
in the College of Design, at Iowa State
University. He co-founded the collaborative,
multidisciplinary social design studio called
PIECE STUDIO in 2008 and is an advisor for
PROJECT M, which is an international social
collaborative group collective.
Bernard J. Canniffe is committed to using
design for the common good and he has
made presentations at international
medical, design, and academic conferences
around the world. He is the recipient
of the Graphis: Inspiring Designers Award,
the Baltimore Step 10 Influential Designers
Award, and The Joseph Binder Award.
Canniffe holds a BA Hons in Graphic Design
from Newport College of Art & Design,
University of Wales, and an MFA from the
Savannah College of Art and Design.
10 Designs for Better Living, CBS Morning
Show, May 31, 2015, accessed on Sept.
15, 2015. http://www.cbsnews.com/
news/designs-for-better-living/.
11 It is also extremely important to create
a diverse student team when engaging
in real world projects. I am always
mindful about student diversity because,
in art and design, student diversity
means celebrating the fact that an art
student is in the same class as a graphic
design student. Whereas true student
diversity lies in the intersection of an
engineering student being enrolled in
the same course as a public health and
graphic design students.
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Le journal de design graphique 7
Research on First Nations (Innu-Naskapi)
Iconography
Dr. Carole Charette FGDC
Abstract:
The following article presents an analysis of painted
patterns on caribou skin coats (and other articles of
clothing) produced by the Innu-Naskapi and Cree nations
from territories that range from northeastern Quebec
(or Lac-Saint-Jean), to the Labrador Peninsula, all the way
to James Bay, Canada. More specifically, it is a study of
the iconography on specific pieces of clothing that were
created and worn as early as the 18th century until
the beginning of the 20th century to ensure successful
hunting game.
Keywords:
Naskapi
Innu
Cree
Indigenous Iconography
Design Composition
A successful hunt would allow an entire tribe to survive
throughout the winter and into the next spring even
in most difficult conditions. This was a very important
practice and symbolic work that was essentially painted
by women, however, the hunting part of this practice
was reserved for men. This practice seems to be unknown
by the craftswomen of our present time.
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Participant observation and interviews among today’s
communities confirmed that knowledge of previous
cultural practice is absent. This impoverishment is most
noticeable when comparing coats created at the end
of 20th century with coats created today—a sign of an
evanescent practice.
Approached from an ethnological-aesthetical point
of view, this innovative research will revisit this abstract
visual language and enrich the body of knowledge in
technical and artistic-design processes.
Data collected over the past century came from
communities already significantly decimated by famine,
multiple epidemics of flu and other diseases that
raged at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of
the 20th century, resulting in the premature demise
of oral traditions and practices.
The persecution of native communities due to the
federal Canadian government’s policy and “philosophy
of exclusion and cultural annihilation and cultural
genocide”1 widely contributed to the decline of ancestral
clothing design practice which incidentally and
tragically coincided with the disappearance of the
herds of caribou in ancestral hunting territories.
Introduction
As an experienced graphic designer, I am always amazed
by the rich indigenous designs coming from an earlier
era. The intelligence and beauty of these ancient designs
make me question the education I received in graphic
design in North America, particularly its foundations in
the school of Bauhaus. The diversity and the visual
richness of these patterns have never been submitted
to formal analysis and I feel that now is the time.
The following article presents an analysis of painted
patterns on caribou skin coats (and other articles of
clothing) produced by the Innu-Naskapis and Cree nations
from territories that range from northeastern Quebec
(or Lac-Saint-Jean), to the Labrador Peninsula, all the way
to James Bay, Canada.
Migratory hunting practice was a vital necessity
considering that the animals moved in small herds around
a huge territory and were the main source of food and
materials to produce tools. While the hunters would know
the migrating habits of the herds, ‘luck’ was an important
part of success since hunters didn’t have access to
today’s means of transportation and modern technologies
for locating game. A successful hunt would allow an
entire tribe to survive throughout the winter and into the
next spring even in most difficult conditions.
Tanner provided testimony of his own experience of a
winter spent hunting game with the Cree.2 The hunting
party carried minimal and essential transportable
equipment and bannock from their summer camps to
the winter ones, and vice versa. He recalls exhaustion
from walking in heavy snow without food in order to
retrieve material left behind the previous year.
More specifically, it is a study of the iconography on
specific pieces of clothing that were created and worn
as early as the 18th century until the beginning of the
20th century.
Photo by Carole Charette, by kind
permission of National Museums
Scotland, A-1881.37.44 (detail).
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Hunters wore two “magical” coats per year (one for
summer and one for winter). Coats were designed for one
type of hunting activity and for one season and never
used for anything else. Once used, the coats would lose
their magical power. Hunters would therefore either
abandon the coat on-site or exchange it for other goods.3
I then decided to focus my energy on developing a
formal study and analysis. I decided to take into account
the myths and legends and the spiritual and religious
practices of that time to preserve the cultural dimension
linked to these patterns—a dimension which has a
strong symbolic value inextricable to my research.
Today, painted caribou coats are rare and are no longer
made in indigenous communities (the way they used to),
but they still retain an important place among elders with
respect to their material cultural heritage. The beliefs
associated with these artifacts honour the strength and
survival of their forbearers who were confronted with
harsh, precarious and rough conditions.
The anthropologist, Adrian Tanner reports that caribou
coats carried such a huge importance among QuebecLabrador indigenous religious practices at that time
because they constituted the material representation of
the hunters’ visions as well as their stories and songs
accompanied by the rhythm of the drum made from
caribou hide.6 Such stories and songs preceded the hunt
in the hopes to create visions and to connect with the
caribou’s spirit.
By analyzing artifacts from that period of time now
preserved in museum collections, we know that indigenous communities used hand-painted ceremonial caribou
skin coats specifically dedicated to hunting these animals.
This ritualistic and traditional hand-painted practice was
also applied to other pieces of clothing such as mittens,
leggings, hats, moccasins as well as ceremonial hides
and bags. This important symbolic work was essentially
painted by women,4 however the hunting part of this
practice was reserved for men.
My work follows the footsteps of anthropologists
Webber (1986) and Speck (1914) who studied the material
culture of the Innu-Naskapi and Cree communities in
the 1920s and 1960s. I have also included the work done
by Burnham (1992) who was a textile curator at the
Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and who collected data on
painted caribou coats for a period of over twenty-five
years, and who illustrated, in her book, about sixty
of these artifacts now part of Canadian, American and
European museum collections.
Inspired by these indigenous designs, I initiated this
study several years ago with the intention of sight-reading
the patterns to make a semiological analysis and to create
a syllabary.5 I had also planned a formal analysis of the
patterns. My first intent was soon abandoned because of
the challenges and difficulties of gathering testimony
from the elders who I hoped would know about these
practices and who I hoped would be able to confirm the
meaning of the patterns. It turned out that almost
everyone consulted had never seen the caribou coats
or could not recall any tradition about the making
of such coats. Perhaps this was because their community
was dislocated, their culture and heritage was disrupted,
or simply because they didn’t want (or were afraid) to
talk about what I had gathered.
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For their part, shamans drew their inspiration from the
real world as well as myths and legends linked to their
spirituality. Ancient artifacts refer to the shaman’s vision
and dreams that connected with the “spirit of the caribou
living and coming down from the sacred mountain.”7
According to Burnham, the dreams, magic and visions of
the shamans or the best hunters were interpreted and
depicted by the women of the tribe, who created these
coats and other accessories in hopes of a successful
hunt and to “please the caribou.”8
Although the men’s visions initiated the design of the
coats, Burham asserts that “Less than half of twenty-one
different elements found on coats might be considered
of significance worthy of a hunter’s dream. When decorations of the coats are carefully analyzed, it seems likely
that one or perhaps two main motifs were dictated by
man, while the rest was left up to the woman.”9
A frequently occurring design motif is a double curve.
Webber and Speck present the hypothesis that the
double-curve is an abstract representation of the antlers
on a caribou head and is associated with the worship of
the spirit of the caribou.10 Interviews done with Innu
women elders in 2013 offer another path of interpretation
and meaning. Female elders suggest that the double
curve represents the blueberry flower or the spirit of the
forest.11 This leads us to believe that the interpretation
of a particular pattern by indigenous people has been,
or still is, polysemic or that its significance has evolved
over time.
Photo by Carole Charette, with
the authorization of the Canadian
Museum of History: III-B-589,
c. 1700, Collection Speyer.
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Apart from the field data collected by Webber and
the study of the double curve, previous ethnographicalanthropological research gives us very little interpretation
of other geometrical or organic patterns.
Methods and Material
I began with documentary research in the Innu
community at the Mashteuiatsh Museum archive centre in
Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, at the Canadian History Museum
in Gatineau and at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM in
Toronto). Next I met with communities on site. My project
was approved by the Band Council of Mashteuiatsh and
I worked closely with their cultural committee to set up
interviews, presentations and participant observations.
I also visited another Innu community (Uashat Mak
Mani-Utenam) northeast of Quebec, located on the
St. Lawrence shore in Sept-Îles, and worked with
the Cree Cultural Institute-Aanischaaukamikw from
Oujé-Bougoumou. I studied numerous coats and other
related artifacts distributed among several museums
and collections around the world. Future meetings
and on-site visits are being planned.
Data Collection and Observations
Raw data collection began with an extensive literature
review followed by identification of relevant artifacts
among museum collections. Formal permissions
were granted for me to conduct on-site studies, make
observation notes, take photos, etc.
Photo by Carole Charette, with
the authorization of the Canadian
Museum of History : III-B-642,
1790, Collection Margaret
Rhuland.
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Data Management
Following the preliminary study of patterns, I developed
a grid for the analysis and classification of the raw data
collected from the field. This grid identifies elements
of each group of patterns (such graphic design elements
as colour, lines, dots, circles, etc.) and visualizes
their evolution, their assemblage and their specificities
over the period studied (beginning 18th until mid20th century).
I rapidly observed that the biaxial symmetry (graphic
elements that duplicate four times) featured on earlier
coats from the beginning of the 17th century, was no
longer used and completely disappeared by mid-18th
century, being replaced by a type of double-curve.
Elements of Design and Composition
Remarkably, the work of ancient tribes was guided
by an intuitive understanding of design principles of
composition. The more frequently used principles were
contrasts of form, structure, weight, size, direction,
colour and rhythm. This visual heritage provides
evidence of ancient knowledge and mastery of the
creative principles in graphic design.
Even today, a successful design relies on the sensible
and innovative use of these principles, no matter if for
architecture, industrial, web or graphic design.
Preliminary Analysis
When studying the painted coats from Innu-Naskapi
and Cree communities, I immediately noticed that the
women knew and mastered basic design principles.
Their creations were composed of such basic design
elements as geometrical shapes and dotted lines
made either with circles, squares or rectangles and
even diamonds.
According to Burnham, the central group of patterns
on the back of the coat were dictated by the men, the
remainder of the coat was interpreted by the woman
making it.12
There are numerous variations in the motifs: a series of
lines (grouped and mixing straight, thin, medium, large,
dotted), geometrical shapes such as squares, circles,
diamonds, rectangles, triangles, etc. I also found crosses,
hearts, vegetal patterns and broad variations of the
previously mentioned double-curves. The triangular
sections (gores) might representation the “sacred
mountain” where the spirit of the caribou lives.13
Double-curves are so diversified that I hypothesize that
they were created as some kind of personal distinctive
signature. Some are geometric and abstract, others
are more inspired by forms coming from nature, or
simply incorporating dots and circles perhaps concrete
representations as asserted by Webber.14
Symmetry is widely used: quadrates, double-curves,
groups of lines often starting with one colour in
the center, etc. Symmetrical patterns appear on the
shoulders, on the middle of the sleeves, on cuffs and
hems—harmoniously distributed all over the coat
almost as columns starting from the centre of the back
as well as on the front of each lateral panel.
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Some coats have as many as three designs and the most
complex coats have up to five.
All coats have one design featuring two equilateral
triangles meeting at a central top point. Other designs
are complex at the bottom and become simple as the
triangle becomes narrower. Perhaps this particular
group of patterns is the symbolic representation of the
shaman’s or hunter’s vision.
Generally, designs include empty space that confers
rhythm to the overall composition. On most of the coats
there is a flange in the shape of either a portion of an
arc, angle or rectangle as a signature component. Flanges
are sewn around the neck and fall over the back. Most
of the time it contains design elements to match the rest
of the coat.
Large shapes are shaded with hatchings: either vertical,
horizontal, oblique, etc., which demonstrates a quest
for perfection and balance. The precision and the
quality of the execution and the regularity of the lines,
the repetition and patterns are evidence of strong
visual perception.
Thus far my work has identified a visual “signature”
in the execution of the patterns painted in a specific
period of time, indicating perhaps that these coats
could have been made by the same person. This seems
consistent with Burnham who states that the most
talented woman would be released from daily domestic
tasks to spend all her time designing a coat.15
Women used a palette of pigments taken from the earth
of their territory: the yellow comes from fish eggs, the
red comes from ochre or iron oxide, the blue-green from
copper oxide and black from a high concentration of
copper oxide.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
In the course of colonization, more colours appeared such
as vermillion red (sulphide of mercury or cinnabar) and
the washing blue (Reckitt’s blue). The evolution of colour
allows us to estimate the date of contact with Europeans
and Western impact on the production of these coats.
The Canadian Museum of History and a few other
museums have participated with a spectrometric pigment
study conducted by the Canadian Institute of Conservation (ICC). This analysis has resulted in a timeline
of pigmentation and the consequent accurate dating
of the artifacts.
About the Author
Dr. Carole Charette FGDC is a researcher,
an Assistant Professor for the Design
Studies program at MacEwan University,
presently investigating First Nations
iconography. She holds a PhD in art and
design education from Université
Concordia, Montréal, an MFA in typography,
and a Bachelor degree in Communication
Design from Université Laval, Québec.
She founded, with Bernard Houde, Trio
communication-marketing inc. and works
for several clients such as ING, RDI, UQAC,
Conseil canadien du bois, Desjardins, etc.
Preliminary Findings
This research study will provide perspective, determine
stylistic attributes and define commonalities and similarities in compositions, bringing a deeper understanding
of the indigenous female’s creative process.
Throughout her career as a designer and
a teacher, she has maintained the highest
performance standards within a diverse
range of functions, which is clearly
demonstrated in her past successes.
She served as the president and CEO
of the Société des Designers Graphiques du
Québec (SDGQ) for ten years. Through
her actions within SDGQ, she organized two
international conferences, design contests,
a series of lectures, websites, as well as
developing many tools and publications to
support design practitioners. She is a GDC
Fellow and an SDGQ honorary member.
Surprising new artifacts were added in 2015 and while
the analysis has not yet been completed, the preliminary
observations are presented here as initial fragments.
