The process of design is almost like writing an essay

The predominant focus of contemporary Art and Design education is visual, rather than written, communication. This paper explores recent shifts in Art and Design curricula, which have brought students’ engagement with the written word to a bare minimum. Drawing on my recent experience teaching at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (CSM), Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (WSA) and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), I will discuss how the written word may begin to take up a more productive place in Art and Design teaching. Changes to dissertation requirements at CSM at the MA level and WSA at the BA level, provide examples of alternative approaches to the use of writing in studio-based studies. While both institutions have reduced the word count of their dissertation requirements, they are also encouraging students to use the written word specifically to explore their own studio practice. Similarly, courses such as “Writing and Making”, which I have taught at RISD and WSA, ask students to question the relevance of language to their practice and suggest that words can be understood as yet another material. When students can see that writing is yet another creative act, we will be able to transfer the confidence many visual arts students have in their ability to communicate through visual means into written language. This written language may be something entirely different from what we know today, but it will be language that is both purposeful and useful to visual arts students.

2019

The Science of Writing: Theories, Methods, Individual …, 1996

This chapter attempts to answer the question "how do we write?" by looking beyond writing as a problem-solving process to consider the writer as a creative thinker and a designer of text. The aim is to take a step towards a general account of the processes of writing, and to resolve some of the seeming contradictions in studies of writers, such as:

The Routledge Companion to Design Research, 2014

Most design academics I have met, over my twenty-year career in academia, could readily provide anecdotal accounts of the frustration they and their students feel in trying to reconcile their experience of their design practice and the academic requirements to write. I share those frustrations. During the past 15 - 20 years of my research I have frequently looked for concrete visual examples of techniques that would help reconcile the inclination to work visually with the process of writing, only to be disappointed little existed. The majority of the growing body of published material, on the disjuncture between creative visual practices and writing, are predominantly text-based explications of the ‘problem’, its history and causes, strategies for resistance, or responses to harness and / or overcome it - sometimes with a few images thrown in for good measure. This literature is emblematic of the crucial yet nascent maturation of the design discipline within the academy and there is much that is good, rebellious, re-assuring or instructive contained within it. Although there is still resistance at the fringes there is a consensus emerging that writing is good for creative practitioners. Review from Nigel Cross in Design Studies Volume 48, January 2017, Pages 129–130 "Especially useful to students engaging with practice-based research might be the two chapters that offer personal experiences from recent PhD graduates (both in Australia, as it happens): on ‘the design process of a written thesis’ (Roxburgh) and ‘alternative modes of representing and documenting architecture’ (Macken)."

2000

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2022

A writing/making divide, within the broader theory/practice myth, is part of the historical narrative in art and design education that both clashes with, and persists in, current practices of writing in art and design. The theory/practice myth separates thinking from doing, head from hand, and writing from making, causing internal frictions in art and design subjects. This article provides a historical and contextual mapping of the writing/making binary in creative practice, drawing on Ivor Goodson’s (1993, 1995, 1997, 2002) work on ‘antecedent subject subcultures’ to discuss the formation and maintenance of subject cultures and – ultimately – their potential to change.

At the Ulm School of Design (1953-1968), there was a promising approach to teaching visual as well as verbal communication. Although it took place in separate departments, this pioneering approach attempted to integrate form and content, theory and practice. From the school's inception, the Information Department was established alongside the Departments of Visual Communication, Product Design and Building: writing was considered a discipline on a par with two-and three-dimensional design. While the Department of Visual Communication flourished, however, the Information Department languished, not least as a result of the school's policy and staff conflicts. A closer look at the HfG's history nevertheless reveals the Information Department's overall importance to the school's self-conception and attitude. Beyond its relevance for design history , this might also contribute to the discussion of a greater emphasis on verbal and writing competence in present day design education.

This research project, now at the end of its third and evaluative year, primarily seeks to support Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) art and design students' critical/reflective awareness and literacy skills through creative writing as relating to multidisciplinary art and design practices, and offers help to develop confidence and greater ownership of learning and participation in dynamic group activities. Through the undertaking of activities, learners explore the relationship between words and pictures and consider the intersections and boundaries where these art forms cross and meet. As a trained teacher, author/illustrator and performance poet who extends his identity into the classroom as part of his pedagogy (Connoisseurship and Criticism. Eisner, 1998), the author encourages learners and peers to also express Keywords creative writing personal identity empowerment sketchbooks storytelling reflective practice

Although architecture as a discipline has been steadily gaining momentum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the architecture schools are falling behind in incorporating writing practices in the undergraduate level curriculum. There have been several studies that investigate writing practices in design curriculums and other related disciplines. However, not many deal with why the students struggle with it. With the help of some theoretical and empirical research, this research identifies the probable variables that may be the causes behind their struggle. Based on these variables, the paper attempts to determine the most significant reason behind why architecture students in Dhaka struggle to write.

