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2007
Volume 3, Number 2: 2007
ISSN 1833-2226
Guest Editor: Laurene Vaughan
Editorial
Vaughan, L.
Education: It's a Futures Business
pp.1-4.
Graduate design education contributes to the field of graphic design practice, including graphic design education at all levels, in profound ways. Beyond the content or focus of the study, in the contemporary knowledge economy training and guiding people in the practice of thinking and critique is essential. New technologies, the speed of change and the blurring boundaries between local and global contexts, require us to have a toolset for engagement. What we know is important. Our ability to find, create and communicate that is essential. The graphic designer of 2020, no matter what their age, will find them-selves working in ways and contexts that we have only just begun to imagine. Graduate education is one way that we, as individuals and as a field of design practice, can find ways to navigate our way into these new and exciting times.
Papers
Melles, G.
Genre-Based Pedagogy for Design-Oriented Theses in Postgraduate Design Education
pp.5-16.
Academic design research currently produces a range of traditional and alternative doctoral outputs integrating writing and project-based components. While other academic fields, including architecture, have achieved sufficient disciplinary consensus that academic writing may be characterised in textbook guides, this is not yet the case in the newer design disciplines. Although there may be humanistic and creative resistance to the conventionalisation of academic design discourse and the perceived loss of academic freedoms this entails much can be gained by writing with an eye to models of good practice. Genre-based approaches to academic writing, including thesis writing, are firmly established in applied linguistics and composition studies. In disciplines with stable research paradigms, such as experimental science, the rhetorical and linguistic conventions for academic genres are well documented and accepted among the relevant discourse communities. This is not yet the case in emerging design scholarship where visual and textual modes of presentation jostle with creative project outcomes. Although postgraduate design education lacks the genre stability of other disciplines a growing corpus of academic documents, including digital theses in the design disciplines now allows some preliminary analysis and conclusions to be drawn about the textual production of knowledge in design. Given the pedagogical value of modelling in teaching writing in the current multicultural environment of Australian higher education, such findings have implications for design education. This paper reviews the genre-based approach and examines research proposals and thesis texts from design as a potential source for teaching at the postgraduate level. The paper suggests that the supervision and writing process for design educators and students can be facilitated by genre-based approaches to analysis and teaching, which is exemplified here.
Calvelli, J.
Design, Designing, Designing Designers, and Redesigning Designing: A Fable on Sustainment
pp.17-25.
keywords: design education, design philosophy, sustainable design, redesigning design, stuff
They knew then and there that it wasn't just a question of redesigning designing, but redesigning the money stuff world, which was designing power. So they rolled up their sleeves and got to work. When they got to work, the first thing they figured was that some people have money and thus power and some people don't. Some people have lots of money and thus power and use it, and some people have no money and thus no power and are thus used by those that have the money and the power. That worked for worlds too, worlds with money and thus power using those worlds with no money and thus no power. And worlds which used the ones with no money and thus no power. And inside the creaking and inside the moaning could be heard all the effects of this difference of power.
McArthur, I.
Learning Continuums: Emerging Paradigms - Reflections on the impact of graduate design education on professional design practice in the 21stC
pp.26-38.
Postgraduate study is increasingly considered by many to be an important part of the professional designer's education. As a result, universities and design colleges in Australia and elsewhere face intense competition in their development of comprehensive and appropriate study offerings to attract local and international students. This is the case especially among institutions that possess established links and partnerships with universities and colleges in Asia. China has become a particularly attractive as a source for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and primarily for financial reasons, participation in engaging with this market is high across the higher education sector internationally. The global context is important in this paper, which explores the relevance of postgraduate design education to current and emerging industry needs and expectations. This account is written from a perspective influenced profoundly by professional experiences and parallel postgraduate study undertaken by the author through a western university, while living in The People's Republic of China. In addressing the question of relevance of postgraduate study to industry, reflections are offered with the intent of fostering discussion about how design graduates are trained to deal with the inevitable impact of shifts in design practice, globalisation and the emergence of China. The text draws on materials developed during postgraduate study and includes references to a major dissertation and project that examines these considerations.
Akama, Y. and Haslem, N.
Reflecting on Fashion City: Learning From Collaborative Experimental Design
pp.39-47.
keywords: participation, co-authorship, reflective practice, collaborative learning, relational aesthetic
Learning through designing is a common pedagogical model in design education. Many design institutions utilise studio-based teaching with design tools and methods facilitating students' learning in a discovery-led way. This paper builds on the above model by examining the learning and discovery that took place that arose from a collaborative student design project named Fashion City. In contrast with most other learning models in undergraduate studio-based teaching, this project did not have a prescribed learning objective. Rather, it took an experimental approach to learn and discover from propositions, interventions, friction and failures. Instead of having a set objective, Fashion City evolved as a response to context, generated through the interactions and actions of a group of designers who all had developed research agendas. In this way Fashion City simply took a position of 'seeing what might happen' when a group of graduate students collaboratively designed a project within a particular context.