I am planning on more data gathering over the upcoming
year, but to date I can confirm that the patterns vary in
quality, complexity, and dexterity over time and clearly
show the wide imagination of craftswomen.
Conclusion
I conclude this article by expressing the deep respect
I have for the indigenous communities and their material
and intangible culture.
I have been guided by verifiable graphic design data
and the scientific approach.
It is my greatest wish that my research will help
community members (indigenous and non-indigenous)
discover their symbolic and spiritual values and bridge
the past and the present.
As a Professor in Graphic Design, I hope that this
research will inspire future students within indigenous
communities to undertake design education, to better
understand this creative process by offering the necessary
tools and keys and to re-appropriate their ancestral
graphic environment and practices. n
Notes
1
“TRC—Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada,” 2015, http://
www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/
index.php?p=820
6
Adrian Tanner, Bringing Home Animals:
Religious Ideology and Mode of
Production of the Mistassini Cree Hunters,
(New York: St. Martin Press, 1979).
2
Dorothy Burnham, To please the caribou.
(Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1992).
7
Alika Podolinsky Webber, Symbols of
Breath. Self-publication. (Ottawa, 1986).
3
Dorothy Burnham, To please the caribou.
(Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1992),
3.
8
Dorothy Burnham, To please the caribou.
(Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1992).
9
4
Alika Podolinsky Webber, Symbols of
Breath. Self-publication. (Ottawa, 1986).
Dorothy Burnham, To please the caribou.
(Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1992),
2.
5
Inuktitut syllabics (Inuktitut:
ᖃᓂᐅᔮᖅᐸᐃᑦ [qaniuja:qpa’it][1] or
ᑎᑎᕋᐅᓯᖅ ᓄᑖᖅ [titi au’siq nu’ta:q]) is a
writing system (specifically an abugida)
used by the Inuit in Nunavut and in
Nunavik, Quebec. In 1976, the Language
Commission of the Inuit Cultural Institute
made it the co-official script for the Inuit
languages, along with the Latin script.
Reference: http://www.tusaalanga.ca/
node/2505 retrieved March 3, 2016.
R
On all coats, a larger red-brownish (red ochre) line begins
at the bottom extremity and it continues on the front
panel going vertically all the way to the collar. This same
large line appears on the end of the cuff. The back of the
coat is magnificent with vertical assemblages composed
of groups of lines on the top part opening up to a triangle
containing double-curves and other design elements.
A gore is constructed from an additional piece of hide and
inserted to expand the bottom of the coat.
13 Dorothy Burnham, To please the caribou.
(Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1992)
and Alika Podolinsky Webber, Symbols
of Breath. Self-publication. (Ottawa,
1986).
14 Alika Podolinsky Webber, Nipish-Floral
patterns among the Northeastern
Algonkians. [Unpublished manuscript]
(Ottawa, 1998).
15 Dorothy Burnham, To please the caribou.
(Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1992).
10 Alika Podolinsky Webber, Symbols of
Breath. Self-publication. (Ottawa, 1986).
11 Personal notes collected during
on-site interviews, Charette, C. 2013
[Unpublished manuscript]
12 Dorothy Burnham, To please the caribou.
(Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1992).
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Le journal de design graphique 7
A Necessary Shift: Embracing Research and Front-End
Coding for Experience-Centered Graphic Design
Dennis Cheatham
Abstract:
Graphic design practitioners are increasingly called
upon to develop outcomes that facilitate experiences.
A shift from print-based media into experience-focused
design means that thinking, knowledge, and skills in
interaction design, design research, and service design
are often necessary. With this shift in design practice,
design education must also change. This paper reports a
curricular approach to experience-centered design where
a “useful, usable, desirable” framework has informed
the implementation of skills like front-end coding and
research into the Graphic Design program at Miami
University. Evaluation of this shift is based on data
collected via interviews, observations, and student work
samples. Recommendations for future curricular
development are made in order to inform the shape of
design education as it embraces issues of usability
and function alongside the teaching of aesthetic that
facilitates engaging user experiences.
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Graphic Design Journal 7
Keywords:
Interaction Design
Usability
Curriculum
Front-end Coding
Experience Design
Activity-centered Design
Illustration:
Sylvia Rigakis CGD
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UUD: A Framework for Advancing Design Education
At the core of the UUD framework is an ideological
and practical shift away from aesthetic primacy. The
“desirable” of UUD has long been a quality of graphic
design, representing the craft excellence designers
espouse in creating persuasive and functional visual
design outcomes. The importance of conceptually
engaging, clearly communicative, and visually pleasing
design is not being debated in this review of a UUD
framework for design education.
A survey of literature in graphic design reveals that
the importance of its “useful” and “usable” qualities have
not been widely addressed. Jorge Frascara’s 1988
article Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science? called
the impact of graphic design on society to the fore.2
In this article, Frascara challenged design education to
teach graphic design in ways beyond style:
…teaching should represent all levels of the activity,
that is, the emotional and the rational, the communicative,
the technological, and the awareness of the social
context. p.27
In current graphic design practice, projects that start
with a detailed brief and end with the delivery of a static,
substrate-bound outcome are no longer the norm.
Aided by the proliferation of screen-based media, a shift
has taken place toward experience-centered design.
With this shift comes a need for design education
to evolve—teaching the thinking, knowledge, and skills
necessary for this different way of designing.
As with any new endeavor, the groundwork for how
to proceed is largely undefined. Based on the results I
have seen from my own teaching experience, I propose
that a valid framework for experience-centered design
education can be built on what Liz Sanders termed
“useful, usable, and desirable” design.1 In an effort to
challenge design learners to address problems beyond
the aesthetic, I have implemented this “useful, usable,
and desirable” (UUD) framework into a range of learning
experiences and courses in graphic and experience
design at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Over the
course of this paper I will explore the value of UUD
and what I have discovered by implementing it into the
ways I facilitate learning.
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Frascara’s own work echoes this stance. Much of his
research has been on the topic of design and healthcare,
supporting his statement that designers should be socially
responsible with their work. Don Norman’s November
2010 post “Why Design Education Must Change” at
core77.com suggests that design education had still not
satisfactorily heeded Frascara’s advice 22 years prior:3
In the early days of industrial design, the work was
primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however,
designers work on organizational structure and social
problems, on interaction, service, and experience design.
Many problems involve complex social and political issues.
As a result, designers have become applied behavioral
scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for the
task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of
the issues and the depth of knowledge already known.
Norman addresses the “desirable” of design in his post,
noting that “the need for styling will never go away” but
he chastises design education for eschewing the teaching
of human behavior, cognition, complex social systems
and rigorous research methods in design curricula.
In 2014 a cadre of prominent design researchers,
calling themselves “The Design Collaborative,” produced
a statement titled: “DesignX: A Future Path for Design.”4
This statement was a charge for design to address social
issues in designerly ways as well as ways of thinking and
doing that are not as native to design:
DesignX aims to enhance the tools required to assist
people, organizations, and societies in developing systems
and procedures that address major human and societal
needs. DesignX builds upon the design profession’s
emphasis of thinking by doing, thinking by drawing,
sketching, testing, and making coupled with intensive
observational techniques, deep analyses of the entire
system, and repeated, iterative testing, reflection
and modification.
Based on the positions shared in these three articles, it
seems that graphic design education has been reluctant
or at the very worst, incapable of advancing with the
social and technological challenges of the last 27 years.
In each of these articles, the “desirable” quality of design
has not been in question, but the thinking, knowledge,
and rigorous attention to usefulness and usability has
been identified as inadequate.
As a design researcher working in areas where design
and human behavior, perception and action intersect,
I agree with the stances made in the aforementioned
articles. My professional experience in interaction and
experience design have supported the stance that design
education should address content in learning experiences
that has not typically been addressed by design.
Experience-centered design activates many of the skills
and thinking processes involved in the production
of print-based design. However, it also encompasses
thinking, knowledge, and skills that extend beyond
substrate-limited design.
Thinking and Skills for Experience-Centered Design
Interaction design includes the development, design,
and testing of websites, web applications, smartphone
apps, and other digital interfaces. In order to craft
these final outcomes, a range of coding languages,
computing equipment, and usability testing is involved.
My teaching in interaction design includes the
development, use, and application of:
• HTML (markup language: page structure)
• CSS (style sheet language: page styling)
• JavaScript (programming language: triggered
interactions)
• SASS (scripting language: efficient page styling
pre-processing)
• Responsive Web Design (device-agnostic design to
improve usability across multiple screen sizes)
• Web typography (custom typefaces)
This list is not intended to be inclusive, and doesn’t begin
to address the tools and skills involved in the production
of outcomes outside of web design.
Experience design includes a broad swath of outcomes,
including services, systems, and products. Because
people perceive and interact with these very differently
based on their worldview and situation, experience
design is most often operated as an activity-centered
approach to designing involving the study of human
behavior, actions, and perception.5 An activity-centered
approach to design allows designers to determine how to
design outcomes that endeavor to be culturally relevant
to the people for whom they are created. Experience
designers employ a wide range of thinking, skills, and
knowledge:
• design research skills, including ethnographic and
qualitative methods
• user experience testing
• heightened awareness of ethical and cultural concerns
• knowledge of the time-based ramifications of design
decisions
• systems design thinking
• multi-sensory awareness
• knowledge of materials
• systemic approaches to design
Prototyping skills and iterative process are part of
experience-centered design much like they are in
print-based design. However, experience-centered
design development utilizes linear and non-linear means
of development that are not part of substrate-limited
design. Prototyping for interaction design is most often
done by coding HTML, CSS, and JavaScript6 and testing is
conducted on a range of devices with users. Experience
design development can include exploring intangible
components like sound and lighting, developing affinity
maps experience maps (often referred to as customer
experience maps.7
• Content Management Systems (CMS) (easy-to-use
website backend, e.g. WordPress)
• PHP (server-side scripting and programming language
for customizing CMS-powered site structure)
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Designing experiences requires learners to deepen
their thinking, develop experience-centered design skills,
and grow their knowledge. In response, design education
must shift to teach these emerging sets of skills and
focus thinking and knowledge generation toward human
behavior. Based on my experience using a UUD framework
for developing and operating learning experiences
in graphic and experience design at Miami University in
Oxford, Ohio, I have found it to be an effective means
for facilitating learning necessary for experiencecentered design.
Program Context
Graphic design and experience design at Miami
University is situated in the Department of Art in the
College of Creative Arts. Courses in graphic design focus
on visual and interaction design and students graduate
with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. At any
one time, about 60 students are enrolled in the graphic
design program as a whole, and each class is composed
of about 20 students.
In fall 2014, a Master of Fine Arts in experience
design was launched at Miami University. The MFA is a
collaboration between the Interactive Media Studies
program and Graphic Design. The first group of students
consisted of five individuals whose professional
experiences included computer science and graphic
design. The MFA program is comprised of courses
that address activity-centered design research, user
experience testing, human factors, marketing, computer
programming, visual design, and innovation studies.
UUD In Action
I have operated UUD in two different ways at Miami
University. The most common approach has been the
development of specific learning experiences for undergraduate design courses. However, in two interaction
design courses, it has served as a semester-long method
of inquiry. In these courses, interaction design has been
approached as a “usable” focused activity where the
design of websites has started with coding languages.
In total, learning experiences that are based on the
UUD framework have been facilitated 12 times over a
period of two and a half years at the undergraduate
and graduate level. In order to share the results of this
work, I will separate these learning experiences into
the useful based and usable based components.
Useful
Questions of usefulness are “meaning” questions. In
order to determine what to design, answering questions
of what matters to target audiences is essential. As design
becomes increasingly experience-focused, it is important
that designers become adept at asking and answering
questions of what is meaningful to people, in order to
reveal opportunities for the development of innovative
outcomes. In order to reach these answers, it is important
for learners to develop the thinking, skills, and knowledge that will allow them to observe and study human
behavior as they seek what matters to people.
“Usefulness” is at the fuzzy front end of the design
process. Often, problems become clearer as questions
are raised and design outcomes are developed.8
A “usefulness” approach to designing can introduce
unfamiliar ways of thinking and doing for learners.
In an effort to address these, I have developed and
operated learning experiences that challenge learners
to broaden their perspective on design.
The People-Driven Design Sequence
In fall semesters, learners complete the People-Driven
Design Sequence in my Applied Interaction Design course.
This project is a set of two studio assignments designed
to challenge learners to develop and design outcomes by
starting with people first. Learners are not given an
assigned outcome, rather they must base the outcomes
they design on what they learn and extrapolate about
a constructed persona.
During the first class period for this assignment, each
student builds a randomized, unique persona by blindly
selecting slips of paper from piles that are organized by
persona aspects. These include:
• age
• gender
• a year when the person lived
• a place where the person lived
• an interest or hobby
Because these piles could render 75,287,520 possible
combinations, it is highly unlikely learners will receive the
same persona that someone else has created in the past.
The results of this experience have created personas like:
• A 30 year-old woman living in Montpelier, Vermont in
1865, interested in carriages.
• A 9 year-old boy who likes baseball and lives in Provo,
Utah in the year 1880.
Learners research each aspect of their assembled persona.
Based on this research, learners determine what kind
of design outcome would help enhance or improve the life
of their fictitious person. This process has prompted
discussion where questions arise like:
What would a boy who liked baseball in 1880 in the
west really enjoy?
How could a young man enjoy both the Las Vegas
experience and perfume at the same time?
What would a 70 year-old woman need to keep quilting
in her older age?
Questions of meaning became the center of studio
discussions for weeks, growing learners’ abilities to think
deeply on meaning.
In response to the process of questioning, thinking,
and discussion, learners develop and design physical
products, environmental design, branding, and an
array of other outcomes, all driven by the needs of a
fictitious person. No outcomes are pre-defined, so
learners decide on outcomes and present rationales for
them based on the aspects of their persona. Some
examples of outcomes include:
• A series of United States Civil War posters that could be
put up in carriages to show support for the Union army.
• A deck of baseball cards that featured outlaws of the
western United States in the 1880’s.
For the second phase of The People-Driven Design
Sequence, learners hand their design work and persona
over to another student in the class. For this step, a
second design learner designs a web site and smartphone
app that extends the initial design outcome into the
digital space. One product of this process included a
United States Civil War tracking app that allowed people
to check in on and support Union troops during the war.
The People-Driven Design Sequence has proven to be
successful for sparking studio conversations on meaning,
human perception, and behavior. The work learners
produced was aesthetically desirable and usable and they
responded favorably to the assignment, with most
of the class sharing that it was their favorite project of the
semester. But the project’s greatest strength has been
how it challenged learners to conduct research, decide on
an ideal outcome, and support that outcome with
rationales that reveal the depth of their thinking.
• A 21 year-old male in 2015 living in Las Vegas, Nevada
who is interested in perfumes.