South African Journal of Higher Education, 2017

Architects must be able to express their ideas clearly to communicate their designs. At the same time, graduate professional degree programs demand advanced critical literacy and academic writing skills. Competence in this domain for high school graduates in South Africa often falls short of the expected proficiencies of first-year students at the tertiary level. To address this gap, an embedded writing course was integrated into the first-year Design Studio and History of Architecture course. This intervention adopted the approaches provided by writing-intensive pedagogy, successfully improving students’ written expression, and their ability to engage with their architectural studies in deeper and more critical ways.

2016

This thesis offers and evaluates collaborative writing practices for teams of Design students at M-Level in Higher Education (HE). The research begins by asking why writing is included in current art and design HE, and identifies an assumption about the role of writing across the sector derived from a misreading of the 1960 and 1970 Coldstream Reports. As a result, drawing on recommendations that were made in the Reports for non-studio studies to be complementary to art and design practice in HE, I focus on how teams of design students can complement their design skills with collaborative writing. Some studies for addressing how design students learn from writing in HE already exist, but none have established a practice-centred teaching method for collaborative writing for design teams at M-level. My research captures the effects of my Approaches, Practices and Tools (APTs) across three case study workshops. I compare these with the most common writing model in HE designed for text-...

"In this presentation I report on a small aspect of a larger PhD study into literacy practices in disciplinary contexts where multimodal and digital texts are the main assessment outcome. Through the exploration of what ‘scamping’ represents in a specific graphic design academic context, I attempt to raise some important questions about the assumptions of meaning ascribed to academic literacies, especially within academic contexts where the non-written is foregrounded. Using academic literacies as the theoretical and methodological framework my ethnographically orientated PhD research study explores the academic literacy practices of students completing diploma courses at a vocational higher education institution in South Africa. In these courses students have to demonstrate their learning primarily through the production of multimodal, digital and print-based textual products such as film clips, posters, logos, three-dimensional (3D) product packaging and photography. In the presentation I illustrate how ‘scamping’ is used and becomes a primary means through which students in the Graphic Design course are required to express their design concept ideas. Scamping is a term used in Graphic Design to explain the process of creating small drawings that visually articulate a conceptualised idea for a design element e.g. an icon, or a design product e.g. the use of a logo in a letterhead. Scamping is regarded by students and staff in this context as a fundamental activity driving the design process and instrumental in communicating design ideas. Through the description of how scamping is used in this learning context I argue that this key activity should be seen as a valid literacy practice, challenging the notion that, in higher education, literacy practices only apply to verbal communication practices. The discussion also highlights how literacy practices evident in the academic context become influenced by professional practices in the graphic design industry through their recontextualisation and foregrounding in the course curriculum. "

The knowledge and skill required by graphic designers is expanding from traditional views that value craft and technical expertise to those reliant on reflective design thinking. This marks a re-definition of design as a social practice more concerned with the facilitation of interaction(s) and that draws on design criticism and principles of rhetoric. Consequently, design practitioners must apply skills that place more emphasis on the impact or outcome of design and where people, and how they respond as part of a communication system, are the priority. However, despite this indication that rhetoric is vital to shifting design thinking and practice, our understanding of the skills related to its application and how they are developed is relatively limited. In this exploratory study we gauge the current state of design education in an Australian university to determine whether and to what extent students reflect critically on the effectiveness of their work.

Iceri2010 Proceedings, 2010

Most art and design students increasingly see written work as irrelevant. However, recent innovative assignments which judiciously mix formal constraints and reflective freedom have encouraged students to apply critical thinking to their practical work. This paper analyses three such written assignments and outlines a fourth, to be delivered in autumn 2010, which aim to inject rewarding creativity into student writing. The students are from Coventry University's School of Art and Design, and range from Art and Design Foundation to undergraduates in Fashion and Graphics. The assignments set meaningful restriction against opportunity: for example, essay lengths are set in terms of the physical space allowed (page extent, or maximum page area: thus students can integrate emerging arguments with layout) instead of word count; picture captions have very specific overall lengths but can be distributed at will amongst the images (thus the images can be strung together as part of a sub-or meta-narrative); conclusions have to be presented wordlessly as one-page picture essays (thus encouraging students to summarise cogently whilst at the same time considering intelligently ambiguous reading as a way of adumbrating meta-truths); and the main points of a hypothetical debate between students and their chosen practitioners for comparison are to be presented as a dialogue replacing the original speech in short clips from feature films (thus obliging students to exploit genre and expectation in text / image combinations). Students have enjoyed the work: not only have they reflected constructively about their practice, but they have also produced work of appropriate scholarly content. However, the work has not favoured those predisposed to write: it has favoured those predisposed to develop sophisticated critical insights as creative visual arts practitioners.