2007
Volume 3, Number 1: 2007
ISSN 1833-2226
Editors: Moline, K., Newton, S. and Roxburgh, M.
Papers
Sweetapple, K.
Power Dressing: A Critique of Design Authorship
pp.1-8.
This paper is an overview of the issues of authorship and design as they have emerged through the nineties. It makes the claim that the problem of authorship for design criticism lies largely in its narrow application, implying that design criticism's 'authorship-lite' is a missed opportunity to investigate aspects of the communication process that remain under-examined in design, yet are well documented in literary theory. It begins with a discussion of the term 'author' from the perspective of literary theory and reveals how the various shifts in meaning are significant to design. Following is a discussion of the uneasy partnering between authorial criticism and design, how the term 'author' has been misused/used in the context of visual communication.
Cahalan, A.
Multitudes of Interpretations: Intentions, Connotations and Associations of Typeface Designs
pp.9-18.
Typefaces—commonly called 'fonts'—are essential to a designer's ability to communicate visually. The end of the twentieth century was the age of the desktop computer, font design software and page layout programs and the new digital technology removed typography from the exclusive area of the specialist type designer, type foundry and typesetting company and placed it in the hands of graphic designers and non-specialists. This democratisation also led to an exponential growth in the number of typefaces available to users of type.
This paper explores the extraordinary breadth evident in the intentions behind the design of a typeface—the reasons someone decides to create a new set of letterforms—and the associations and connotations which typefaces accrue as they are used by designers as components of visual culture. Reflecting the place of typefaces within a cultural and sociological context, it is the diversity of approaches and outcomes which are discussed in this paper. It addresses the cultural significance and meaning of typefaces by showing the role of personal interpretation and a search for appropriateness in the use of the vast resource of an estimated 100,000 Western typefaces.
Winters, T.
Using concepts of authorship in graphic design to facilitate deep, transformative learning
pp.19[^]29.
This paper argues for the potential educational value in critically considering varied descriptions of, and claims to, authorship in graphic design as a means of encouraging students toward more sophisticated conceptualizations of the "design entity" (Davies & Reid 2001: 180). It describes how the form and content of debates over authorship can be used to support desirable educational goals of deep and transformative learning. I suggest that the critical discourse around definitions of authorship in graphic design provides rich territory for critical, reflective thinking, and challenging students to develop more critical dispositions in relation to their discipline.
2006
Volume 2, Number 2: 2006
Special Issue: Design Authorship
ISSN 1833-2226
Editorial: Moline, K.
Grocott, L.
Designing a Space for Speculation
pp.1-15.
keywords: design research, practice-led research, speculative practice, visualisations
This paper visually documents the practice of Studio Anybody, The Australian graphic design consultancy that provided the research study with a site and context for positioning research as a speculative activity fundamental to a studio's professional culture. Working across a triangulation of activity the consultancy developed a reflective practice model where the back-talk generated by the studio-initiated research and client-commissioned projects continuously advanced the collective practice of the five designers. The research asserts why and how a critical space for speculation played a significant role in creating a practice model that allowed the designers to avoid familiar, derivative work and embrace the unfamiliar and the unknown.
Glickfeld, E.
Designed Criticism or Critical Design: The Dilemmas of Graphic Design and Authorship
pp.16-30.
keywords: authorship, critique, designer-initiated publications
This paper examines theories of authorship as applied and discussed in international graphic design circles from the 1980's onwards. The birth of critical theory opened the way for notions of authorship to be questioned. The application and discussion of them in the discourse of graphic design, however, are full of confusion and misunderstandings. This in turn created a backlash against theory in general. It is this author's contention that exposing these misconceptions will open up the way for designers to imagine a way of operating that is based on questioning and critique.
Sadowska, N.
Transfering Traditions? From the Graphic Design of Women's Magazines to Commercial Online Portals for Women
pp.31-47.
keywords: graphic design, web design, women's magazines, commercial women's portals, feminism and design, consumption
With the introduction of the Internet as a communication medium, new forms of design practice have begun to come to the fore. However these practices often draw upon the well established canons of the design discipline. The case study of BEME.com, a commercial online portal design for female Internet users, explores the transition from the graphic design traditions associated with women's magazines to the online design of commercial Internet portals for women. This paper addresses the relationship between design practice and the portrayal of gender in both mediums. Feminist critique of design practice has drawn attention to continuing problems women have as design practitioners and design consumers and a case study analysis of BEME.com offers an opportunity to highlight some of the issues such a critique raises. The paper draws on documents obtained from the commissioning publishing house and visual materials gathered from the online portal to substantiate the analysis. Whilst located at a cross-road in design practice where design traditions for women's magazines meet the emerging practice of online design, this paper argues that the case of BEME.com demonstrates that design traditions and particularly design for women and of gender, are all to easily transferred from one medium to another.