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Pet Peeves Project
This project is operated in Highwire Brand Studio,
an interdisciplinary course comprised of marketing and
graphic design students, co-taught by design and
marketing faculty. Over the course of the two-week long
Pet Peeves Project, learners develop field research skills
and learn how research informs the design of outcomes.
Learners work together in groups of three or four to
identify and select a pet peeve that serves as the subject
for their project. Each group is allowed to address
any pet peeve they wish, from personal nuisances to
offensive or dangerous behaviors. Examples of past
pet peeves includes:
• people in weight circuit rooms who check their
cellphones too much and impede others’ workouts
• people who are inconsiderate and block other
pedestrians on walking paths during class changes
• people who do not empty the lint tray in clothes
dryers and as a result cause a fire hazard
Each group researches their selected pet peeves using
qualitative and quantitative research methods. Learners
are required to take a human centered approach to
design, observing the interactions, environments, and
workings of each of their pet peeves including the
perceptions, and attitudes of the people involved. Groups
present their findings to the class at each meeting and
are required to support their claims with evidence. These
sessions are an opportunity for instructors to highlight
when learners lean on their own assumptions or personal
feelings instead of remaining objective.
As learners become more familiar with the complexity
of their problems via research, they start to determine
potential solutions. These solutions are repeatedly
reviewed through a lens of usefulness, by comparing
them to the identified pet peeve. Gathered evidence
reveals what “useful” would mean for the people being
studied, and the evaluation of solutions includes a review
of their success at considering the needs of the affected
people. At the culmination of the two weeks, learners
work iteratively to produce a proof-of-concept solution
for their selected pet peeve. Learners present their
solutions, with special attention to justifying its efficacy
and usefulness based on the evidence they gathered
via primary research.
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By the conclusion of the project, learners become
accustomed to presenting their solutions using statements like “we recommend this solution because of what
we found through our observations…” These habits
continued through the semester. When working on the
main project for the course, several learners felt comfortable shifting solution directions because the evidence
they gathered disproved their own assumptions. Also,
learners have shown to consider usefulness as a criterion
throughout their semester work when before Pet Peeves
Project it was not voluntarily considered. Based on the
project’s success in meeting its learning objectives,
Pet Peeves Project has become a permanent component
of the Highwire Brand Studio course.
Usable
The concept of usability is native to experience-centered
design because one of its essential properties is interaction with people. Regardless of the media, be it digital,
product, or service design, interactive design decisions
promote or inhibit usage at many levels. The fact that the
design of an experience-centered outcome can possibly
block access and frustrate users means that designers
should be as mindful of the usability of an outcome as they
are its desirability. Different scenarios of use and different
abilities of users means that determining the usability of a
design can be very difficult to anticipate.
When learners are mindful of factors that affect usability
and they learn to test high-fidelity prototypes, they are
more likely to make design decisions that will promote
usability. In interaction design, high-fidelity prototypes
take the form of fully coded interaction design work.
Paper prototypes and wireframes are valuable in interaction design; however, functioning sites allow usability
to be tested natively, across a wide array of devices.
This type of testing allows questions like “does it work,
and how well?” to take place—challenging learners to
inspect their designs critically.
I have adopted a high-fidelity prototype model for
teaching interaction design, not only so outcomes can be
tested, but more importantly so design learners can
understand how website elements behave and the
“nuts and bolts” of front end code. This allows learners
to develop visual interface designs that are based
on the constraints of the medium while equipping them
to communicate with programmers using a common
code language.
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Interaction Design Coding
Since 2013, I have been teaching interaction design with
front end coding languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
being the primary tools for design. In order for design
learners to develop complex, fluid, high fidelity websites
that enable usability testing, knowledge of coding
languages is necessary. Websites and web applications
are kinetic—their boundaries change significantly
depending on the context in which they are viewed.
In order to more clearly understand usability, fully
functioning sites are necessary.
This approach has effectively demonstrated
the importance of usability in my courses. During the
semesters I have taught interaction design this way,
students have shared positive feedback about their
learning experiences. Some students have demonstrated
empathy for the people who would someday use their
interaction design outcomes. One student critiqued
their own interface design in class and realized they had
limited users from navigating their site freely. Their
reflection on this fact included the statement:
“…the user might want to go directly to another page and
they should have that option.”
Students have also demonstrated an ability to
anticipate website design behaviors, thanks to their deep
knowledge in front-end coding. I once overheard a
learner critiquing the structure of another’s site, inquiring
how the site would behave on mobile device screens:
“looks good…but what’s it going to do when you go
responsive?”
Over the course of the semester, learners go from
designing a web page that says “Hello World” to a
multi-page, fully responsive portfolio website that
includes interactive elements. They have shown they are
familiar enough with code that they can review others’
work, dissect it, and typically know where to look to
diagnose problems. This approach has grown learners’
ability to think critically. Learners make small changes
to code and correlate these changes to how they affect
the visual interface. They also encounter usability
issues when testing sites across multiple devices, and
work to resolve these issues systematically.
Even if learners no longer write front-end code in
their careers, they are more familiar with the “physics”
of interaction design. They learn “how gravity works”
in web design which means the visual interface
thumbnails or comps they create are based on a real,
working model of what will work when coded. These
designers are also able to communicate with front-end
coders and programmers more easily thanks to a
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shared knowledge of front-end-coding. This reduces
barriers between members of interaction design teams,
encouraging collaboration.
Each time I facilitate interaction design learning that
incorporates front-end coding, I learn more about what
level of instruction is needed for this approach. One
example of this was a decision to implement SASS
(Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) into my teaching.
Basically, SASS is an extension of CSS that introduces tools
for writing visual styling that mimic the formatting styles
and global colour swatches in Adobe InDesign and
Illustrator software. I teach SCSS, which is a syntax like
SASS that allows CSS and SASS formatting to be written
the same file. While implementing SCSS adds complexity
to the process of teaching and writing visual styling, it
adds functionality that supports the production of highly
complex interaction design outcomes like those learners
will be expected to work with during their careers.
Initially, I implemented SCSS late in the semester,
but found its complexity was not as much an issue as
I expected so I moved its introduction to early in the
semester to allow more time for application and
experimentation. In order to lower barriers for learners
when developing custom WordPress themes using PHP,
I developed a starter theme called QuickTheme that
reduces time spent learning complex PHP and enables
students to quickly implement working, template-based
websites. After operating several semesters of this
approach I have reduced complexity expectations in
some ways in order to enable learners to excel at more
significant aspects of learning code. In all, learners
practicing and exploring a usability perspective when
designing has been a benefit of this approach and
it stands as a chief rationale for continuing teaching
front-end coding in interaction design.
UX in the Wild: Shopping User Experience
Experience-centered design employs physical space
and product design that are best experienced in person.
In order to provide an opportunity for learners to engage
with experience-centered design and also practice
observation skills, I operate a one day field trip where
students observe shoppers in two very unique shopping
experiences in the Cincinnati, Ohio area: Jungle Jim’s
International Market, and IKEA. UX in the Wild: Shopping
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User Experience posits that retail stores are like user
interfaces in websites. Design decisions made in stores
and websites block or inhibit flow through space, they
present a manifestation of a brand, and they invite
interaction between humans and interface (where shelves
often serve as the interface of a store). This field research
trip was first operated in the spring 2014 semester
with first year graphic design students enrolled in the
Fundamentals of Interaction Design course and takes
place every year.
Between 9 a.m. and noon on a Saturday, our group visits
Jungle Jim’s International Market and IKEA. Comparing
Jungle Jim’s and IKEA reveals a stark contrast between the
stores product offering, environmental signage design,
store layout, and entrance design. This presents opportunities for class discussion on how design affects student
and shopper decision-making. At the conclusion of the
field trip, the class meets to share observations and
insights that come from the experience.
Jungle Jim’s is a warehouse-like store that spans 200,000
square feet in size. The store features grocery items, fresh
produce, meats, fish, and bakery goods from around the
world. Food items are grouped by nationality and store
decorations reflect each nation’s cultural heritage. Pricing
signs are bright yellow and are hand-written. The front
entrance of Jungle Jim’s can be difficult to identify as there
are multiple entrances and none takes visual prominence
over the others. The store feels like an amusement park,
with animatronics in different sections that move and
make sounds to liven up the areas they feature.
IKEA is a furniture designer, manufacturer, and retailer
founded in Sweden in 1943 and is known for stylish,
affordable design.9 IKEA stores have very clear design
aesthetic and layout that privileges a limited colour
palette. Item labeling and signage throughout the store is
consistent, utilizing the Verdana typeface, and a rigid
store design guides shoppers through the store in an
orderly fashion. The front entrance of IKEA features
a dominant blue facade where a large bank of doors
and letters spelling “entrance” in red focus users’ eyes
on where to enter, visible from the parking lots that
surround the store.
A sheet of discussion prompts is given to learners before
UX in the Wild: Shopping User Experience to guide their
thinking about different aspects of the stores. These
prompts highlight physical space design as well as human
behavior. During the discussion that follows the store
visits, learners have shared observations of how other
shoppers behaved in each store, making connections
between observed behaviors and conclusions based on
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evidence. Participants have learned to broaden their
perspectives, identifying physical and non-physical
aspects of each store as being factors that affect shopping
experiences. These have included aisle width, the
size of signage typography, employee uniforms, music,
and lighting.
The details and discoveries shared after the store
visits have revealed that the experience is effective in
encouraging students to make correlations between
design decisions and their effects. As I have been revising
experience-centered design curricula, I have seen an
opportunity to apply the learning from this experience
more directly into other assignments in later classes,
shedding new light on usability. I believe doing so will
help to cement the lessons learned during it and can
continue to challenge learners to consider the agency of
intangible components in experience-centered design.
Adaptable People
As designers are increasingly called upon to design
interactions, services, and experiences, the development
of curricula that equips learners to thrive and to lead this
design evolution is important work. The useful, usable,
desirable framework has served as a set of guiding
principles that have helped to keep learning objectives in
balance. It has focused the way I facilitate learning for the
development of learners’ thinking, skills, and knowledge.
This does not replace high quality aesthetic in design;
instead it honors the visual by increasing the levels
of thinking that go into producing design outcomes.
In short, design is more rigorous when it has multiple
dimensions.
Training designers to be primarily aesthetic or focused
on only one dimension of design locks them into one way
of thinking and doing. This approach impedes their ability
to be adaptable.10 The UUD framework challenges learners
to develop the kinds of thinking, skills, and knowledge
that comprise the growing area of experience-centered
design. As design continues to evolve, design educators
have a responsibility to empower learners to thrive, and
approaches like the useful, usable, desirable framework
are worth our attention in this changing space. n
Notes
1
Elizabeth B. Sanders, “Converging
Perspectives: Product Development
Research for the 1990s.” Design
Management Journal 3, no. 4 (1992):
49–54.
2
Jorge Frascara, “Graphic Design: Fine
Art or Social Science?” Design Issues 5,
no. 1 (Fall 1988): 18–29.
3
Donald Norman, “Why Design Education
Must Change.” November 26, 2010.
Accessed October 2, 2011. http://www.
core77.com/posts/17993/whydesign-education-must-change-17993.
4
Ken Friedman, Yongqi Lou, Donald
Norman, Pieter Jan Stappers, Ena Voûte,
and Patrick Whitney, “Design X: A Future
Path for Design.” November 2014.
Accessed August 20, 2015, http://www.
jnd.org/dn.mss/designx_a_future_pa.
html.
5
R/GA. “Experience Design.”
Accessed September 9, 2015. http://
www.rga.com/about/departments/
experience-design/.
About the Author
6
Khoi Vinh, “The Tools Designers Are
Using Today.” September 10, 2015.
7
Chris Risdon, “The Anatomy of an
Experience Map.” November 20, 2011.
Accessed September 11, 2015.
http://adaptivepath.org/ideas/
the-anatomy-of-an-experience-map/.
8
Stefan Wiltschnig, Bo T. Christensen, and
Linden J. Ball. “Collaborative Problem–
solution Co-Evolution in Creative
Design.” Design Studies 34 (September
2013): 515–42.
9
B.V., Inter IKEA Systems. “History—Ikea.”
2014. Accessed June 6, 2014. http://
www.ikea.com/ms/en_AU/about_ikea/
the_ikea_way/history/.
Dennis Cheatham is an Assistant Professor
of Graphic Design at Miami University in
Oxford, Ohio where he serves as a Graduate
Director of the xdMFA program in Experience Design. His research explores how
design thinking, processes, and outcomes
affect, and are influenced by human
perception and behavior on a systemic level.
Prior to his academic appointment, he
practiced design professionally for fifteen
years as a creative director, graphic,
interaction, and experience designer across
a wide range of contexts in the Dallas/Fort
Worth area.
10 Gunnar Swanson, “Graphic Design
Education as a Liberal Art: Design and
Knowledge in the University and the
‘Real World’,” In The Education of a
Graphic Designer, edited by Steven
Heller, 22–32. New York: Allworth Press,
2005.
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Tracing the logic of graphic design in Canadian
design history
Brian Donnelly
Abstract:
Noting the lack of design studies and history programs
in Canadian universities, where studio design approaches
predominate, this paper proposes that Canadian design
history needs to find an alternative method to the
traditional chronology that traces the rise and triumph of
the Modern, as the growing awareness of global histories
of design leads us to adapt broader methods. Beginning
with a visual comparison of two works from ca. 1960,
a history of graphic design is proposed that can question
the idea of progress in visual culture and accommodate
many of the visual histories and technologies developed
and used by designers in Canada. A set of themes
and concepts is proposed by which we may effectively
compare works across periods and traditions: seeing
design as idiomatic, rather than a visual language;
design as an abstract art form, crucially different from
illustration; and using the study of design to form
new theories about the role of copying, tradition
and identity.
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Keywords:
Graphic Design
Canada
Thematic
History
Methodology
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modernism that it worked against national, linguistic
or ethnic divisions, that is, against the very idea of
“Canadian” graphic design (as opposed to the design that
happened to be done here). There hardly appears to be
any guarantee, given world history over the past 100
years, that nations emerging from colonial status should
‘naturally’ have, or want to have, a homogeneous
identity, even with the relative privilege often arrogated
by dominant cultures within settler colonies.2 Further,
as I have argued elsewhere, graphic designers in Canada
have known how to produce strong work even within
what is effectively an oral history tradition, without a
single, canonical, or national design history text.3
Despite considerable neglect over the last many
decades, there are clear signs of awakening interest—
individual but more importantly institutional—in the
history of graphic design in Canada. To its credit, Canada
has a developed a wealth of College and University-level
graphic design programs which graduate hundreds of
well-qualified practicing designers every spring. But this
growth only underlines the lack of undergraduate and
graduate programs in design studies and history, let alone
Canadian graphic design history. We have yet to leave
behind the model whereby studio practitioners or those
trained in methods from disciplines such as art history
or communication studies stand in for the missing
disciplines of design history and design studies. (By way
of comparison, imagine an art history department staffed
entirely by painters and media studies professors.)
