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2005 AIGA MEDAL
Meredith Davis, who comes from a family of teachers, says, “I don't
remember not expecting to teach—it's in my history.” Her first job,
after earning two degrees in art education, was as a middle-school
art teacher in Pennsylvania. Then, in the mid-1970s, when her
interests steered her to design, she went to Cranbrook Academy of
Art. There, funded by a grant from the Michigan Council of the
Arts, as part of a student team, she developed a curriculum for use
in 500 Michigan public schools that introduced students to
communication, objects and environments as outcomes of design
decision-making. This was the beginning of Davis's long and
multifaceted investigation of the complex relationship between
design and education.
Upon graduating from Cranbrook, Davis embarked on the phase of her
career most directly connected to design practice. Practice for
Davis, however, was never far away from teaching. Her first
position, as a curator of education and designer at the Hunter
Museum of Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, enabled her to straddle
both fields. Not only was she teaching full-time and administering
programs at Virginia Commonwealth University, she was also running
Communication Design—the firm she founded in 1979—where she oversaw
large-scale projects for clients such as Best Products, the United
Nations and Twentieth Century Fund. “This was to make certain I
knew that what I was teaching could live in the world of practice,”
she says.
Among the notable pieces of work Davis did at Communication Design,
in collaboration with her two colleagues Robert Meganck and Rob
Carter, was the 1980 annual report for Best Products Company. The
report gained the design community's attention and received
multiple awards for its innovative integration of the editorial and
financial information, its use of black-and-white photography, and
its rejection of what were, at the time, conventional approaches
to report design, such as full-bleed photography on the cover. As
Davis recalls it, “Our clients tended to be those interested in
rethinking standards and conventions of format.”
By 1989, feeling the need for more reflection than her double life
of full-time teaching and practice allowed her, Davis quit her
practice and moved to North Carolina State University (NCSU) to
focus on teaching. Within three months of her arrival, she was
asked to head a new department of Graphic Design, and in 1997, she
became director of the Graduate Program.
Davis's interest in graduate education and design research
deepened, and in the same year, using an NEA grant, she published a
series of Annotated Graduate Research Bibliographies that aimed to
illustrate what kinds of literature support exemplary graduate
teaching and research. She began to believe more and more in the
need for design research as one of the defining characteristics
that separates a “trade” from a “profession.” In 2005, she became
the director of Ph.D. program in Design, having developed only the
second doctoral offering in graphic and industrial design in the
United States.
Accreditation, assessment and their associated issues are abiding
concerns for Davis. Among her initiatives in this area is a
collaboration between AIGA and the National Association of Schools
of Art and Design (NASAD), which focuses on articulating a set of
national standards that are sufficiently open to allow for
innovation, but also rigorous in setting minimum thresholds for
program performance. Davis is interested in how programs make
judgments about what they're doing and what it means to the
practice of design. As a member of NASAD's accreditation
commission, she visits programs around the country on a regular
basis. Among the issues she investigates are: how teachers learn to
teach; how to develop a pedagogy consistent with one's philosophy
of design; and how to develop meaningful education in the context
of a reward system that tends to only value great portfolios.
Another aspect of Davis's work with design education is her
writing. She is committed to the publication of literature for
college students and faculty and to expanding the sources for
graduate design education. In 2004, Thames and Hudson commissioned
Davis to edit a series of design textbooks and to author one on
graphic design theory. She makes writing a big part of the NCSU
graduate program. “We require students to make sense of their work
through writing,” she says. “Writing is a good way to emphasize the
importance of the construction of an argument.”
Davis contributes her time to numerous professional organizations
and policy-making bodies. As well as working with NASAD, since
1990, she has been actively involved with the National Endowment
for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Education and the Council of
Chief State School Officers. In 1986 and again in 1992, Davis took
on the presidency of the Graphic Design Education Association, and
in 1989, she began 10 years of service on the American Center for
Design's board of directors. Later, in 1995, she became a director
on AIGA's national board and has continued to serve the
organization in a variety of capacities ever since. For Davis,
among the virtues of these organizations is the fact that they
provide what she describes as “a forum for taking on big issues
that just can't happen with individuals.” She has spearheaded
numerous projects through AIGA, mostly aimed at increasing
designers' understanding of the role and importance of design
education in relation to practice and its larger contexts.
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