Mapping graphic design practice & pedagogy

Abstract

Workshop Description Mapping graphic design pedagogy will explore the complex, expanding and fragmenting fields of graphic design through the process of visual mapping. This experimental, collaborative workshop will enable participants to conceive and develop useful frameworks for navigating the expanding arena of graphic design that has grown from its roots in professional practice and now come to include areas of ethical, political, socio-economic, cultural and critical design. For academics, charged with educating the next set of designers, this expanding and fragmenting field represents exciting possibilities but can also generate existential uncertainty concerning what, why and how we go about teaching graphic design. The workshop utilises mapping as a productive activity, where “making a map is a way to hold a domain still for long enough to be able to see the relationships between the various approaches, methods, and tools.” (Sanders 2008: 2). Through mapping, and informed by a theoretical framework called the Four Fields of Industrial Design (Tharp and Tharp 2009), participants will map and temporarily freeze the fast moving, fluid and complex domain of graphic design as situated within educational contexts into a relational and temporary whole. Participants will be asked to visually map a range of related concepts, artefacts and objects including graphic design projects, units, modules, briefs and course philosophies to unearth and discover new potential and relationships. The workshop will be highly discursive and its focus is very much on the process of mapping as a way to surface latent meanings, intentions and connections. The workshop draws from on-going research into the use of participatory and co-operative inquiry methods with graphic design students as a means to develop a relational and situated understanding of their practice in an expanding field of graphic design. This workshop will involve group based visual mapping activities and lively discussion