September + October 2008
interactions
single typographic line, “We are all African.” Negroponte shared his first stories of MIT’s $100 laptop, which brought the world of the Internet to children living in poverty in developing countries. I was sitting in the audience with Hugh Dubberly, who commented that design, in comparison to technology, had made such little real progress over the preceding 20 years. In a visual sense, these were equally elegant solutions, but their fundamental perceptions of the problem of poverty and what part design can play in addressing it are quite different. Why is this the case?
I believe that design education, at the most basic level, views complexity as a “ problem to be overcome through reductivist artifacts,” not as an inevitable and pervasive attribute of life in the post-industrial community. So if the future is about an ever-expanding web of connectedness, how are we preparing students for meaningful work in this complex world? I’d like to suggest that we’re not. Despite the obvious emotional impact of Glaser’s poster, he belongs to a generation in which the goal of design was to make things simple. Negroponte, on the other hand, is a technologist for whom the goal of design is to make the complex manageable and complicated things meaningful.
Almost everything about today’s design education is matched to Glaser’s worldview. We structure both curricula and projects in craft-based progressions from simple to complex, from the abstract to the contextualized. In typography classes, for example, we begin with the
letter and then advance to the word, sentence, paragraph, and page. Sequences of typography courses are built on this simple-to-complex progression. When opening InDesign demands that students address the formal and interpretive issues of publication design simultaneously, how do you defer a discussion of leading and legibility, of the modernist preconceptions of software, of language? The only option is default, and what kind of typographic lesson is that?
The reality is that our strategy for teaching typography is residue from how students could comp type in predigital times— by drawing. It is the organizational structure for every type book since James Craig’s 1970 Designing with Type, but it holds less relevance for what students need to know about communication in a digital world. Typography today is a complex relational system that depends on the interplay of formal, technological, linguistic, and cultural variables. Yet we persist in teaching this progression of scale, isolating such variables within their own distinct conceptual frameworks and rules.
The same strategy defines how students progress in other studies of form. First-year foundation lessons begin with abstraction: point, line, and plane; color wheels; and paper-folding exercises. We defer discussions of meaning and context until later levels of the curriculum. Beginning students learn these abstract principles only through patterns in what makes their teachers smile; nothing about such studies resembles what students know in the real world, and as a colleague recent-
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