Research and Destroy Response

This article sounds to me like a push to encourage designers to change the way they approach designing. Heads up: education is my soap box. All roads lead back to education.

That being said, in order for the way we design and the way we think about to change, we must change the way we teach design. My university is a perfect example. There is a journalism college, a fine art college, an architecture college, and a textiles, manufacturing and fashion design college. The weird part? They all have a design aspect until recently, none of them collaborated, worked together, or cooperated to teach students. At some point, designers of various things all need to learn the same fundamentals. You'd think it makes sense to have a design college since we have such various design programs offered...but no. We don't. Instead, we're isolated from one another and left to our own devices to figure out how to navigate as a design student.

Some of the colleges teach certain things really well. The J-School (journalism) teaches the programs really well. They also have outstanding connections to the job market. The Fine Art school (my college :D) teaches the conceptual side of design really well. We also have some amazing instructors with awesome experiences. The architecture college teaches work ethic better than any college I know. And their equipment...don't even get me started. It's beautiful, and I love it. The fashion college teaches design for something other than web, print, and sky so that forces students to think about their designs in a way that none of the other colleges do.

All of that to say that, the merging of the fine arts and architecture colleges is huge step in what I think is the right direction to influence change in the way we design. There needs to be more cross college design education. Like I said, my university is a great example because we have a lot of this going on currently. This university is home to a lot of talented designers. They can be even better with a broader design education to be prepared for whatever they may encounter, especially those instances where they have to be designers for the sake of design.

**This blog was in response to this paragraph, specifically: "It is not so strange that a branch of graphic design has evolved that no longer hangs around waiting for an assignment, but instead takes action on its own accord. It has polarized into the ‘willing to work’, who often have little or no control over their own positions, and the ‘out of work’, who, with little economic support beyond re-channelled subsidies or grants, work on innovation for the sake of innovation."**