Craft to Concept: Notes on the Scholarship of Teaching Graphic Design

(Early in June of this year a number of design educators gathered for Intent/Content, an AIGA education conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Design educators in colleges and universities often confront issues of what it means to produce scholarship in their field, so this conference was organized around that theme. Discussion centered around ideas about design education in relationship to four kinds of scholarship described by Ernest Boyer in 1990: the scholarship of teaching, of application, of integration, and of discovery. This article is adapted from a keynote address on the scholarship of teaching.)

In colleges and universities educators are often required to defend their work in terms of specific standards of scholarship, standards usually established by others outside their own field of study. For design educators, this means understanding the terms and conditions of those standards, and their relationship to the teaching of graphic design. The first thing to be said (and perhaps this is too obvious) is that the activity of teaching, even good or great teaching, is not in and of itself an act of scholarship. While we cannot have the scholarship without the teaching, scholarship requires the additional step of public dissemination of ideas, methods and theories, along with the review, critique, and possibility for future referencing and exchange of that information. Those are it's fundamental characteristics, and certainly some of the reasons we are all here at this AIGA design education conference.

To teach well requires some understanding of teaching and learning. For many of us, this has been picked up in practice; it has been understanding gained through trial and error. Teaching graphic design, like teaching in any field, also requires extensive subject knowledge. By some people's standards this subject knowledge is to be gained also through extensive professional practice, but I do not want to get sidelined in a debate about how much professional practice you need to have in order to teach design.

Instead, what I do want to say is, the practice of anything, graphic design and teaching included, represents a kind of craft (using the word craft in its highest and most respected sense). Scholarship is a different kind of activity - having a basis in its own practical craft - that provides a way of observing, responding to, sharing, and changing other disciplines in relationship to one another. It takes us into new territory. Both kinds of activity - practice and scholarship - have great value; by understanding each of them we can enhance the other. And interestingly, both activities evolve in complex relationship to one other. Our current practice of design, with its ever expanding dimensions, both stems from and attracts new scholarly support, and our teaching of design becomes more sophisticated, and more expansive, when we explore its theoretical components. In a sense, the two activities are constantly catching up with one another. At this moment, the teaching of design is poised at the edge of an exciting new period of scholarship, which is needed to keep pace with energetic emerging practices.

Let's look for a moment at this notion of craft, and how it applies to design and to teaching design. Craft is the moment when our work with materials and ideas is inseparable from the form that is being created. Clay becomes a pot, words spill out onto a page, type is placed, moved, changed, and repositioned. Lines are drawn and redrawn, stone is cut, plastic is bent, hands are placed on. It is when you are "working it" and "it" pushes back at you.

Design is both a physical and mental act of this kind, the results of which are something tangible: an object, a plan, an organization, arrangement, or set of relationships we use or experience to some particular effect. Our work with both ideas and materials yields to incremental changes; the knowledge gained through the work itself cycles back into the process and informs the eventual result. Whatever we are working with provides its own "resistance," which then succumbs to our hard earned skills.

Teaching design is one step removed from design itself, but I think for many of us, it began as, or quickly became a design project: the creation and management of specific experiences, whose purpose was to awaken and enhance the design process in others. We may have started with an act of pure imitation (simply offering projects that we ourselves did in school), but once we understood that each course had its specific goals and objectives, and that each audience of students (or each individual student) had their own particular needs, we were quick to modify those first projects and create new ones that seemed more effective.

A project then becomes a series of projects, and together with other activities we call them a course. A set of courses becomes a curriculum. Each of these can be considered design situations as well; projects which are enhanced when we can align our own goals and objectives with the needs of our various audiences and programs.

In our role as teachers, we sometimes act first as designers, then as guides, coaches, catalysts, and mentors for both our students and for each other. The back and forth between teacher and student, between various students, and the dialogue with ever changing conditions, makes teaching a kind of ultimate interactive design project. Each group of students is different from one another; they respond to each other and to the projects in different ways. Many of us have had the experience of teaching two sections of the same course, in the same semester, and having one be more successful than the other, despite the fact that the projects and activities were the same in each. Each day and each semester we all respond to external stimuli, from today's news, to tomorrow's deadlines, and to longer term changes in technology, business conditions, or societal needs. Our work is constantly adapted to keep pace with these things.