But the intention of this paper is not to bemoan once
again the lack of Canadian identity; Canada is both
a developed, highly autonomous nation state and an
important player in global relations of power.1 The
apparent dominance of international influences has hardly
dampened the importance of design produced here.
It could be taken as one measure of the impact of
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Given the historical divisions and inherent complications
within Canadian cultural identity, it also follows that the
usual historical narrative is also inadequate. Mapping out
a strict chronology, tracing an imagined upward march
through time towards the triumph of modernism, is not
useful in describing the Canadian experience. In part
because Canada has been late to write its graphic history,
we can be critical of the positivism built into the paradigm
of constant improvement. Designers in Canada can learn
from more contemporary methodologies; understanding
the development of the discipline here need not require
(in fact would be better off without) measuring and
venerating individual greatness, or trying to establish
why designers in Canada are somehow better than—or at
best, tied in overtime with—contemporary international
figures or movements. It is absurd not to simply assert
that design in Canada is worth serious study; surely
describing and understanding what happened here is a
sufficient and in many ways superior starting point.
What The Survey Says
In keeping with McLuhan’s dictum that the medium
is the message, the structure of design history surveys is
typically as important as what they are talking about:
the chronological arrangement by periods, each one
displacing and building on the previous ones, sometimes
growing increasingly international in scope, in itself
suggests an inevitable rising towards a universal standard
of taste and preference. The survey’s very structure
reveals its function, to establish a canon or measure of the
best works through time. There are upwards of a dozen
major surveys of graphic design that largely discuss the
same names, movements, and images. Some start in
the caves, some with the printing press, but they all show
the same trajectory of modernism passing from Western
Europe to America; this method owes much to the rise of
the art history discipline in Germany, under the sway of
Hegelian ideals of progress and the rising spirit of history.4
One lesser known discussion of this effect is The Way
Beyond ‘Art,’ by Alexander Dorner. In it, Dorner celebrates
design as broadly part of human progress and a solution
to the dead end of modern art itself. In the spirit of Hegel,
he traces the powerful self-negating and self-defining
power of visual cultures in constant movement, from the
mythical Pre-Hellenic mind and its complex symbolism;
through the Renaissance conventions of perspective that
apprehended space and Being; to the rise of time and
Becoming in the Enlightenment; and finally to the worship
of the individual in Romanticism. This sweeping narrative
ends badly: Dorner finds that contemporary art is isolated
and frozen in its egoistic, self-absorbed search for
absolute freedom, “a powerhouse without practical
purpose.”5 In particular, he sees in design a use for—even
the solution to—modernist, essentialist art, and a change
from the arts of Eternal Being to a practical, industrial
art of Perpetual Change. Yes, these terms are rooted in
philosophy and can seem pretentious; but whether
consciously spelled out or not, they also accurately
describe the ideals that underlie so much of the structure
and logic of most art and design history.
Recent efforts have begun to look beyond the Eurocentric
bias of Western surveys, notably Victor Margolin’s
ongoing (and enormous) project, World History of Design.6
He touches on largely unexplored traditions in design,
particularly those of Asia and Africa but also Canada. As
of this writing, I have not yet read the text, but the table
of contents of the two volumes that cover up to 1939
and World War II show a familiar concern with progress:
‘modern,’ modernism,’ ‘modernity,’ and even ‘hybrid
modernity’ (for Japan) figure prominently in the titles.
It seems to me that these two methods, the ideal of
progress in visual culture and the expansion of graphic
design’s history beyond the European-American diaspora,
are locked in an inherent contradiction. If we are to study
global history (and surely it is absurd not to simply assert
that global developments in design are worth serious
study), the canon expands to the point where the idea of
a single standard itself must change into something else.
Contradictions are important to explore; in effect, they
can’t be ignored: Hegel also wrote, as part of his famous
dialectic, that history only moves forward through the
power of contradictions. One way was through quantitative change and expansion, which inevitably turns into
more fundamental, qualitative change. Our canonical
measuring stick, so dominant as to be paradigmatic, has
grown so big that we can no longer really insist it is
any kind of coherent standard. Our historical methods,
tools and outcomes need to adapt.
I think this is also true in describing the Canadian
experience. There are many strong ties between Canada,
Europe and America, often in the literal form of
individuals who emigrated here after 1945 to design
but also to establish new university design programs.
Many explicitly brought methods, vocabularies and
ways of seeing from the typographic and print traditions
of England, Germany, Switzerland, and New York (and
sometimes more than one of these centres, as with Frank
Newfeld or Burton Kramer). But if we simply hitch our
wagon to the existing train, and see Canadian design as a
continuation of other histories, or as part of the great
upward progression of human history, I think we will miss
what is interesting about our history. Adopting the
template and trajectory of modernism as our own, I think,
can really only result in seeing Canadian design as
derivative, and thus secondary. It seems to me that we
have the opportunity to embrace the expansion of design
history’s subject, to include Canada along with all other
examples of global graphic thinking, but reject the
implicit idea of progress, of movement towards a modern
ideal. This also implies abandoning the inevitable
classification of designs into earliest, best, and highest
quality; it frees us to explore works from historical record
for everything else they can teach us.
Life After Premodern, Modern, Antimodern,
and Postmodern
To take an example, I have just written a paper on
these two images (Fig. 1 and 2).7 Histories of modernism
would celebrate the Roch as dramatic, clean, deliberate,
structured, informational; by the same measure, they
would also likely overlook the borrowed, idiomatic,
clichéd feel of the Schenk. However much they were
received here as the harbinger of everything important
and modern in design, works like Roch’s can be seen
another way: as a revival, what contemporary marketing
now calls ‘retro.’ Compare it to any number of El Lissitzky’s
designs,8 or Kurt Schwitter’s ads for Pelikan ink and you
might argue (as I do) that what you see is the repetition of
ideas from Russian and German Constructivism of the
1920s and early 1930s; an idiom repeated 40 years later,
just as musicians today sample 1970s James Brown.
In the changed, postwar context, the productive, original
avant-garde has become the derivative, neo-avantgarde.9 Just as this argument began to expand how art
history looks at the issue of originality, I think we need to
understand that repetition, copying, replication and
mimesis are central aspects of visual culture, meaning and
value, and that graphic design is central to this process.
It does not denigrate Roch’s influential work to leave aside
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these works work as visual communication. It would be
a positive step, I am suggesting, if the history of graphic
design in Canada were to be written without reference
to the concept of the ‘modern’ at all.
Figure 1. O.K. Schenk, “One
should arrive smartly,” Provincial
Paper advertisement ca. 1959.
the argument for it as part of a great breakthrough to
the long-awaited, inimitable and inevitable modern style
in postwar Canada; instead, we have the opportunity to
use Roch’s place in history to rethink what matters about
how design is received and used in practice.
In a very different context, we also need new methods to
outline the study of early Canadian design and printing,
and its relation to Canada as a settler colony. Certainly we
want to know our typographic past, the complex social
history of the uses of printing. Important studies in this
vein are available, particularly Patricia Fleming and Yvan
Lamonde’s multi-volume History of the Book in Canada.10
Printing history is just one technology and medium,
however, and despite its central role in graphic design
there is still an important distinction to be made between
design history and printing; the whole point of design
as a separate discipline is the thinking and sensibility
that is carried through print (and today, on digital screens
and many other places). Why else would clients pay
extra for it?
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Figure 2. Ernst Roch, “Industrial
screw jacks,” page from an
industrial goods catalogue, ca.
1958.
So where in a modernist history do we fit works such as
the Cree syllabic typeface of the missionary James Evans,
or the carving and graphic traditions of West Coast First
Nations, or the first newspaper in Canada (48 years
after Boston’s first), The Halifax Gazette of 1752?11 To try
to incorporate these complex and highly varied visual
histories in all their detail, given their widely varied
mixtures of visual invention and influence, freedom and
necessity, would strain the trajectory of a coherent
narrative. Indeed, everything from cave drawings and
photographs to vernacular ‘zines and concert advertising
tends to disrupt and confound the methods of visual
culture history as any kind of consistent, linked progression. They all might have happened or be happening in
the same rough geographic space, but under very
different social, political and technical circumstances, and
were/are not necessarily linked by their creators in any
conscious sense of tradition. The judgments and values
that follow from imposing upon them the classifications
premodern/modern/antimodern/postmodern distort
our understanding more than they usefully explain how
Design as a Visual Technology
Printing’s record is mixed. Unused by the colony of
New France, it arrived in Canada in the wake of the British
re-enforcement of Halifax, at the discretion and as the
tool of the colonial administration, incorporating defense
notices, lists of non-branded goods and services (not
exactly advertising as we know it today), slave sales, and
old ‘news’ from Europe. The printed page has always
been aligned with power, the keeping of records, the
declaration of laws and the store of value in the form of
paper money, and print has also been used to contain,
discipline, organize, and control people (Fig. 3). We may
think of books as liberating, part of the Enlightenment,
but they also exact a price for the rule of reason. We
might remember that schools and books were also tools
for the loss of First Nations’ languages, having almost
disappeared under the impact of imposed colonial
languages. (Movingly, Janice Hill, director of the Four
Directions Aboriginal Student Centre at Queen’s University and a Haudenosaunee Elder of the Mohawk First
Nation has recently noted that a new generation of native
speakers of the Mohawk language, for whom this
language is their first language, is now re-emerging.12)
But even given the necessity of a critical attitude to
the issues of print and power, design history is about the
visual magic that emerges in plain view, almost without
notice and while history is going about its business.
The development of the medium of photography had an
immediate impact on society in itself, changing the
performance of private lives and fixing visual memories.13
But the ability to reproduce photographic images directly,
that is photographically, without the intervening stage
of hand-carved woodcuts or metal engravings, expanded
their effect exponentially. The first translation of a
photographic image into print, in 1869, using ‘halftone’
dots created purely mechanically to enable the press
to imitate the greys, the intermediate or half tones of the
original image, is seen in Figure 4. Of course such a
momentous technical achievement would be reserved
for the arrival of the British Prince Albert, son of Queen
Victoria, on a royal visit to Montreal. It’s possible that,
in all the celebration, few people noticed that design
had entered a new and powerful era of mechanical
imagery except, of course, the publisher, GeorgeÉdouard Desbarats, and the inventor of the process,
William Leggo.
Figure 3. John Bennett, The
Statutes of Upper Canada, title
page, 1802. Reproduced from
Aegidius Fauteux, The Introduction
of Printing into Canada (Montreal:
Rolland Paper Company, 1930):
126.
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This moment points ahead to an even more significant link
between photography and design, namely the beginnings
of camera-ready art, mechanical paste-ups sent out to
be photographed in large repro cameras that produced
the negative films from which printing plates were made.
Once letterpress printing was no longer restricted to
metal sorts locked into a chase, and line art could be
reproduced directly from a paste-up onto a printing plate,
we begin to see the free placement and interaction of
word and image that we understand as representing the
full potential of graphic design today.
But it wasn’t simply new technology that allowed this
way of thinking: there is evidence in the “Montreal
Exposition” poster of 1884 (Fig. 5), that our anonymous
printer was already exploring ways to disrupt the rules
of letterpress. Despite the mechanical limitations and tacit
notions that kept type from overlapping, the headline,
“Exposition,” has been surprinted with a second colour,
that is, the sheet has been run back through the press
and hit again with another, much taller condensed font in
red. Where did that idea come from, and who told him
he could do it? This suggests a recurring theme in design,
in fact, the interdependent development of technologies
and media with the evolution of design as something
separate from material limitations and which pushes
against them; the idea of the deliberate and often
experimental organization of the elements on the page.
Further, it is in the exploration of visual themes and trends
such as this that the history of graphic design in Canada
can find its way out of the limitations set for it by existing
and traditional historical methods.
Figure 4. Canadian Illustrated
News, Vol. 1, No. 1, front page.
Reproduced from Library and
Archives Canada’s website:
Canadian Illustrated News,
1869-1883. http://www.
collectionscanada.gc.ca/
obj/001065/f1/1001.jpg
Figure 5. Anonymous, Grande
Exposition, Cité de Montréal,
1884. Reproduced from Robert
Stacey, The Canadian Poster Book
(Toronto: Methuen, 1979): 4.
Towards a Thematic History
Without even getting to 1900, then, it is possible
to begin to outline some of the elements that I think are
most compelling about the study of historical works
of graphic design in Canada: they do not need to fit within
the structure of the traditional historical survey, with its
ingrained and tacit assumptions of progress and the ideal
of modernism; without any such overarching historical
role to play, they can better be seen as unique things,
remarkable material objects within a critical view of
history; and even the most mundane examples of design
can demonstrate the way in which visual demands
and thinking shape technologies and their uses as much
as the reverse.
But material limitations are very real, and space prevents
me from expanding this discussion to similarly explore
other themes that arise from the study of a range of
historical graphic designs produced in this country—short
of turning this into the very history that I am only just
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teasing out here (however much I might wish it were
finally done). Rather than fitting these works to grand
theories or historical trajectories, Canadian design can be
looked at as an illustration of issues inherent in all visual
or graphic practices; rather than as the latecomer in
an historical drama, we can explore design in Canada as
exemplary of themes that suggest how design works.
Some of the key themes that have arisen over the past
many years of this study include the idea of graphic codes
as idioms, rather than the overly common idea of a “visual
language.” Is there a grammar to design, can we correct
a visual work, or prove that it is, finally, right or wrong?
Or are we limited to showing that a given design simply
doesn’t fit with familiar previous uses or examples, or that
we simply don’t like it, without ever locating any firm
basis for declaring it ungrammatical or non-syntactical.
It seems the endless fascination and power of the visual
lies precisely in its not being tightly or systematically
defined enough to permit a grammar to impose itself fully
on how we use it. That’s why the next work to comprehensively break the ‘rules’ always becomes the new normal,
and then the subject of latest chapter in the ongoing
chronological survey texts of greatness. (The argument
for design as something contingent, the idiomatic
word-image, as against the idea of visual language, is the
subject of my doctoral dissertation.15) The writings of
Carl Dair and their detailed descriptions of size, direction,
form, colour, structure and weight, to use a favorite
example, and the work of Robert Bringhurst in establishing rigorous typographic standards (if not rules), are
worth close study in this connection.
Another recurring theme has involved looking at the
implications of design as abstraction, the way in which
letterforms are a completely non-representational
art form. One way to describe design is the systematic
exploration and application of the possibility of social
meaning through abstract form, in a way that modern
painting never achieved. The levels of sophisticated
association and the passionate defense of the minute
differences in form between Helvetica and Arial,
for example, or Times Roman and Times New Roman,
surely rival such precise acts of social distinction as wine
tasting and assessments of facial beauty. The movement
from illustration to the use of greatly enlarged type or
dramatic hand-drawn decorative treatments in the work
of Clair Stewart is one such instance of the abstraction
of design emerging out of more literal, illustrative means.
