Schemas confused by a failure in design thinking

Last semester I taught a seminar course at NC State University’s College of Design where I asked the students to identify, as part of a weekly assignment, two instances: one where design thinking had thrived and another where it had failed. Towards the end of the course, students had collected a series moments that proved that only a simple nudge was required, many times at no extra cost to anyone, to set a series of problems right. Recently, I came across one such example.

Last week, due to the birth of my nephew Gonzalo, I got to spend some time in the maternity wing of the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital. It was indeed a short time, yet most of it was spent waiting for the baby to make its appearance. I had time to look around. A few things came to my attention, but this particular emergency door stood out the most out of anything else that caught my eye.

An Emergency Door in the Maternity Wing of the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The subject in question is located on a hallway directly across from the nursery of newborns. As you can imagine, a lot of people congregate in this area. Upon further investigation, four things were of interest to me:

1) The standard, internationally used emergency exit sign;
2) An ink-jet printed sign which informs that this door does not provide access to the ground floor;
3) The familiar red sign that indicates to use this exit in case of an emergency; and
4) A photocopy which explains, in paragraphs, what to do in case of a problem.

Can you imagine what would happen, God forbid, if there was an emergency in this space?
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The ideation continues

Click image for high resolution.

As the end of the semester approaches, work on the independent study gets more intense.

Working by framing a project within the context of a learning community

The current undergraduate graphic design curriculum at the College of Design, like others in the country, introduces its students to the field through a fundamental year of art, form, rules, exploration, and little or basic software use. As the pedagogical experience progresses into sophomore year, students move, within the timeframe of 2 months, from custom methodological ways of working within a handmade environment into an automatized, software dependent sterile digital scenario.

Design concepts are still explored through the making of artifacts, yet this very process now relies on the manipulation of software tools for their very execution. Previous experience on creative software platforms shapes many of the student’s individual experiences, some having an easier time than others. No matter the case, the commonality between all levels of expertise becomes them having to learn it.

Learning software moves to the forefront of the student’s interests. Pressure is exerted on the professors to teach the various platforms required for successful execution. Teaching strategies, ranging from in-class demos, to online tutorials, and even reference books, become a hindrance to the students, while one-to-one gesture based exchanges between them seem to provide a more stable source of growth and understanding. How can online digital tools help with this learning process? Could such tools offer a possible platform for pedagogical reinterpretation? Would a grassroots approach to software instruction lead to a flourishing of its understanding?

The last few months I’ve working around these issues. All of my projects have concentrated around the struggles of sophomore graphic design students at the College of Design as they experience the initial steps of learning software. Community, values, needs and outcomes have been studied, tested… and hopefully address. As final review gets near, now its time to polish the projects into presentable shape. More to come…

Who am I doing this for?

Two daily planner page designs, one for a fourth grader and the other for a college freshman.

Last semester was all about the graphic designer’s role in culture. I can’t speak for the whole class, but it would be safe to say that sometimes it would concur, even if for a moment —you can imagine how hard is to get 12 people to agree on an idea—, that owning up to the title of graphic designer not only relates to the things one can make, but also to the understanding and acceptance of one’s role as a gatekeeper of culture. You may or may not agree with this, (maybe it’s a bit too much for you to fathom… A designer is more than just pretty things?), but the following text knows that a (good) graphic designer is not dictated by what it makes, but by a combination of the artifacts with what he or she thinks. Since such is the case, shouldn’t it, then, be part of our social responsibility to design according to how we should, and not according to how we know?
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