In doing this, we share what we have learned and what we practice. Essentially, this is a cycle of craftsmanship. Paula Scher's words about her own teaching neatly summarize this point of view, or stage of our activities. She wrote: "Designers learn by doing. They learn faster when someone gives them a way to do it. When they learn how, they can understand it. And when they understand it they can teach somebody else." (Scher)
In this cycle we learn by gradual acquisition of skill through imitation, repetition, and modification in response to materials or to the imperatives of very specific situations. We make things, and we display them for admiration, comparison, and professional advancement.

What, then, can scholarship (particularly the scholarship of teaching) add to this culture of craft in which we are deeply embedded? How does it expand our horizons? If we learn something by doing it, and then "understand it" as Scher has written, what is left for scholarship to provide? Note that I do believe that there is specific understanding created completely through doing or making - tacit knowledge as described by the philosopher Michael Polanyi. But I also believe that scholarship, the public review, discussion, and critique of such knowledge, and the creation of explicit descriptions of such, sharpens our understanding, and also allows us to modify that understanding more quickly when we need to adapt to new conditions.

Scholarship is a way of looking outward and inward at the same time. We look outward to carefully observe what is happening around us. We look inward to ask ourselves questions about what we are doing, what patterns we observe, and why we are doing it. We turn outward again to share our observations with colleagues, and to accept their comments and judgments before turning inward again for further reflection.

Scholarship has its own elements of craft, its own way of doing it well, which I initially encountered in a conveniently titled book: The Craft of Research. (Booth, Colomb, and Williams). But for our purposes here, I want to first talk about how scholarship takes us out of the realm of craft in relation to other disciplines, because it gives us an opportunity to not only share what we have learned through practice, but to mark out new areas for exploration. In a sense it provides a way of prototyping thoughts, of making and testing them in the public sphere. At its best, it provides "aha" moments when seemingly disparate or dissociated facts and observations are aligned in a common point of view, allowing us to better remember, organize, and use those pieces.

Thomas Ockerse, for many years head of the program at RISD, understood that this was a difficult sell for some. He wrote: "The word 'theory' is often a red flag to the very practical people that graphic designers are, but such apprehension stems from a misunderstanding about just what theory is." He went on to say: "Theory demonstrates interrelations and maps the organization of specifics. Theory demystifies the complex, and is essential to education because to understand means to simplify. And when we are aware and understand, knowledge becomes powerful and generative." (Ockerse)

Scholars then, can be considered the mapmakers of the practical and intellectual landscape. But it is interesting how uneasy their relationship with practitioners remains. Consider this: over the last 50 years or so, design theorists have discussed definitions of design, and have generally embraced a view of it as a unique discipline and a kind of thinking. But we have also recently seen a practical backlash to this development, in comments complaining about the teaching of "design thinking" rather than teaching students to actually "do something." (Saffer) Again we have the misunderstanding about the purposes of theory. In this case, what investigation of design thinking allows us to do is to recognize and categorize components of that activity, which then allows us to modify our teaching methods for various audiences, and also gives us a chance to improve teaching efficiency in areas that previously seemed mysterious or inaccessible.

Why ignore what we know or have discovered? Would you rather tell a student whose concepts are underdeveloped to "sketch some more," or simply to "push it a little further," or would you rather expose them to the dozens of ways that are already known to encourage iteration and the generation of alternative ideas? (As an aside, many of those methods were noted or developed by scholars and authors in the 1960's and 70's, who were then writing about creativity, or trying to apply theories about creativity to fields such as engineering.)

I spoke earlier about how different areas of theory and practice catch up with one another, and how we seemed poised at the edge of a vigorous period of new scholarship in the teaching of graphic design. I feel this way precisely because the practice of graphic design, embedded in the larger discipline of design itself, is such a vital and varied one. AIGA now calls itself "the professional organization for design." I don't know how architects, engineers, or industrial designers feel about this, but I do agree that it attempts to recognize and capitalize on the sense that design is a much larger component of everything we do; a word with as much potency as the word science, or the word art, or the word religion, all of which are words describing broad aspects of our human experience. Within each of these domains there are wide ranges of practice, just as we find in design.

This, as I mentioned, has been under discussion by theorists for the past half-century, as they observed emerging practices in fields as varied as architecture, engineering, industrial design, organizational management and computer science. Until recently, very few of those theorists - almost none, in fact - were graphic designers. But even without our scholarly help, our piece of that design domain, visual communication, now spans a greater range of media, and has the possibility to exert influence in more areas than ever before. Our teaching practices, supported by a scholarship of teaching graphic design, need to catch up a bit.