By the same measure, it is important to open the
question of illustration in design, not simply how it is
used but as a test case for the limits of design. Heather
Cooper produced detailed paintings that were clearly
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illustrations, yet tightly designed to work with type. But
to what extent are posters by, for example, Louis Fishauf,
Theo Dimson, or Neville Smith still obviously works
of design? There are also many examples of brilliant
typography and highly expressive calligraphy which pose
the same question of definitions and limits in design.
In the absence of any determinate system of visual
language, and given its abstract basis, design also
demands the use of mimesis, or copying, however hard
that may be to accept in a field so driven to seek and
assert its originality. The only way to fix the meaning of a
symbol or design, such as a logo, is to repeat it exactly;
and the only way to translate one contingent visual
meaning or idiom into another medium or work is to copy
it or some aspect of it. Designers work with copy supplied
by clients, photographs and illustrations done by other
hands, using readymade typefaces and software on
computers they didn’t create, specifying paper stocks,
inks and printing presses run by others, often working
within and against visual styles credited to others… yet all
this copying and borrowing still leaves enormous room
for originality in the design process. It just can’t dispense
with a huge degree of replication and repetition without
lapsing into complete randomness (or becoming fine art).
With no disrespect to his work, we looked at the element
of repetition in Ernst Roch’s modernism (Fig. 2), and I have
also written about Harold Kurschenska’s subtle struggles
against the expected or predictable design solution.
Some of the most compelling and even puzzling semiotic
explorations of Bruce Kierstead, in Halifax, for example,
are composed entirely of new and striking uses for clichés:
how else do you send a message?
In the same vein, it is important to explore the social
aspects of design, looking into the schools and other
institutions which have shaped design practice in Canada.
Many lively interviews with educators, predictably, went
far beyond discussion of their own design work and into
wider questions of design. And inherent in institutional
practices is the shaping of identity, including on a national
scale, and the subject of national symbols and programs
of identity, and seminal events such as Expo 67 and the
Montreal Olympics, need to be explored here.
Figure 6. Carl Dair, two-page
spread from Design with Type
(Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1967).
Finally, while questioning assumptions, it is also worthwhile to ask the most basic question of all. I have referred
to compiling and writing a history, but not a book,
exactly. Of course, when my many well-meaning design
friends and colleagues can’t hold back any more, that
is inevitably what they ask: “How’s the book coming?”
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There is still a strong case to be made for that most
tradition-bound (pun intended) and seemingly
authoritative form of historical record and considered
opinion. I wonder, however, given the sheer amount
of material collected so far, and knowing how far short it
falls from being a complete overview of the subject,
whether the fixed form of a book would work best. Digital
technologies easily allow for expanding archives, a forum
for the addition of new writing, and the dissemination
of thousands of images and tens of thousands more words
than a book can contain, not to mention audio and
video records and other possibilities, such as an archive
of digital web and motion design. It would also create
appropriate material for the potential online delivery
of a university-level credit course in Canadian graphic
design history, available to every student in Canada.
It would be in the nature of design to result in such an
original solution to the ongoing problem that is the
history of graphic design in Canada. n
About the Author
Notes
Brian Donnelly teaches design history
and theory at Sheridan College, Oakville,
Ontario, including a unique course on
the history of graphic design in Canada.
He has published articles in this field in
Journal of Design History, RACAR, DA: Devil’s
Artisan, Communication Arts, and Design
Issues. An earlier article on the methods of
Canadian graphic design history has been
reprinted twice, most recently in The
Graphic Design Reader (forthcoming, 2017),
edited by Teal Triggs and Leslie Atzmon.
He also recently gave a paper on the visual
and formal qualities of drawing in comic
books, at the Canadian Society for the Study
of Comics in Toronto.
1
2
3
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Graphic Design Journal 7
For examples of the debate around how
to characterize Canada’s global position,
see Paul Kellogg, “The Mistaken Return
to Left-nationalism,” Canadian Dimension 37.2 (Mar/Apr 2003): 32–33, and
Todd Gordon, Imperialist Canada
(Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing,
2011).
This argument was outlined in my paper,
“Marks of the Colonial in Canadian
Visual Culture,” delivered at the
Universities Art Association of Canada
annual conference, Banff, AB. November, 2013. The definition of the unique
and privileged status of the ‘settler
colony’ has become well established in
recent scholarship, including Eva
Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural
Politics and National Identity in Canada
(New York: Routledge, 1999); and
Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson, ed.,
Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Routledge, 2005).
Brian Donnelly, “Locating Graphic
Design History in Canada.” Journal of
Design History 19, no. 4 (Winter 2006):
283–294. Special Issue on “Oral
Histories and Design”; Linda Sandino,
editor.
4
Among the many texts that trace and
critique this intellectual heritage are
Vernon Hyde Minor, Art History’s History
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1994), and Hans Belting, Art History
After Modernism, trans. Caroline
Saltzwedel, Mitch Cohen and Kenneth
Northcott (Chicago: Univerity of Chicago
Press, 2003).
5
Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond ‘Art’:
the work of Herbert Bayer (New York:
Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947): 116.
6
Victor Margolin, World History of Design
(London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.)
7
Brian Donnelly, “The Inversion of
Originality through Design,” RACAR 40
no. 2 (Fall 2015): 146–160.
8
Although the comparison might be
unfavorable: Jorge Frascara famously
derides El Lissitzky in his classic and
rhetorical essay “Graphic Design: Fine
Art or Social Science?” Design Issues
Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn, 1988): 18–29.
9
See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant
Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 19) and the
arguments with it in Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, Neo Avant-Garde and Culture
Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000); the argument is also summarized
in Peter Bürger, trans. Bettina Brandt and
Daniel Purdy, “Avant-Garde and
Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer
Certain Critics of Theory of the
Avant-Garde.” New Literary History 41
no. 4 (2010): 695-715. Project MUSE.
https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed
September 22, 2015).
10 Patricia Fleming and Yvan Lamonde,
History of the Book in Canada Project.
History of the Book in Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004).
11 Aegidius Fauteux, The Introduction of
Printing into Canada (Montreal: Rolland
Paper Company, 1930): 45
12 Author’s notes from the talk given by
Jan Hill at Ideas Left Outside conference,
Elbow Lake, Ontario, August 3, 2013.
13 See Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard, The
Cultural Work of Photography in Canada
(Montreal; Kingston: McGill – Queen’s
University Press, 2011).
14 http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/
innovations/023020-3040-e.html
(accessed Sept. 22, 2015).
http://www.worldcat.org/title/
picturing-words-writing-images-designtoward-contingent-meaning/oclc/
166373958#borrow (accessed September
21, 2015).
15 Brian Donnelly, Picturing words, writing
images : design ☞ contingent meaning
(Ph. D. Queen’s University, Ontario
2005). The printer’s fist, ☞, was a visual
‘word’ inserted into the title precisely to
illustrate how images can often replace
or defeat words. (It can be duplicated
in Word or other applications by typing
the plus sign, +, and setting it in Zapf
Dingbats.) I meant it to be mute and
irreproducible in some contexts. The
helpful online catalogue librarians
sought to translate it, however, and
inserted the word [toward], as in,
“design [toward] contingent meaning,”
with this note: “On the title page the
symbol of a hand with the index finger
pointing to the right appears after the
word design and has been interpreted
to mean ‘toward.’” This little bit of
medium-contingent interactivity pleases
me quite a bit.
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Pedagogy of Engagement:
An Exploration of Community Projects
in Design Education
Layal Shuman
Abstract:
Integrating community projects in design education is
a pedagogical approach that brings together educators,
students and community partners to collaborate and
respond to critical societal needs and concerns. This
paper presents research conducted at the University of
Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, that explores the ways
in which community projects influence educators’
pedagogies, students’ learning and community partners
involved in these participatory design processes. The
research also examines the pedagogical method used for
incorporating community projects in design courses. It
explores the educational environment and how engaging
students in community-centered and collaborative
processes may affect teaching and learning environments
in design education.
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Keywords:
Community Engagement
Design for Social Change
Experiential Learning
Participatory Design
Pedagogy of Engagement
Teaching and Learning
Pedagogical Method
Illustration:
Mariah Barnaby-Norris
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For the purpose of this paper, I define a community
design project as a project that an educator undertakes
to address needs and concerns raised by a group,
an organization or an institution that is working for the
benefit of the community. The project is presented
in the course syllabus, for students to develop responses
through design and in collaboration with community
partners—members of the group, organization
or institution.
Community Projects in Design Learning
The participatory and collaborative nature of community
projects reminds us of the social constructivist approach
to education. In this approach, learning occurs within
social exchanges, where learners collectively construct
their knowledge. Vygotsky, who supported social ways
of learning, suggests that learning occurs first through
social interactions and then through the internal interpretation of these interactions “…as learners participate
in a broad range of joint activities and internalize the
effects of working together, they acquire new strategies
and knowledge of the world and culture.”1
Introduction
Community design projects combine many approaches
to teaching and learning in higher education: active,
experiential, discovery-based, project-based,
student-centered and collaborative. Some of these will
be discussed in this paper. Equally important, these
types of projects position design as a community and
people-centered practice. They give students the
chance to design for peoples’ needs and include them
in various phases of the design process.
This paper presents research that I conducted at the
University of Alberta (U of A) as part of my Master of
Design thesis (2012–2014). Since completing the research
project, I have moved on to doing some critical thinking
about what the idea of community means, who it is
that we serve and what political discussions we help raise
or mute when we break down the walls between the
classroom/studio and the outside world. My thinking
is driven by an ongoing attempt to examine these
concepts from different ontological and epistemological
perspectives. I hope to share my thoughts on the topic
at another time.
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Also in favour of social learning is Piaget who argues
that group interactions present positive opportunities
for students to challenge their pre-existing ideas and
knowledge and try out new directions.2 He describes
intelligence as the outcome of interacting with the
environment: “Intelligence is not an innate internal
characteristic of the individual but arises as a product
of the interaction between the person and his or her
environment.”3 Engaging students with real projects
means experiential learning and is defined as “the
process whereby knowledge is created through the
transformation of experience.”4
When educators include community projects in design
curricula, they give students the chance to channel their
creativity and skills towards helping others fulfill their
needs and desires through design. These collaborative
project-based opportunities not only benefit community
members, they also benefit students who engage in
processes similar to what they might experience in their
future design careers.5 Frascara says that involving the
community in the design process generates ethical and
effective communication. Ethical communication starts
with acknowledging the other not as an object, but
as a subject who interprets the message according to his
or her unique experiences and understanding. Ethical
communication implies communicating with someone and
not to someone:
It is a strong asset to have the public as a partner in the
promotion of changes that affect it. Imposition does not
work in the long term. Although behaviours can be, to
some extent, controlled through communication, pressure,
fear, legislation and enforcement, if there is no partnership
between the message producer and the public in relation
to desirable objectives, attitudes will not change.6
Papanek argues that designers neglect the needs
of people and instead create products that are socially,
economically, and environmentally harmful. He invites
designers to focus less on market-driven projects
and more on designing solutions to improve peoples’
lives, especially the lives of the underprivileged and
marginalized. To him, designers have to be responsible
for the professional choices they make because design
outcomes have a deep impact on people’s lives:
The ongoing dimensions of what we design, make,
and use lie in the consequences. All of our tools, objects,
artifacts, transportation devices, or buildings have
consequences that reach out into such diverse areas
as politics, health, income, and the biosphere.7
There have been growing discussions in academia about
ways in which design education can promote positive
change. The reasons for that remain, as Papanek famously
argued decades ago, that there are increasing social,
economical and environmental challenges that require
designers’ attention. Vernon says that these challenges
raise questions about designers’ roles and contributions
to society. She invites designers to think of solutions
that address global issues and create products that have
constructive outcomes.8
Design outcomes have changed from a focus on products
to a focus on the impact that design has on people. Design
practice today involves planning and creating situations
within which traditional design responses, such as
tangible products, are part of the overall strategy.
Because of this shift, designers have to understand people
and the society and environments in which people
live and coexist.9 Sanders and Stappers argue that design
practice has moved away from user-centered to more
collaborative approaches “we are no longer simply
designing products for users. We are designing for the
future experiences of people, communities and cultures
who now are connected and informed in ways that
were unimaginable even 10 years ago.”10
Community projects in design education engage
educators, students and community partners through
participatory design processes. Participatory design
is an outgrowth of people-centered design, which puts
the interest of people at the heart of the outcomes.
Over the past six decades, designers have increasingly
collaborated with those who interact with their work.
People with no professional design background have
been contributing to the design process by providing
expertise and feedback on what needs to be designed
and how. According to Sanders and Stappers, design
practice will keep on evolving towards participatory
approaches, where designers act as facilitators of
collaborative creative processes. They suggest that
design education should explore pedagogical methods
through which students learn the new ways of the future:
We will see the emergence of new domains of collective
creativity that will require new tools and methods for
researching and designing. We will need to provide
alternative learning experiences and curricula for those
who are designing and building scaffolds to support
the collective creativity of others.11
Exploring Participation in Community Projects
Although I did not call my research a case study in my
thesis, nor did I intentionally comply with ways of
conducting such a study, I now think of the research
presented in this paper as a case study because it focuses
on one particular context—the design studies curriculum
at the U of A. Design studies at the U of A include Bachelor
of Design (BDes) and Master of Design (MDes) programs.
Students can take courses in Visual Communication
Design (VCD) or Industrial Design (ID) or both. The
curriculum was influenced by design thinkers such as
Victor Papanek and educators such as Jorge Frascara,
who taught in the program for many years.
I became interested in community design projects as
pedagogy when I participated in a project during my first
year of graduate studies. I remember learning valuable
lessons while working with other students to create
a branding strategy for/with a community group.
Participating in the project made me wonder about the
effectiveness of such teaching method in design
education. When I decided to take on the topic as my
MDes research thesis, it was important for me to explore
how different stakeholders experienced these projects
and to to share the methods used when implementing
community projects in design courses.
To understand how community design projects influence
stakeholders, I invited educators to semi-structured
interviews to discuss the reasons they choose to incorporate community projects in their courses; and how they
think this approach to teaching design influences
students’ learning, the community and/or their own
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pedagogies. The six educators who participated in
the interviews taught VCD and ID courses at both the
undergraduate and graduate levels.
I invited students to respond to an online survey to talk
about their experiences with community design projects.
