IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

As graphic design expands, new skills are required to practice in the profession. Education needs to respond as much with new skills, as with a reorientation of pedagogy. Our first experiences with design should move away from emphasizing expected outcomes, towards locating design decisions amongst the skills, practices, and media that make graphic design a broadly significant discipline. In place of existing outcomes and projects, pre-professional steps or phases, we should focus our attention on the specifics of decision-making. More than Donald Schön’s reflective practice model, where a dialogue is struck between a learner and a design scenario, we expand these dialogues to exist between learners and tools, techniques, and knowledges. Such a framing of design process locates learners in a rich and complex studio environment – we learn to make; we make to learn. Can documentation and reflection – looking back at the evolution of a project – reveal the specific decisions that arose in a specific project? Rather than a rote description of steps, we need a pedagogy that supports the emergence of, and reflection on, autonomous design decisions, not design decisions that are modelled on the aesthetic preferences of a studio-master. A pedagogical move towards design as reflective practice places decision-making at the core of the studio. Such a studio might introduce the lenses of appropriateness and effectiveness – how specific visual form engages with the needs of communication. A reflective design studio might rely on longer simple projects, but a more complex context, where the tools, techniques, and knowledges, locate autonomous design decisions.