As we advance we need to:
• better understand how graphic design is situated within the broader discipline of design;
• we need to consolidate baseline information on best practices and recognized methodologies;
• we need to examine new methods that allow our students to explore multiple approaches, tools or media;
• we need to be attentive to variation in our audiences; and
• we need to find new ways to teach graphic design to everyone, not just professionals.

Along the way, we will need new scholarly tools: more peer reviewed venues (such as these conferences, but also in published form) specifically devoted to teaching graphic design or to teaching design in general. And we ourselves need to catch up with scholarly work that has already been done, in design, in teaching, and in other disciplines.

As a community, we'll have an easier time doing this as we continue to share information, and look for new ways to do that. It wouldn't hurt to have a journal (electronic or otherwise) or full-on website devoted to design education. It may seem strange to call for yet another journal or web site in a sea of publications and information, but one of the signs of increasing maturity in a discipline is an increase in the number of places where peer reviewed publication can occur, with a sharper focus on specific issues in each of those places. Perhaps, some day, this whole scholarly structure will be replaced by blogs or open source communications, but in one way or another scholarship will always be supported by established standards of discourse, and clear evaluation structures.

Good scholarship is based on previous scholarship, on knowing something about what already been analyzed and presented. We, as a scholarly community, need to get into the habit of building our work on that solid ground. We will gain respect when we demonstrate our understanding and respect for other research communities, and for standard research methods. While each research community finds its own style of discourse, they are all based on similar standards of rigor, questioning, and demonstration through evidence, either quantitative or qualitative.

I have tried to show that practice and scholarship differ, but that each informs the other. The ability to effectively investigate and codify the teaching of design requires knowledge of two practices, both teaching and design - which I have represented as craft activities - as well as knowledge in a third area, scholarship itself. The idea of craft has been associated with design before, often as a sort of backward or nostalgic glance at an era that seem to be vanishing, or as an appeal for qualities we want to preserve. But that was at a time when we felt our activities had to be described as "either/or," and we tried to make sharper boundaries and distinctions between things. In this age of convergence and collaboration I am much more fond of the word "and." We can have craft and we can have scholarship, quality and progress, discipline and change, and they can be intertwined.

Of course there will always be great teachers who are not scholars, just as there can be great designers who are neither teachers nor scholars. But I suspect that the best practitioners in most fields at least pay some attention to the scholarship in their discipline, even if they don't create it.

Before I close let me share, quickly, some specifics about turning your practice of teaching towards a scholarship of teaching, if that's what you are thinking about doing. I clearly don't have a "theory" here yet, but perhaps some methods or steps will be helpful.

First, observe. Observation is a foundation of all good research. You need to notice things, record them, and remember them. Perhaps you are already doing this somewhat, as you attempt to improve your teaching practice, but the tendency at first is to just push ahead without recording your observations in dispassionate detail. For a scholarship of teaching, the subject of your observation is the specifics of your students, their work, and their reaction to your teaching methods.

Second, question. Your observation must be without preconceptions, which means asking yourself what is really going on, what is being understood and what is not, and then wondering why. Eventually, you need to find a "research question" which is a specific and limited form of question that you can answer and support with the previously mentioned evidence.

Third, study widely. You may find someone who has already thought about what you are looking at. That's a good thing; you can respond to their ideas.

Fourth, organize, categorize, and restructure. We know (from teaching our own students) that material can be looked at from many different points of view. This also helps get rid of preconceptions.

Fifth, present and represent. The essential element of scholarship is public presentation, but before this can happen, you need to represent your ideas to yourself over and over. Question relentlessly. Return to steps one through four.

Sixth, evaluate. I've already mentioned that scholarship has its own standards of craft. Get to know them, and measure your work by those standards. Remember that your scholarship can be just as clunky as one of your student's early typographic studies, or like many projects we see, it can have a slick surface masking lack of substance.

Finally, when you have a good story, and can support it well, tell us about it. Help us extend our boundaries and map out those new territories that we want our students, and everyone, to explore.

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Notes:
Booth, Colomb, and Williams, The Craft of Research, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, (Princeton,NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990).

Thomas Ockerse, "Graphic Design Education: a Position Paper," in Spirals 91, principal editor Natalia Ilyin (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1991): book 1; 6.

Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1983; reprint of Doubleday & Company, 1966)

Dan Saffer, "Design Schools: Please Start Teaching Design Again," from the blog Adaptive Path, March 6, 2007, http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/03/06/design-schools-please-start-teaching-design-again/

Paula Scher, "Back to Show and Tell," in Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, edited by Beierut, Drenttel, Heller, and Holland (New York: Allworth Press, 1994): 225.