The 26 undergraduate and graduate students who
responded were from the VCD and/or ID programs. Some
had graduated during the past three years. Survey
questions were inspired by Vernon’s research at Falmouth
University in England, which examines the skills students
acquire from community design projects. Her research
also explores how participating in such projects influenced former students’ career choices and ambitions.12
In addition to exploring the effect of community design
projects on educators’ pedagogies and students’
learning, it was important to look at how these projects
impact community partners and their organizations. In a
focus group session, community partners discussed the
reasons they participate in and/or initiate such design
collaborations. They reflected on the collaboration with
design educators and students and suggested ways of
improving that process. The four community partners who
joined the focus group discussion were members of teams
situated within the U of A campus and had engaged in
community design projects in the VCD program.
Effect on Participants
Research findings suggest that community design projects may influence educators, students and community
partners in three ways: professional development, sense
of social responsibility and ability to collaborate.
Professional Development
Community design projects present spaces for educators
to blend their identities as teachers, researchers and
practitioners by participating in collaborative, projectbased educational processes. Educators also consider
these projects as opportunities to promote the value of
design to organizations and groups in the community.
Students say that engaging in community design projects
nurtures their reflective abilities because they are able
to work with complex issues and receive feedback from
the people for whom they design. They believe that
learning through these types of projects helps them to
gain skills that are timeless and that they can later
use as professionals. Furthermore, students say that
these projects allow them to participate in new ways
of learning and practicing design.
Community partners say that they initially participate
in community design projects to receive affordable
services for their organizations. They say that working
with design educators and students helps them to
better articulate who they are as a team and what they
do as an organization. Community partners also
value the experiential aspect of working on real projects
with university students.
Sense of Social Responsibility
Incorporating community needs and concerns into
Table 1. Some feedback from participants
Educators
Design Students
Community Partners
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“Over the last 20 years we have seen the field
of design shift from a purely designer-centric
focus to one that is more participatory and
collaborative, one that is moving towards a
model that is more society-centric. Working in
and with the community better reflects this
future.”
“[A community project as a pedagogical
method] supports the education and
development of socially responsible,
human-centered designers who can work with
others in meaningful and effective ways.”
“Design for communities have [sic] also
strengthened my sense of belonging due to
direct interaction with members of the
community.”
“It showed me what real world designers
actually do! I got a better understanding of how
to work with a client and how to ask the right
questions to come up with an appropriate
design.”
“It [community design project] is a way for
actually engaging a new group of students who
we wouldn’t normally have a chance to work
with, to actually grab what are the issues, what
are the global issues and then to translate that
into design.”
“It [community design project] is an affordable
option. We may like to go out and do all kinds
of things but can’t necessarily hire in-house
[designers].”
classrooms presents educators with opportunities
to promote civic engagement and activism in/through
design pedagogy. Educators agree that such a community-centered education fosters the growth of critical
thinkers who practice ethical and people-centered design.
Students say that engaging in community design projects
allows them to address people’s needs and aspirations.
They say that working with non-professional designers
helps them understand the audience and users for whom
they design. They also witness how design outcomes
impact people’s personal and professional lives.
Community partners say that these types of projects allow
them to collaborate with others to respond to critical
issues. Because their work on campus is mainly concerned
with enhancing students’ experiences, community
partners value these collaborations and see them as an
opportunity to learn more about the student population.
Some community partners believe these experiences
challenge their assumptions about certain people and
social issues.
Ability to Collaborate
Educators say that community design projects allow
them to connect students with the public and engage
all stakeholders in collaborative and participatory
design processes. They say that such an approach to
design education nurtures students’ empathy towards
the people for whom they design.
Students say that working in interdisciplinary teams in
community design projects helps them to learn about
different topics and ways of thinking and doing. Students
value practicing design that is based on community
needs. They find people’s feedback on their work to be
effective for learning about the design profession.
Community partners say that working with educators
and students helps them learn about the design process
and how designers think and work. Through participatory
design, they also learn to consider the public’s feedback
when making decisions affecting the public.
Exploring the Pedagogical Method
After exploring ways in which community design projects
may influence educators, students and community
partners, I participated in a community project to study
how such projects are incorporated in design courses.
The project was part of DES494, Concepts & Systems in
Visual Communication Design I, an intermediate-level
course in the VCD undergraduate program. After each
class and outside of course hours, I used a research journal
to reflect on my experience. My reflections consisted
of writing observations about the learning environment
and creating visual mappings to outline the project’s
various phases and activities.
The community design project, Designing for Advocacy,
brought together students and community partners
to examine visual and linguistic texts used to represent
people and cultures. Participants were invited to create
proposals for social marketing campaigns that would
both support interculturalism and generate fund-raising
opportunities. Participants were the course educator,
15 undergraduate students and two graduate students
who were involved in the project as part of their course,
DES601, Concepts, Analysis and Criticism in Design II.
There were five community partners from an Edmontonbased not-for-profit organization that helps immigrant
and refugee families improve their well-being and adapt
to their new environments.
After the project was completed in class and graded,
I invited the educator, students, and community partners
to three separate visualization activities. Using mapping
and diagrams and other visual and textual techniques,
three design students, four community partners
and the course educator visualized their experiences
of participating in the project.
Integration Process
Research findings reveal that a community design
project may be integrated into a course using a process
involving five phases: initiation, introduction, development, final presentation, and completion. The initiation
phase is when an educator and community partners
plan the project prior to its commencement in class. The
introduction phase is when the project is briefed to the
students in the class. The development phase, which is the
longest, is when participants collaborate to carry out
the project. The final presentation phase is when students
present outcomes to the educator, community partners
and other stakeholders. The completion phase is when
students share outcomes with educator to receive
feedback and then revise (or not) and re-submit. At this
point the educator records the grades and presents
the proposals to the community partners for selection
and implementation.
Figure 1 shows the integration process and the 10 types
of activities that occur during the phases. Activities are
both milestones around which the timeline of the project
is planned and pedagogical tools to move the project
forward. These activities are briefing the project,
problem framing, exploring outcomes, planning and
management, ideation, educator’s directions, discussion
about social responsibility, feedback and critique, public
engagement and presentation. Most of the time, it is the
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educator who facilitates the activities; this is done
as part of course planning and instruction. However, all
stakeholders may collaborate to facilitate activities.
The abbreviations in Figure 1 recommend facilitator(s) for
each activity. For example, DS means that design students
are encouraged to facilitate the activity and DE & CP
means that the design educator and community partners
may both facilitate the activity. DE & CP/DE means that
the activity may sometimes be facilitated by the design
educator and community partners and sometimes by the
design educator, and so on and so forth.
Research findings reveal that the characteristics of the
teaching and learning environments within which these
projects occur are collaborative, explorative, democratic,
respectful, dynamic, and student-centered. Pre-existing
relations between educators and community partners may
also lead to positive collaborations, as may shared ideas
about education. Community design projects require that
all participants be dedicated to and understand the
educational and exploratory nature of the collaboration.
Moreover, collaboration among educators, students,
community partners and the public should always be
voluntary for it to be considered collaboration. Due to the
participatory nature of community projects, it might be
challenging for students to learn certain technologyrelated and crafts skills, which require more one-on-one
teaching and learning methods.
Conclusion
Research findings indicate that bringing community
needs and concerns into designers’ classrooms and/or
taking students outside of their classrooms and into the
community present opportunities for educators, students
and community partners to engage in meaningful
collaborations through participatory design processes.
When design students respond to a challenge presented
by community members within the parameters of a
course, they get the chance to channel their creativity
and use their design abilities to help others. They also
discover more about the design profession by connecting
what they learn with the outside world. The skills
students learn are skills that evolve as they progress in
their careers. These skills are not related to current
design trends; they are qualities that designers need no
matter what area(s) of design they choose to practice.
Community projects are also opportunities for
participants to reflect on how their professional practices
contribute to shaping the world. Thinking about
the consequences of one’s actions nurtures a sense
of responsibility towards fellow inhabitants of the
world. Finally, community projects enable educational
spaces for stakeholders from different backgrounds
to engage in serious discussions and decision-making
about our shared future. n
Notes
About the Author
Frascara, Jorge, Bernd Meurer, Jan Van
Toorn, and Dietmar Winkler. User-centred
Graphic Design: Mass Communications and
Social Change. London: Taylor & Francis,
1997.
1
Vygotsky cited in Sullivan Palincsar,
“Social Constructivist Perspectives on
Teaching and Learning,” Annual Review
of Psychology 49, no. 1 (1998): 351–352.
2
Piaget cited in ibid., 350
3
Piaget cited in David Kolb, Experiential
Learning: Experience as the Source of
Learning and Development (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 12.
4
Ibid., 38.
5
Elizabeth Sanders, “From user-centered
to participatory design approaches,” in
Design and the Social Sciences: Making
Connections, Jorge Frascara, ed. 1
(London: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 1–8.
Layal Shuman is an academic researcher and
lecturer, who’s work involves teaching and
learning in and through design education.
Shuman is completing a PhD in Educational
Studies at McGill University. In her
dissertation she explores design-based
education in schools, and its relation to
teaching for 21st Century learning. Shuman
also collaborates with teachers and
researchers across the country to integrate
design thinking in schools to promote
creativity and innovation. Prior to academia,
she worked for several years in multinational media agencies. Shuman’s creative
work has garnered international recognition
and awards.
6
Jorge Frascara et al., User-Centred
Graphic Design: Mass Communications
and Social Change (London: Taylor &
Francis, 1997), 18.
7
Victor Papanek, Design for the Real
World: Human Ecology and Social
Change (Chicago: Academy Chicago,
1984), 23–24.
8
Su Vernon, “Design Education for Social
Sustainability” (Proceedings of the 2nd
International Conference for Design
Education Researchers, Oslo, Norway,
May 14–17, 2013).
9
Jorge Frascara, Design and the Social
Sciences: Making Connections (London:
Taylor & Francis, 2002).
Frascara, Jorge. Design and the Social
Sciences: Making Connections. London:
Taylor & Francis, 2002.
Kolb, David A. 1984. Experiential Learning:
Experience as the Source of Learning and
Development. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall.
Palincsar, Sullivan A. 1998. “Social
Constructivist Perspectives on Teaching and
Learning.” Annual Review of Psychology 49:
345–375.
Papanek, Victor J. Design for the Real World:
Human Ecology and Social Change. 2nd ed.
Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1984.
Sanders, Elizabeth. “From User-Centered to
Participatory Design Approaches,” in Design
and the Social Sciences: Making Connections, by Jorge Frascara, 1–8. London: Taylor
& Francis, 2002.
Sanders, Elizabeth, and Pieter Jan Stappers.
“Co-creation and the New Landscapes of
Design.” CoDesign 4, no. 1 (2008): 5–18.
Vernon, Su. “Design Education for
Social Sustainability.” Presented at the
2nd International Conference for Design
Education Researchers, Oslo, Norway,
May 14–17, 2013.
Figure 1 Integration Process
Phase 1
Initiation
Bibliography
Phase 2
Introduction
Phase 3
Development
Phase 4
Final
Presentation
Phase 5
Completion
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all of the
participants for enriching this research.
10 Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Jan
Stappers, “Co-creation and the New
Landscapes of Design,” CoDesign 4, no.1
(2008): 6.
11 Ibid., 13–14.
Briefing
the project
DE/CP
Problem framing
DE & CP
Planning & management
DE & CP/DE
Problem framing
CP & DS/DS
Exploring outcomes
DE
Educator’s directions
DE
Problem framing
DE/DE & DS/DS
Discussion about social
responsibility
DE/DE & DS/DS
Presentation
DS & CP & DE
Feedback & critique
DE & DS
Planning &
management
DE
Presentation
DS/DE
12 Su Vernon, “Design Education for Social
Sustainability” (Proceedings of the 2nd
International Conference for Design
Education Researchers, Oslo, Norway,
May 14–17, 2013).
Exploring outcomes
DE/DE & DS/DS
Planning & management
DE
Planning & management
DE/DE & DS/DS
Ideation
DS/DS & DE
Presentation
DS & CP
Feedback & critique
DE/DE & DS/DS
Public engagement
DS/DS & DE
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Social Responsibility and Design Education:
Design for the Public Good
Alison Miyauchi
Abstract:
The concept or value of socially responsible design
is not a new concept but is not always well articulated in
contemporary design education, which still tends
to be largely commercially focused. In educating the
visual communicators of the future it is important to
look at alternative ways of operating in design.
Keywords:
Design
Social Responsibility
Design Education
Community Engagement
Service-Learning
Design Responsibility
Work-Based Learning
Illustration:
Melissa Bui
The Public Design Service is a vital part of the curriculum
of The School of Communication Design at the Alberta
College of Art + Design in Calgary, Alberta. Based
on the idea that design can have a positive influence on
people and the world in which we live, this initiative
provides high-quality communication design solutions for
not-for-profit organizations and provides a practicum
experience for students. Educating students to be socially
responsible designers is a vehicle for positive social
change and can strengthen our external relationships and
create an impact in our immediate communities, as well
as highlighting the value of good design.
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engagement piece to the practicum experience promotes
a deeper sense of social responsibility among students
taking them from merely becoming “well-informed”
to becoming more committed to the collective work and
responsibilities needed to address social and cultural
issues. This type of service-learning requires students to
use their subject knowledge to carry out an activity that
benefits others, and the experience can empower
students with practical and strategic skills that help
transform communities and society at large. In turn, this
teaching strategy can encourage new ways of thinking,
doing, and acting with respect to civic engagement.
Introduction
When Ken Garland published his First Things First
manifesto in 1964, he challenged graphic designers
and other visual communicators to become more
socially responsible by calling for “greater awareness
of the world…and more useful and lasting forms of
communication”. 1 This was reiterated in the First Things
First Manifesto 2000, which was signed by 33 prominent
designers and design educators in 1999. The concept
or value of socially responsible design is not new but it
is one that is not always well articulated in contemporary
design education, which still tends to be largely commercially focused. In educating the visual communicators
of the future it is important to look at alternative ways
of operating in design. Providing students practical,
real-world experience is also not new to design educators
as can be evidenced by the plethora of practicum
opportunities available at most institutions of higher
learning but tying this type of learning experience to
notions of social responsibility and good citizenship is
much less prevalent. Educators and education should
be involved in the development of caring attitudes
towards others as well as helping students grasp the
various fields of knowledge as they prepare for
professional design careers. Adding a community
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A Case for Service-Learning in Design
Service-learning means doing good work and serving,
helping, giving assistance or benefiting others.2 Servicelearning, like other teaching and learning methods,
facilitates subject learning but it also responds to
students’ desire to use their education to help others. It is
the altruistic dimension of this teaching method that
provides them with a strong source of personal learning
and development. Unlike what is usually offered in
the studio or classroom environment, learning locations
in this model offer more variety. In this model students
are often required to learn under pressure while working
with and for other people. This is real-life experience.
Students need to deal with and manage the entire process
rather than simply the faculty-student relationship.
