Preamble
How do ideas become visual? How do emotions take shape? What do we assume about the things we see? What do we take for granted? What are our expectations for communicating with others? How do they communicate with us? How should information be organized? In what form does it pass from one person to the next? What are the boundaries between the precious and the everyday? How do we evaluate beauty? When do visual things become ideological? Which kinds of communication are information and which are propaganda? Which kinds of communication are ethical and which are unethical? Who decides? What should learning about design require? How should we do it? What does criticism have to teach us? Who can make design? What kind of rights and authority can those people lay claim to?

In any discipline, the ability to ask questions of what you do will help you to do it better. And in any creative community, there must be a time for making and a time for thinking about what’s being made. This class will help you with both efforts, and it will help you to coordinate between them. It will help you ask better questions of what you see, which will help you to make better decisions about what you make. It will also help you to better analyze what your classmates make, and in so doing it will help to build a common critical language between you.

Thus the twin roles of critical thinking are clarified: critical thinking gives tools both to the individual maker and to a community of makers. As a result, this class is only as good as your enthusiasm for participating in it. It does not exist in a vacuum. Some of the knowledge you will gather here is book knowledge, but a greater part of it is self-knowledge and shared knowledge within your community of peers. You will do projects together as well as separately, and your group discussions will be every bit important as my lectures and insights. To put it very simply, I am only an experienced guide: you will learn in large part from one another.

Philosophy
One way of thinking about this course is as a very hands-on introduction to the “philosophy” of design. For the sake of simplicity, I have built the class around its assignments, but it could just as easily have been built around the six major branches of philosophical inquiry. Since it’s useful to have some familiarity with these as we start the class, I’ve included them below. They are:

• Aesthetics: What’s beautiful and what’s ugly. Why something is one thing and not the other. The philosophy of formmaking.
• Epistemology: How we know what we know. How we learn what we don’t know. How much we know and where our knowledge ends. Includes criticism and education.
• Ethics: How we decide between right and wrong, good and evil. Includes morality and professional ethics.
• Logic: The structure of arguments. Includes classification and syntax.
• Metaphysics: The structure of the universe and our perception of it. Being, time, reality, consciousness, etc. The relationship of worldly objects to one another.
• Politics: How scarce resources are allocated to the community. The structure of liberty, justice, property, rights, and freedom. The dynamics of power. Includes ideology and authority.

The assignments, the class itself, and (of course) the real world will blend these areas together, but often it helps to be able to take a thought or visual gesture apart using these general branches of philosophy.

Forms of Design
Another way to interrogate the things you see is by considering the assumptions that come with how they were made. Designers are asked to have a tremendous number of technical and analytical skills at our disposal to communicate information that is unfamiliar to us. Borrowing from Alice Twemlow’s What Is Graphic Design For?, a few of these the forms that designers regularly use include:

• Typefaces
• Motion graphics
• Music and sounds
• Games
• Signage and wayfinding systems
• Posters
• Magazines and periodicals
• Books
• Information graphics
• Interactive systems
• Identity systems
• Advertising
• Writing
• Software programs
• etc, etc.

All of these forms require very different skills for making them, different critical tools for understanding them, and different expectations from audiences in terms of which forms favor certain kinds of content when others do not. Successful designs and designers not only understand these problems themselves but manage to make them relevant to their audiences.

Class Formats
This class will adopt a variety of formats including lectures, discussions, presentations, critiques, and in-class exercises. I will often lecture with slides and will try to provide slide lists when appropriate.

When discussions are scheduled, I generally like to focus on a specific reading or comparative set of readings. I will notify you of these in advance and will expect in return from each of you an email that includes some ideas you’d like to bring to our discussion in class. This email can outline points of agreement, points of disagreement, points of discussion, offhand comments, questions for me, questions for others, or a mix of all of these.

Because our time is limited, I plan to use the workshop technique of breaking the class into two groups, A and B. Some weeks both groups will present their assignments to the class for discussion, but most weeks it will be one group or the other. You will get your group assignments the first week of class. If it is your week to present, please come to class with your assignment prepared as specified. If it is not your week, I will still expect your assignment in a form that can be turned into me for my review. Please be mindful of the weeks you are scheduled to present your projects.

Evaluation
This class will truly reward those who enthusiastically embrace its assignments and discussions. As such, the majority of your grade (75%) will rely on your cumulative performance from week to week. The remaining portion (25%) will be based on the strength of your contribution(s) to the final class project.

Assignments
The assignments I give in this class may turn into graphic design assignments in the future, but I ask each of you for now to focus on them as opportunities to write, think, debate, gather evidence, and conduct original research. They are content-generating assignments first and foremost, and creative responses to our discussion topics second. The content I ask you to gather may be visual in some cases, but none of the assignments should be interpreted as design assignments, so prioritize your time investment in them accordingly.