McCarthy, S.
Curating as Meta Design-Authorship
pp.48-56.
keywords: design-authorship, exhibitions, curator, meta-authorship
Design-authorship is often considered at the micro-level as graphic designers produce discrete works with an enlarged sense of agency. Whether publications, posters or interactive media, these artifacts position the designer as having a greater role in the communications paradigm, thereby enlarging the cultural, economic and political spaces for design activity.
Designer-authored works are occasionally brought together into themed exhibitions, as curators cast this work into new contexts. Additionally, acting as meta-authors, some curators produce design-authorship at the level of the conceptual exhibition. This paper examines examples of both approaches: the exhibit of, and the exhibit as, design authorship. The dual nature of the curator as meta-author is explored through seven exhibition case studies. These studies show the variety of ways in which traditional distinctions of subject (by designer) and object (about designer) are becoming blurred and dynamic.
Moline, K.
Authorship, Entrepreneurialism and Experimental Design
pp.57-66.
keywords: experimental design, critical design, authorship, graphic design, relational aesthetics, Re-magazine, Jop van Bennekom
This paper responds to recent calls in design literature for a return to design authorship, and the appropriation from fine art of theories of relational aesthetics. I suggest that before looking to art as a model, it is useful to retrace various divergent moments in the authorship and entrepreneurialism debates in graphic design. This paper describes how these debates polarise the designer-as-author as antithetical to the designer-as-service-provider, and as such omit a third term, experimental design. I discuss an example of experimental design, Re-magazine by Jop van Bennekom, in terms of how such design challenges the promises of "total control" or autonomy that is identified by many as a key motivation in practices of graphic authorship and entrepreneurialism. I interpret issue 9 of Re-magazine as a allegory that questions design's pursuit of autonomy. Rather than confuse the distinct specificities of fine art and design practices in an unexamined adoption of relational aesthetics, as Poyner and Mermoz suggest, I propose that design must first reflect on its own products and practices.
2005
Volume 1, Number 2: 2005
Special Issue: Visual Communication
ISSN 1833-2226
Editorial: Roxburgh, M.
Nini, P.J.
Sharpening One's Axe: Making a Case for a Comprehensive Approach to Research in the Graphic Design Process
pp.1-10.
keywords: problem-solving, user-centred, process models, planning models, research methods
The goal of this paper is to present the basic information needed for graphic designers to consider incorporating the demonstrated research techniques in their work. It is my hope that more graphic designers will pursue a research-based approach to the process of creating appropriate and effective communications for the various users and audience groups for which they design.
Schenk, P.
Before and After the Computer: The Role of Drawing in Graphic Design
pp.11-20.
keywords: Drawing ability, Design process, Digital studio
This paper is based on some of the key findings from a research programme conducted over 20 years, and charts significant adaptations to the professional practice of graphic designers and changes in a traditional, largely paper-based design process to one extensively facilitated by a digital working environment.
Stones, C.
Identifying, Categorising and Rationalising Digital Design Moves Made by Novice Graphic Designers
pp.21-36.
keywords: Design moves, Colour schemes, Digital design, Visualisation, Design process
Generally this paper hopes to set an agenda promoting the use of digital design move capture and visualisation systems within the formal study of graphic design practice, to accompany other research tools such as protocol analysis and task observations.
Volume 1, Number 1: 2005
ISSN 1833-2226
Editorial: Newton, S. and Roxburgh, M.
Roxburgh, M. and Kasunic, J.L.
Looking for Limits in a World of Excess
pp.1-14.
keywords: photography, observation, curriculum
In this paper we advance the proposition that careful observation, in an iterative framework, is a necessary pre-condition for any intelligent and informed photo-imaging practice.
Mignone, J.
Handmade: The Revitalisation of Illustration Looking for Limits in a World of Excess
pp.15-23.
keywords: Illustration, Drawing, Digital imagery, Visual problem solving
As a society it is now rare for us to be commonly exposed to and appreciate a diverse range of illustrative material. In this paper I propose that illustrators create a new need for their work before its use disappears. It is up to Illustrators to not only save what some see as a dying art but to re populate our mainstream culture with diverse, creative illustrated images.
contact: journal.editor@agda.com.au
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