“The experiential element of service-learning can contain
challenging and conflict filled situations that need to
be dealt with”. 3 This connects classroom learning with real
life beyond the academic exercise and makes it possible
for students to gain a deeper understanding of course
content as well as an increased sense of social responsibility. This type of experience echoes trends in the
design industry where the field of social design attracts
increasingly more designers who crave a chance to
work with underserved clients as an alternative to the
more traditional design jobs in large corporations
and advertising firms. Designers want to work closely
with communities that need their help most and actively
participate in combating complex social problems.4
At the same time, service-learning in design education
allows many not-for-profit organizations to access design
services which otherwise are not within their budgets.
Educational reformer John Dewey (1859–1952) offered a
conceptual framework for service-learning. He advocated
that all genuine education comes through experience and
provides support for the experiential element of servicelearning. His idea that education should contribute to how
we live and operate in the community supports the service
element of service-learning.“I take it that the fundamental
unity of the newer philosophy [of education] is found
in the idea that there is an intimate and necessary
relation between the processes of actual experience and
education.”5 Service-learning has occurred for all types
of post-secondary education across a wide spectrum
of disciplines during the past two decades and can be
defined as a course-based, credit-bearing educational
experience in which students: (a) participate in
an organized service activity that meets identified
community needs; and, (b) reflect on the service
activity in such a way as to gain further understanding
of course content, a broader appreciation of discipline,
and an enhanced sense of personal values and
civic responsibility.6 Bringle and Hatcher’s definition of
service-learning is important in differentiating servicelearning from volunteering by identifying this as an
academic activity. If volunteering is defined as offering
to perform a service of one’s own free will, providing
assistance or assuming the obligation voluntarily, then
service-learning as a course or part of a course or as
career development needs to be viewed differently.
Service-learning combines theory with practice, the
classroom with the community and the cognitive with the
affective. It is a form of experiential education that
enables students, in the case of the Public Design Service
course at the Alberta College of Art + Design (Canada),
to actively apply classroom knowledge by working with a
not-for-profit organization. As students engage in action
and thinking that do not necessarily follow the outlines
of a textbook but follow the patterns of real problems in
the world, they develop a deeper understanding of the
practicality or the relatedness of ideas within a discipline
and across disciplines and how those ideas have
use for guiding their actions in the world outside of
the classroom.7 It can be a potentially transformative
experience for the student. Learning not only occurs
through the process of solving the design problem
at hand and the subsequent reflection on and evaluation
of that experience (which can result not only in
academic and cognitive development), but also in
personal and social development.
Faculty have a pivotal role in this type of learning
experience by determining and assessing learning
outcomes, collaborating with community partners and
structuring student experiences that realize academic
goals. Key in these activities is the integration of
structured reflection activities that link the community
service to course content and vice versa to provide
a deeper understanding of both. This critical reflection
adds new meaning to the experiences, enriches the
course content, and develops the student’s ability to make
informed decisions in the future. Because much of the
learning experience occurs outside of the classroom
with a variety of different student/client experiences,
the planning, delivery and evaluation can be a complex
and sometimes difficult activity. The inevitable pressure
of building links with different groups and stakeholders
during the learning process adds to this complexity. From
a student’s perspective the service impulse can range
from a largely self-improvement motive to a predominantly charity driven impulse. As a result, student intention
and effort play an important role. It can be challenging for
some student designers to give up a certain amount
of control over their work and let the community partner’s
input inform their design decisions in order to fully
address the design problem at hand and to ensure all
parties will take ownership of it. Recognizing student
efforts in service-learning also needs to be considered.
Celebrating the students’ accomplishments in this area is
important in demonstrating that this type of learning
and the services provided to the recipients are valued.
Service-learning can help students develop knowledge
and skills in communication, teamwork, organization,
management, time management, project management
and interpersonal capabilities. Participation in a servicelearning experience with a community organization
also allows an opportunity for students to develop more
caring selves. It is a vehicle for character and citizenship
development as well as for the creation of social
conscience. Another benefit is a greater sense of
connection between students and the community that
results from conducting shared projects. Servicelearning can also help address some non-financial aspects
of the design business such as social capital, civic
engagement, social responsibility and sustainability.
It is also clear that students need and want a learning
experience that is relevant to an increasingly diverse and
immediately connected world. These types of learning
experiences provide educational, professional and
personal stepping-stones for students, helping them
to transition into their careers.
Education and training are pivotal to economic growth,
international competitiveness, increased productivity,
mobility of the population and to the level and standard of
living.8 In the province of Alberta, the economy has
dominated educational debate between institutions and
the provincial government. Increasingly in Alberta, the
provincial government feels inclined to tell educators that
post-secondary institutions need to be more results-based
and “real world,” in part due to the fact that competition
for public funding has dramatically increased as claims on
the public purse have grown. As a result there is greater
pressure on post-secondary institutions to emphasize the
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acquisition of knowledge and skills that are largely
market-driven and institutions are asked to demonstrate
that they are contributing to economic development,
up-skilling, and knowledge-based developments. In
addition, post-secondary institutions have been tasked
with greater accountability and cost-effectiveness forcing
them to be focused more on economic and financial
factors to secure their support base in the public mind.
In addition, the dominant government voice advocates
that higher education should prepare students to operate
within and support the economy. This is done by enabling
students to acquire knowledge and, from a government
standpoint, this knowledge should be economically
useful, advanced and marketable. In this model students
are seen as customers who want marketable skills with
the desire of developing attractive careers. This view does
not address the idea of the ability of higher education
to strengthen society by encouraging students to develop
values that help them live more effectively with others.
In fact, some criticize post-secondary institutions for not
sufficiently teaching the values of social responsibility.9
A more balanced approach acknowledges the need
for knowledge that meets individual career needs and
that of the broader economy with principles of social
responsibility.
The demand for certain social outcomes of post-secondary
education is also growing. A strong contributing factor to
this is community outreach or demonstrating credentials
and value to the community at large. The Government of
Alberta and its institutions are expected to achieve
focused economic and social outcomes that it deems are
of most value to Albertans.10 Echoing this sentiment is
the World Bank, which advocates that higher education
has a responsibility for equipping individuals with
the advanced knowledge and skills required for jobs in
government, business and the professions. UNESCO,
through the World Conference on Higher Education,
advocates for the development of social responsibility,
so that graduates can become better citizens who
can think critically, seek and apply solutions and accept
social responsibility.11 It can be challenging to balance
academic imperatives with the idea of job preparation and
government mandates. When we consider the plight of
not-for-profit organizations in a time of shrinking public
funding the case for service-learning becomes even more
attractive to all stakeholders in the process, even though
this can place additional pressure on the recipient
organizations. Why would not-for-profit organizations
want to take on this type of proposition? Organizations
sometimes take on service learners to expand their
organizational capacity. Some organizations take on
service learners to build, strengthen or preserve
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connections to colleges and universities.12 Others engage
in this activity to fill a need in their operational capacity or
to secure a service they do not possess nor could otherwise afford. A number of not-for-profit organizations
utilize service learners as part of their mission to educate
the public, where students are seen to be members
of that public. Service-learning can have positive and
quantifiable benefits for all stakeholders in the process.
The Public Design Service
Since 1984, service-learning has been a vital part of the
curriculum in the School of Communication Design at the
Alberta College of Art + Design through the Public Design
Service. Based on the idea that design can have a positive
influence on people and the world in which we live,
the Public Design Service course provides high-quality
communication design solutions for not-for-profit
organizations and provides a practicum experience for
students through doing work for worthwhile causes that
can really make a discernable difference in society.
The Public Design Service matches senior design students
with not-for-profit organizations and community partners
who have applied to participate and who have met the
eligibility requirements in a service-learning educational
experience. The two primary goals of the Public Design
Service are: 1) to give senior design students practical,
real-world experience in achieving effective solutions
to creative communication and graphic design problems;
and, 2) to provide charitable arts, service, community,
environmental, and similar not-for-profit organizations
with the benefit of quality design solutions. Secondary
goals include instilling a sense of social responsibility in
the students and community outreach.
In the Public Design Service course, project-based
service-learning is a means of managing short-term
service-learning or pro bono work. Not-for-profit
organizations are highly motivated to use project-based
service-learning as a way to get their work done and
to tap into specific strengths and skills of students. In a
recent survey, 40 of the 45 organizations interviewed
highlighted contributions made by the student designers
on projects that the organizations did not have the skills
for in house, and noted that the students behaved in a
professional manner and solved the communication or
design problem at hand with great creativity and energy.
The student designers enter the relationship with a great
deal of valuable skills and new perspectives providing
a resource that most not-for-profits and community
organizations cannot afford but desperately need.
Utilizing project-based service-learning with design can
create a win-win situation for all parties. It can be an
invaluable resource for studio-instruction and form a
connection to community important for all designers.
It is clear that in today’s world designers have a higher
public profile, as the importance of design and the power
of design to promote change have become more widely
known. As Anne Bush notes, design has an important
social role and design practice should be anchored in the
reality of its social consequences.13
As mentioned above, project-based service-learning in
the Public Design Service extends beyond the classroom
into the community. Students engage in projects that
address community needs while meeting the demands of
academic curriculum, taking their scholarly knowledge
into the community and experiential learning back
into the classroom. “This integration of pedagogy with
real-world experience provides a unique learning
opportunity for students, which can result in positive
outcomes in their academic learning and personal
development”. 14 It can result not only in academic and
cognitive development but also in personal and social
development. In some cases students are disappointed
with their service-learning experience, most often
when their expectations of the service experience are not
met or because the expectations of student and recipient
organization are not in alignment. Lack of effective
communications is a key factor here and faculty play a
very important role both in matching the student to the
project or organization and also in the facilitation of
client/student communication. In addition, organizations
can also struggle with how to set their expectations
of the students who sometimes have limited practical
experience and who approach the organization as a
learning site. It is important that the student understand
the balance between their own educational objectives
and the community organization’s expectations. In
addition, some not-for-profits do not feel comfortable
with student designers working or communicating
directly with their clients. Here, it is crucial to establish
contact parameters at the outset of the project. The
not-for-profit will also need to clearly identify the time
and resources that they can contribute to the process.
In the Public Design Service course, service-learning is
used to teach design problem solving, project management, and business practices including design briefs,
letters of agreement and contracts. The Public Design
Service also promotes the understanding of the social
value of pro bono work through providing design services
to a not-for-profit organization. At the beginning of the
semester and at key points throughout the semester
students learn the relevant theories delivered through
lectures, course work, panel discussions and guest
lecturers. The workflow chart for this course is provided
below in Table 1.
A value in giving project-based service learners a handson experience in not-for-profit community organizations
is to provide students with a greater sense of social
responsibility and community competency. Some
organizations see these students as future staff members
in the not-for-profit sector. This is not a core goal of the
Public Design Service course which views this experience
as fostering an understanding of the importance of
supporting not-for-profit work in some capacity in the
future. Students who participated in this course from
2010–2011 (approximately 60 students) were asked if
they understood the benefits of pro bono work. The term
is generally used to describe professional work undertaken voluntarily and without payment (or substantially
reduced fee) as a public service. The response to understanding the benefits of pro bono work was 100%-Yes.
Further when they were asked if they would undertake
pro bono work in the future the response was 95%-Yes.
When asked whether pro bono work made them feel like
they had made a positive contribution to the community,
65% of students felt that this work made them feel like
they had made a positive or very positive contribution to
society. The remaining 35% were neutral, most citing
the fact that their work had not yet been produced and
therefore were unable to judge whether the work had
made a positive contribution or not. A disconnect was
identified when students were asked if they knew how to
find pro bono work in the future. The response to this
question was 75%-No. This result was reinforced by
responses to a follow up question asking if students were
aware of the educational and business resources available
from the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada pertaining to pro bono work where 75% again replied no. Clearly,
further fine-tuning needs to be made to help students
engage in pro bono work post graduation.15
Additionally, the students were asked if their service
learning contributed to their understanding of the
business of graphic design, advertising and/or marketing. Of the respondents, 75% indicated yes to this
question. Of the 25% who responded no, 15% reported
difficulties with client expectations and 10% reported
that they believed they already possessed a good
understanding of the business of design. When students
were questioned about their views on whether the
service-learning project had provided a “real life design
experience” 75% responded yes, 25% responded no.
Further research is required in the perceptions of this
experience with the negative response group. They were
also asked to rank the following in terms of their
perceived importance in the learning experience:
Business Skills; Communication; Interpersonal Skills;
Leadership; Life Skills; Negotiation; Organization;
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Table 1. Public Design Workflow
Table 2. Student Ranking of Learning Outcomes16
Prior to Semester
Client registration Application via Public Design Website or hard copy by mail
Client Selection
Faculty Planning including review of the previous year’s course
Phase 1: Weeks 1–4: Research
In Class
Outside of Class
Assignments
Faculty
Orient students to the course
Research
Letter of Agreement
Panel Discussion: How not-for-profit
organizations differ from other
businesses
Client introductions
Contract
Assess student strengths and
inclinations
Design Brief
Client meetings
Assess client projects to determine
whether they are solo or team projects
Lecture: Client Relations
Lecture: Dynamics of Design Teams
Lecture: What is a Design Brief?
Lecture: Contracts (guest speaker)
Lecture: Intellectual Property and
Copyright (guest speaker)
Lecture: Time Management (guest
speaker)
Phase 2: Weeks 4–7: Preliminary Design
In Class
Outside of Class
Assignments
Faculty
Lecture: Design Thinking
Research
Framework for creative direction
Lecture: Project Management (guest
speaker)
Ideation and Concept Development
Preliminary design concepts
for approval by Faculty and then Clients
Client Meetings
Guidance on client objectives and client
relations
Approve concepts with respect to the
individual student project briefs
Lecture: Printing Processes (guest
speaker)
Ideation and Concept Development
Phase 3: Weeks 8–12: Development and Refinement/Preliminary Production
In Class
Outside of Class
Assignments
Faculty
Concept Development and
refinement
Presentations to Clients
Comprehensives, storyboards or
wireframes
Troubleshooting regarding
client relations, communications,
sub-contractors
Lecture: Liaising With Suppliers
Lecture: Community Engagement
Lecture: Nuances of Client Relations
(including scope creep, rushed
approvals, dealing with changes,
keeping your eye on the ball, etc.)
Securing Sub-Contractors
(photographers, illustrators, printers,
web developers, etc.)
Community Engagement
Phase 4: Weeks 13–14: Production
In Class
Outside of Class
Assignments
Faculty
Production to media
Production to media
All files necessary for production in
required media
Troubleshooting
In Class
Outside of Class
Assignments
Faculty
Student Presentations with
process books and summarized
client feedback
Client Service
Process Book
Deliverables to Cleint
Assessment of student learning
outcomes
Project Summary
Client Evaluations
Client Feedback Summary
Student Evaluations
Phase 5: Week 15: Evaluation
Review of semester
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Project Management; Self Knowledge; Presentation Skills;
and Time Management. In terms of student perception of
the learning experience Communication, Organization
and Project Management were given the highest rankings
and Self-Knowledge and Life Skills receiving the lowest.