• Record of a Remembered Event
• Gift Giving
• Studio Tour Guide
• A List, a Deck
• In the Library
• Supermarket Wall Plaque
• Beautiful & Ugly
• Two Descriptions
• Color Propaganda Blog
• Ethics Poll
• 50 Footnotes
• Final Journal Project

Readings & Schedule
I expect everyone to do all the readings each week, and to assist you I have provided them as printable PDFs on CDs I will distribute the first day of class. You will see that certain readings are starred (*) for in-class discussion, and it is for those readings that I will expect an email from you as specified in “Class Formats.” Please bring copies of the reading to class that week as well. When an (A) or (B) group is noted, that group should plan to present its response to that week’s assignment during the review.

Class 1: Introduction

1) “Edugraphology—The Myths of Design and the Design of Myths” by Victor Papanek [LC 3]

Class 2: Emotion, Memory, History, Symbolism

Review: Record of a Remembered Event (A)
1) “Is It Possible to Touch Somebody’s Heart with Graphic Design?” by Stefan Sagmeister [Made You Look]
2) “Good History/Bad History” by Tibor Kalman, J. Abbott Miller, and Karrie Jacobs [LC 1] (*)
3) “The Last Page” by Alberto Manguel [A History of Reading]

Class 3: Clients, Authorship, Production, Rituals

Review: Gift Giving (A and B)
1) “The Commerce of the Creative Spirit” by Lewis Hyde [The Gift] (*)
2) “A Technique for Dealing with Artists” by W.A. Dwiggins [LC 3]
3) “The Designer and the Client” by Misha Black [LC 3]
4) “The Designer as Author” by Michael Rock [Typotheque]
5) “The Designer as Producer” by Ellen Lupton [DWR]

Class 4: Tours, Travel, City

Review: Studio Tour Guide (B)
1) “Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table” by Georges Perec [Species of Spaces]
2) “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” by Robert Smithson [Collected Writings]
3) “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger [Ways of Seeing, chapters 1 & 7] (*)
4) “Prehistory” by Rem Koolhaas [Delirious New York, pp. 13–27]

Class 5: Classification, Ordering, Lists

Review: A List, A Deck (A)
1) “I’ve Got a Little List” by William Gass [Tests of Time]
2) “Think/Classify” by Georges Perec [Species of Spaces]
3) “Writing and Language” by Karl Gerstner [Compendium for Literates, pp. 10–33] (*)
4) “My Typographies” by Paul Elliman [Eye Magazine 27] (*)

Class 6: Archiving, Indexing, Analogy, Metaphor

Review: In the Library (B)
1)”The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books”
by Georges Perec [Species of Spaces] (*)
2) “Discards” by Nicholson Baker [The Size of Thoughts]
3) “Unpacking My Library” by Walter Benjamin [Illuminations]

Class 7: Everyday, Readymade, High/Low, Art/Design

Review: Supermarket Wall Plaque (A)
1) “Low and High” by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller [Design Writing Research] (*)
2) “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed” by Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown [Learning from Las Vegas] (*)
3) “Is a Designer an Artist?” by Norman Potter [What Is a Designer?]

Class 8: Aesthetics, Visual Ideology

Review: Beautiful and Ugly (A)
1) “Cult of the Ugly” by Steven Heller [Typotheque] (*)
2) “The Crystal Goblet” by Beatrice Warde [link]
3) “Towards a Complex Simplicity” by Andrew Blauvelt [Eye Magazine 35]
4) “The Vow of Chastity” [Dot Dot Dot 2]

Class 9: Objecthood, Modernism, Postmodernism, Style

Review: Two Descriptions (A and B)
1) “New Life in Print” by Jan Tschichold [LC 3] (*)
2) “Deconstruction and Graphic Design” by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller [DWR] (*)
3) “Design Modernism 8.0″ by Mr. Keedy [Emigre 64]
4) “An Approach to Style” by Strunk & White [The Elements of Style, chapter 5]
5) “Exercises in Style” by Raymond Queneau [Exercises in Style, a selection]

Class 10: Perception, Psychology, Propaganda, Manifestos

Review: Color Propaganda Blog (A and B)
1) “Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity” by Susan Sontag [LC 3]
2) “Selling Out” by Tibor Kalman [Perverse Optimist]
3) “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth” by Bruce Mau [link] (*)
4) “An Annotated Manifesto for Growth” by Dean Allen [link] (*)
5) “48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene [link] (*)

Class 11: Ethics, Morality, Professionalism

Review: Ethics Poll (A and B)
1) “First Things First Manifesto 2000″ [Emigre 51] (*)
2) “First Things First Revisited” by Rick Poynor [Emigre 51] (*)
3) “Some Footnotes on the Manifesto” by Michael Bierut [LC 4] (*)
4) “The Road to Hell” by Milton Glaser [Metropolis Magazine, August/September 2002]
5) “The Responsibilities of the Design Profession”
by Herbert Spencer [LC 3]
6) “How Good is Good?” by Stefan Sagmeister [Typotheque]

Class 12: Design Education, Writing, Criticism

Review: Fifty Footnotes (B)
1) “The Macramé of Resistance” by Lorraine Wild [Emigre 39] (*)
2) “The Time for Being Against” by Rick Poynor [Typotheque]
3) “Why Designers Can’t Think” by Michael Bierut [LC 1]
4) “Intuition and Ideas” by Paul Rand [Design Form and Chaos]

This class was first given in fall 2006 at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.

up