VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

College and university enrolments are diversifying rapidly. For example, in Canada in 2022/2023, international students accounted for 21.2% of total enrolment, a figure that has more than doubled in the last decade. Many of these students have backgrounds in writing systems other than Roman, such as Chinese, Korean, Perso-Arabic, and Indic scripts. Furthermore, many urban centers have areas where non-Roman scripts are found in public signage and other messaging. While Roman script dominates Western design education, this monoscriptual focus does not prepare students for the current global and domestic design context. Consequently, I advocate for the strategic integration of non-Roman script traditions into first-year typography curricula. This approach provokes fundamental design inquiries: • What are the purely formal qualities of a script, independent of linguistic knowledge? • How does our perception differ between foreign languages in familiar scripts and those in scripts we don’t know? • What are the unique affordances of different writing systems in design? These questions encourage students to consider how different scripts may work together, a practice increasingly relevant in the global design economy. All students will navigate multicultural careers, making assignments incorporating varied scripts valuable for professional relevance in graphic design and related disciplines. Currently, my curriculum includes projects where students analyze existing non-Roman typographic work and incorporate both Roman and non-Roman scripts into a single composition. These assignments yield several benefits: They foster cultural and typographic awareness for Roman-script students; they provide students from other script backgrounds an opportunity to use and demonstrate mastery of their native writing systems and educate their peers; and they contribute directly to the decolonization project by challenging the hegemony of Roman script in design education.