See Table 2 – Student Ranking of Learning Outcomes.
Other metrics students were questioned on were
personal growth and personal course experience.
Students were asked to rank the following in terms of their
personal growth as a result of the service-learning
experience: Care; Confidence; Responsibility; and
Understanding. In the personal growth spectrum,
students ranked an improvement in Responsibility the
highest followed by, in order of importance, Confidence,
Understanding and Care. See Table 3 – Student Ranking
of Personal Growth. They were also asked to rank the
following in terms of the personal experience of the
course: Brought into a Different World; Challenge;
Enjoyable; Learner Responsibility; Personal Impact; and
Practical Learning. Students ranked Practical Learning
the highest here and Personal Impact the lowest. See
Table 4 – Student Ranking of Course Experience. It is clear
that their service-learning experience goes far beyond
discipline specific knowledge and skills to encompass the
realm of personal and social development.
Community partners of the Public Design Service are
selected with some necessary conditions: (a) they are
not-for-profit organizations; (b) the communications or
design needs of the community partner meet with
the academic goals of the course; and, (c) activities to be
undertaken are agreed to be of value to both parties.
During the last three years, 44 not-for-profit organizations were clients of the Public Design Service. See Table 5
– Public Design Service Clients 2010–2012. Most students
invested in excess of thirty hours outside of classroom
time into their various projects. Another 20% of
respondents indicated that they spent in excess of 40
hours on this activity. In responding to the question
of whether the experience has a positive impact on the
organization, 85% of community partners reported
that the experience had either a positive or very positive
impact. Approximately 10% of community partners
reported a neutral impact and less than 5% reported a
negative impact.19 Of the student respondents, 75% felt
that their work had a positive or very positive impact
on the client and 25% felt their work had a neutral impact.
Further research is required to examine the neutral and
negative groups more thoroughly.
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Table 3. Student Ranking of Personal Growth17
Conclusion
As service-learning is not a traditional learning
experience in the context of design education it can pose
challenges to the community organization, the servicelearner and the faculty with respect to the most fair
and effective way to evaluate the student academically.
In many cases the success of a service-learning project
depends on the level of commitment made by both
the representatives of the academic institution and the
community partners to developing and carrying out a
successful project. The effectiveness of communication
between parties prior to and during the project,
and the compatibility of the student and the recipient
organization are key factors here. It is critical to
anticipate the individual students’ constraints in terms
of previous knowledge, skills, and experience. It can
also be challenging for the student designers who are
required to work with a wide range of people who
have strong opinions and a lot of pride and emotion
invested in their organization.
Partnerships with community organizations can also be
complicated due to the disconnect between the academic
world’s time frame and culture as well as the specialized
lingo associated with design work. At times, it can seem
as if the two parties are speaking entirely different
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Table 4. Student Ranking of Course Experience18
languages. In order to mitigate this issue, both parties
need to openly discuss the nature of the partnership, how
to manage the relationship and clearly define the outcomes. It is also vital that a process for responding to the
other’s concerns be established. This allows both parties
to clarify their expectations as well as their roles and
responsibilities in the learning process. In addition, the
better the faculty’s understanding of the community
partner’s organization and processes, the better the
service-learning partnership is for all parties. Though the
bulk of this process occurs at the outset of the servicelearning partnership, it is crucial that there are regular
updates and continued communication throughout the
process. Clients need to understand the unique nature
of service-learning, be willing to work with students, and
be willing to be educated in the design process. In short,
they must understand the relationship between their
project goals and the learning outcomes for the students.
Students need to understand and accept responsibility
for their role and actions as a designer, understand design
as a profession, and must be open to a non-traditional
learning experience. Faculty must be able to assess
projects for their suitability in meeting course learning
outcomes and maintain objectivity between client
and classroom.
Within the context of the Public Design Service
concerns around miscommunicated expectations and
the consequences that can result from miscommunication
are addressed by setting out an explicit agreement
between the organization, student and faculty in the
forms of a letter of agreement, a design brief and a
contract. Faculty facilitate this process with the students
through lectures, panel discussions and one-on-one
meetings, as well as through discussions with the client
prior to student assignment. Students are encouraged
to initiate a formal process with the client to further
communicate and develop agreement on the expectations. An important component of this relationship is the
nature of the communication between the community
organization and the higher education institution’s
representatives, which can differ depending on the
structure of the community organization and the size and
nature of the project at hand. It is important to create
more and better communications without overburdening
the student, faculty or community partner. The faculty
role in this experience needs to be differentiated from
other teaching methods. Here real-life experience is
paired with a more open learning method where faculty
take a less directive role in favor of a more facilitative
one. Assessment of learning outcomes can be much more
challenging in this type of teaching method where
there is a much greater potential for variation in service
experiences and some loss of control over student
stimuli. However this can be mitigated by creating
assessment criteria on assessable artefacts.
Implementing and maintaining a strong and relevant
service-learning program requires a great deal of time
on the part of the institution and faculty to manage
both community partners and students. The very nature
of service-learning is such that all stakeholders—
communities, faculty, students, institutions and
policy-makers—are impacted by the purpose,
assumptions, and practices of various service-learning
initiatives.20 These types of initiatives require planning,
networking skills, organizational capabilities and
sometimes a significant time commitment on the part
of the institution and the faculty responsible for the
course or activities. Despite the many challenges
service-learning by almost any measure has been an
enormously successful academic innovation.21
From an institutional standpoint service-learning
can address imperatives such as the responsibility of the
institution as part of the community; the role of higher
education in terms of civic and social engagement;
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Table 5. Public Design Service Clients 2010–2012
2010
2011
2012
Alberta Civil Liberties
Research Centre
Eve oe
oe, oo ove
ove or DVD, Guidebook,
Poster for 30th Anniversary
Alberta College of Art + Design
Public Design Website
Show and Sale Rebranding,
Promotional Materials
Alberta College of Art + Design
Faculty Association
Alberta Cops
Website Redesign
Recruitment Elements for AC
Website, Exhibit, Video
Alberta Magazine Publishers
Association
Alzheimer Society of Canada
Corporate ID
Calgary Car Share
ID Package
Calgary Centre for Global
Community
Display, Brochure, Program
Brochures, Banner
Calgary Drop-In Centre
Play it Forward Program
Calgary Educational Partnership
Foundation
Logo, Tagline, Application Guidelines,
Collateral Materials
Calgary Food Bank
Logo, ID Program,
Applications Corporate Manual
Calgary Humane Society
Advertising Campaign – Posters
and Billboards
Calgary Opera
Premier Gala Invitation and
Collateral Materials
Calgary Outlink – Centre for
Gender and Sexual Diversity
Website
Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra
Poster, Postcard, Business Card
Calgary Public Library Foundation
Logo and ID Program
Calgary Seniors Resource Centre
Recruitment Brochures
Cerebral Palsy Association
in Alberta
Gala Invitations, Tickets,
Web Graphics, Programmes
Central Alberta Aids Network Society
Website, ID Package
Centre Stage Theatre Company
10th Anniversary Season ID, Brochure
The Children’s Link Society
Logo, Stationary, Brochures, Website,
Social Media
Community Wise Resource Centre
Poster Design, Community Forum,
online and print
Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts
Annual Report
Fort Calgary
Interior Map, Exterior Map
Kids Cancer Care Foundation
Poster
Green Calgary
Advertising – Poster Campaign,
Website
Library Association of Alberta
Logo, Identity Manual
The Military Museums
Research
Missing Children Society of Canada
Logo for 25th Anniversary
Provincial Health Ethics Network
Brochure, Catalogue
Rosebud School of the Arts
Website, Poster, Brochure
Rhythmic Gymnastics Alberta
Logo, Website
Seeds Foundation
Website
Sexual and Reproductive Health
Program - AHS
Logo Design, Applications
Corporate Manual
Sheldon Chumir Foundation
Event Poster, Event Template,
Book Cover
Society of Graphic Designers
of Canada
Portfolio Show Poster
Sustainable Alberta Association
Portfolio Show Poster
Logo, Program Development
ID Package, Branding Guidelines
Volunteer Alberta
Print Collateral Material
WP Puppet Theatre Society
Logo, Branding, Postcard
Work of Your Hand International
Development
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Portfolio Show Poster
Logo, Collateral
Vecova Disability Services
Youths Can Fish 2 Charity
Combining service-learning with design education
can have significant benefits for individual students,
the institution, as well as the external community.
On the individual level, this type of learning experience
can increase confidence, fostering leadership and
business skills. It also enhances skills in project and time
management, as well as communication. Students
have the opportunity to use their experiences of helping
not-for-profits to strengthen their understanding
of design practice which in turn encourages the development of knowledge, skills and values. It can allow
the student to apply academic knowledge to real-life
problems and through their service-learning experience,
students can develop a greater sense of civic and
social responsibility. In addition, the material students
produce through this experience can and does have
positive effects on both their target audiences and the
community as a whole. On the institutional level, this
type of initiative promotes community outreach and may
demonstrate credentials and value to the community
at large. On a community level, service-learning can
produce a greater sense of civic responsibility and utilizes
students’ creativity as a resource to provide a needed
service for a not-for-profit community partner. Despite the
challenges of incorporating project-based service
learning in design education service-learning has the
potential to be a positive experience for all stakeholders,
encouraging new ways of thinking, doing, and acting
with respect to civic engagement. n
Poster, Website Graphics,
Flyers, Booklet
Triwest Soccer
The Vocational and Rehabilitation
Research Institute
Advertising, Rebranding of Lecture Series,
Educational Brochures, Exhibits Page,
Integrate Social Media
and, demonstrating the value of the educational
experience to the external community. For postsecondary institutions, service-learning initiatives
provide additional means of demonstrating the value
of public investment in post-secondary education.
When done well, such initiatives present the institution
as a positive and contributing member of the
community and give substance to the rhetoric of
partnership and outreach.22 Service-learning can build
strong links between institutions and a wide range
of communities while preparing students to be socially
engaged individuals.
Posters, Brochures, Label Designs
Poster
105 Le journal de design graphique 7
Notes
1
Ken Garland, “First Things First
Manifesto,” The Guardian, April 1964.
2
Anto Kerins, An Adventure in Service
Learning: Developing Knowledge, Values
and Responsibility. (Farnham, Surrey,
GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2010),
79.
3
4
Anto Kerins, An Adventure in Service
Learning: Developing Knowledge, Values
and Responsibility. (Farnham, Surrey,
GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2010),
4.
Andrew Shea, Designing for Social
Change: Strategies for Community-Based
Graphic Design. (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2012), 8.
5
J. Dewey, Experience and Education.
(New York: Collier, 1938), 20.
6
R.G. Bringle and J.A. Hatcher,
“Innovative Practices in Service Learning
and Curricular Engagement” in New
Directions in Community Engagement,
edited by L. Sandmann, A. Jaeger & C.
Thornton, 37–46. (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2009), 38.
7
8
9
Christine M. Cress, David M. Donahue
and Thomas Erlich (Foreword by).
Democratic Dilemmas of Teaching
Service-Learning: Curricular Strategies
for Success. (Sterling, VA: Stylus
Publishing, 2011), 133.
Luong Wang, “Work-based learning:
A critique” The International Journal of
Learning, Volume 15, Number 4 (2008):
90.
James O. Freedman, Idealism and
Liberal Education. (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2001), 55.
10 Enterprise and Advanced Education,
Government of Alberta. Letter of
Agreement between the Minister of
Enterprise and Advanced Education and
the Board of Governors of the Alberta
College of Art and Design. Edmonton,
AB. Retrieved from eae.alberta.ca/
media/letters/Alberta-College-of-Artand-Design.pdf, 2013.
11 UNESCO. Policy Paper for Change and
Development in Higher Education. Paris:
UNESCO. (1995), 25–26.
106 Graphic Design Journal 7
About the Author
12 Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon,
eds. Unheard Voices: Community
Organizations and Service Learning.
(Philadelphia, PA, USA: Temple
University Press, 2009), 20.
13 Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne,
eds. Citizen Designer: Perspectives on
Design Responsibility. (New York:
Allworth Press, 2003), 26.
14 Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon,
eds. Unheard Voices: Community
Organizations and Service Learning.
(Philadelphia, PA, USA: Temple
University Press, 2009), 73.
15 Results derived from a survey of Public
Design Service students 2010–2012.
16 The relative scale of the headlines
signifies the level of importance in terms
of student perceptions.
Alison Miyauchi is the Acting Vice President,
Research and Academic Affairs at the
Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary,
Alberta. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr
College, Pennsylvania and a former
Research Fellow of the Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C. She is a
practicing artist, designer, educator and
administrator. Alison has lived and worked
in Milan, Italy; Rome, Italy; Glasgow,
Scotland, and London, England. She
returned to Canada in 1992. Alison Miyauchi
has been a Faculty member of the Visual
Communications Design program at the
Alberta College of Art since 1993 and was
the founding Chair of the School of
Communication Design. Alison’s research
interests include design education, social
responsibility and community engagement.
17 The relative scale of the headlines
signifies the level of importance in terms
of student perceptions.
18 The relative scale of the headlines
signifies the level of importance in terms
of student perceptions.
19 Respondents indicating a negative
impact cited one of the following; a
miscommunication at the outset of the
project regarding scope and nature of
work required; project parameters being
altered midstream; or a student refusing
to address the client’s needs.
Nice paper, eh!
20 T. Chambers, “A Continuum of
Approaches to Service-Learning within
Canadian Post-secondary Education”
in Canadian Journal Of Higher Education
[serial online]. 39 (2) 77–100 (2009): 90.
21 Timothy Stanton, Dwight Giles, and
Nadinne Cruz. Service Learning:
A movement’s pioneers reflect on its
origins, practice, and future. (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999),
184–194.
22 T. Chambers, “A Continuum of
Approaches to Service-Learning within
Canadian Post-secondary Education”
in Canadian Journal Of Higher Education
[serial online]. 39 (2) 77–100 (2009):
93.
107 Le journal de design graphique 7
ONE COUNTRY
ONE GRAPHIC DESIGN INDUSTRY
ONE PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATION
GDC and RGD are working together to align qualification criteria, procedures
and evaluation models to create ONE National Certiication Mark for Professional
Members of both organizations.
A single professional certification will benefit all Canadian graphic designers,
allowing us to focus on elevating awareness of the value of professional design
in Canada.
Stay tuned for more.
gdc.net | rgd.ca
BP
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Call for Papers and Graphics
Graphic Design Journal
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Matt Warburton CGD, FGDC (Editor)
Aidan Rowe CGD (Co-Editor)
Brooke Allen CGD
Roberto Dosil
Katherine Gillieson
Casey Hrynkow CGD, FGDC
Karin Jager CGD
Mary Ann Maruska FGDC
Michael Maynard FGDC
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