Sunday, January 17, 2010

Reading Assignment 1 - The Landscape of Graphic Design Education

Author: Meredith Davis
Source: p. 2

Connotation/Idea:
  • 60,000 salaried designers / 74,000 freelancers
  • 16,000 individual design businesses
  • 90% have fewer than 10 employees
  • 15% of these firms are newly created each year
  • 1300+ two-year programs teaching graphic design
  • 450 four-year programs in 1974 AIGA listing of schools
  • Pratt Institute has 700 undergraduate majors
  • Graduating 25 students a year = 43,000+ new designers
  • 120 programs in architecture
  • 50 programs in industrial design
In the current landscape of graphic design education:
  • Professional curriculum controversy
  • Shifting professional practices
  • Emerging research culture
  • Shortfall in challenging literature
  • Increasing use of adjunct faculty
  • Administrative generation gap

Source: p. 3, 5

Connotation/Idea:
  • the role of colleges and universities now engaged in professional education is to develop students with respect to both the discipline and the profession of graphic design
  • it takes a very long time to produce a professional designer
  • some universities offer professional degrees, but their curriculum is built in a way where important aspects that need to be learned from different perspectives are shoved into single courses and force fed to the students
  • the way current curriculum is planned out, students in colleges that offer two year programs are unable to transfer a lot of the credits to university when they move to finish their undergraduate degrees
  • colleges and universities need to cooperate and plan out their curriculums together

Source: p. 6

Connotation
/Idea:
Over the last two decades:
  • Rapid technological change
  • Democratization of the means of production
  • Extreme highs and lows in the economy
  • Public concern for the environment
  • Consumer activism
  • with the world changing the way it is, design is becoming more and more important in the corporate world
  • the graphic design programs adapt to current trends, but because the process is slow, the changes are often very late

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