Yesterday I went to a great AIGA event in the SVA Theater in New York. The event was honoring Richard Wildes 40 years of devoted work as chairman of the graphic design department at the School of Visual Arts. To do that, Steven Heller did live Q&As with legendary designers/design educators Gail Anderson, Arem Duplessis, Carin Goldberg, and Paula Scher. They where discussing their own careers in design education and showcasing some of their students results.
The design educators where talking about how important and rewarding it is to teach the next breed of young designers and had some really great examples of assignments and solutions with them.
One of the things that stuck to my mind, was Paula Scher talking about how she changed her perspective on design teaching a couple of years back. Going from giving assignments related to a specific media, i.e. book jacket design to now giving assignments that teaches the students how to seek out, research for and improve real life situations/businesses, utilizing the different medias that makes sense in the specific case – more of a holistic brand-oriented approach. I really like the idea and I think it’s much aligned with what we are trying to teach the kids at The Danish School of Media and Journalism. I really don’t think the world needs more “book jacket designers” – or designers stuck in a single narrow media.
Another thing Paula Scher said, that I think is very right, was a comment on the importance of getting good designers to embrace digital design (free from memory) “The Internet was invented by geeks – that’s why it looks like it does. But now that designers don’t fear technology any more, it’s time to take it back from the geeks and fix it. There’s no reason why a website can’t look as beautiful as a poster or a book jacket”. Sorry Paula, if I didn’t get it exactly right, but it was prety much the essence of it as I understood it. And it’s so true.
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