I love the preliminary research before a project begins. So I picked up The Education of a Graphic Designer to start a personal investigation while I consider a master’s degree. It’s turned out to be the perfect book to help organize thoughts around graduate design school — what should be valued in design education, which trickles down to reasons for enrolling and what to expect from a good institution.

What follows are some rough notes from the first essay, Education in an Adolescent Profession, by Katherine McCoy.

In short, design education is heavily dilluted because:

1. There are no universally recognized guidelines of what qualifies one as a professional graphic designer
2. The focus is too often on applied design where students learn how to respond to common design problems (akin to flipping through CA) instead of the underlying design fundamentals at play
3. Few colleges understand that design is not simiply the commercialization of fine art

Bauhaus Design Fundamentals: Correct
Architecture was the earliest design field and the only one to exist 100 years ago. The Bauhaus were the first to lay ground rules, showing the need for a set of design fundamentals before addressing the pragmatic design need:

The Bauhaus Basic Course was the first in design education to declare that basic design principles underlie all design disciplines, that primary design education should begin with abstract problems to introduce these universal elements before students proceed to tackle programmatic design problems applied to specific scales, needs and media. This emphasis on abstraction and experimentation, and the rejection of accepted traditional formulas, represented a radical new attitude in education.

The Bauhaus method of design principles were slow to make their way to US schools and went through Switzerland before being adopted by major studios in the 1960’s and eventually taking root in Yale and other premier schools.

Based on objectivity and rationalism, this [Swiss] educational system produced a codified method that was easy to communicate to students, giving them a foundation for a visual design process and composition that went far beyond the superficial emulation of their heros.

But even today, the Bauhaus style of abstract experimentation is usually limited to introductory design survey courses, after which students are forced into a specialization where the simulation of real-world design ensues.

Master/Apprentice: Incorrect
Many schools emulate the master-apprentice model. The apprentice initially takes on the mechanics of the master’s work, taking on more and more craft as his skill progresses. Although more vocational than academic, this educational style maps more easily to the job market from the start, and is the driving force behind this method — to boost graduate employment rates. The main problem is that it’s not based on any kind of design standards, but the personal style of the master.

This lack of formalized method has been almost universal in our art schools and university art departments until recently. The typical approach has placed a premium on creativity, a flash of intuition, the Big Idea, and educators have encouraged this, through exposure to “samples and examples”… Graphic design magazines and competition annuals have been most students’ only resource. Emulating the work of renowned designers could be seen as a weak continuation of the master/apprentice system without the benefit of personal contact between student and master.

A nugget relevant to my personal quest:

Graduate study should never imitate professional practice; rather, it should challenge students to look deeply into the discipline and into themselves to connect design to its culture, its history, its users, its society, and its technology

And some comments on what lies at the intersection of design and other disciplines that surfaced during a conversation I had with Dave Shea:

But we hear a continuing debate as to whether this profession should lean toward art or toward science. The most recent influences add a third contender to the art/science debate. Literary and critical theorists see design as a language to be read—that graphic design might be considered a form of visual literature.

Although all three orientations are preoccupied with communication and meaning, each stresses a different component of the sender-transmitter-receiver communication model. Design as art is concerned with personal content and expression; design as science is concerned with systematic presentation of objective information; and design as language is concerned with the audience’s reading or interpretation of text and content … Certainly, graphic design will be the richer for the exploration of all three directions.

More to follow.