Research Diary - Course Reading Summaries

Course Reading 1

The landscape of graphic design education (Meredith Davis)

- What is going on in this plethora of programs?
- How are they alike and different in the ways they address issues regarding the profession of graphic design?
- And what challenges do they face in educating students for the 21st century?
- A discipline is a branch of learning that has a body of knowledge, modes of inquiry, and historical and critical perspectives on both as they relate to the subject.
- A profession is an occupation that involves the application of knowledge and training in the discipline.
- 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.
- Healthy professions transform themselves over time.
- They anticipate and respond to changes in the social, technological, and economic context by developing new knowledge, modes of inquiry, and critical perspectives.
- Changes in graphic design come from forces outside the field.
- AIGA & NASAD suggest we must move the relationships of general education to design courses from one of proximity to integration
- National Association of Schools of Art and Design

What is research? (Leedy Ormrod)

- The word connotes finding an item of information or making notes and then writing a documented paper.
- It also refers to the act of informing oneself about what one does not know, perhaps by rummaging through available sources to retrieve a bit of information.
- Merchandisers sometimes use the word to suggest the discovery of a revolutionary product when, in reality, an existing product has been slightly modified to enhance the product’s sales appeal.
- But the above three are not the true definition of Research.
- Research is not mere information gathering.
- Research is not mere transportation of facts from one location to another.
- Research is not merely rummaging for information.
- Research is not a catchword used to get attention.
- RESEARCH IS A SYSTEMATIC PROCESS OF COLLECTING, ANALYZING, AND INTERPRETING INFORMATION (DATA) IN ORDER TO INCREASE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE PHENOMENON ABOUT WHICH WE ARE INTERESTED OR CONCERNED.
- Research originates with a question or problem.
- Research requires clear articulation of a goal.
- Research requires a specific plan for proceeding.
- Research usually divides the principal problem into more manageable sub problems.
- Research is guided by the specific research problem, question, or hypothesis.
- Research accepts certain critical assumptions.
- Research requires the collection and interpretation of data in an attempt to resolve the problem that initiated the research.
- Research is, by nature, cyclical or, more exactly, helical.

Graphic design education as a liberal art (Gunnar Swanson)

- Not only increase the augmentation of design training with more liberal studies, but also reconsider graphic design education, as a liberal arts subject.
- Graphic design is not education.
- It is vocational training and rather narrow specialized training at that.
- Design should be about meaning and how meaning can be created.


Course Reading 2

Investigating Design: A Review of Forty Years of Design Research (Nigan Bayazit)

- Design research is systematic inquiry whose goal is knowledge of, or in, the embodiment of configuration, composition, composition, structure, purpose, value, and meaning in man-made things and systems.
- Design research is concerned with the physical embodiment of man-made things, how these things perform their jobs, and how they work.
- Design research is concerned with construction as a human activity, how designer work, how they think, and how they carry out design activity.
- Design research is concerned with what is achieved at the end of a purposeful design activity, how an artificial thing appears, and what it means.
- Design research is concerned with the embodiment of configurations.
- Design research is a systematic search and acquisition of knowledge related to design and design activity.
- The objectives of design research are the study, research, and investigation of the artificial made by human beings, and the way these activities have been directed either in academic studies or manufacturing organizations.
- The sciences of the artificial
- Designer has to start by analyzing human behavior, from which he could derive “quantities, qualities, and relationships”
- User involvement in design decisions and the identification of their objectives were the main characteristics of the second-generation design methods.
- Most design research studies were made in architecture because of the requirements of the societies after World War II.
- Another area of studying design research is the utilization of the methods of disciplines in such areas as psychology, social psychology, management, economics, semantics, and ergonomics.

Method Designing: The Paradox of Modern Design Education (Jessica Helfand)

- Engaging the audience might be said to characterize the designer’s goal as well.
- Train young designers as thinkers, and not merely as service providers.
- Seek references beyond the obvious.
- Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.

The Problem: The Heart of the Research Process

- The heart of every research project is the problem.
- It is paramount to the success of the research effort.
- To see the problem and to state it in precise and unmistakable terms is the first requirement in the research process.


Course Reading 3

Investigating Design: The review of the literature (Bell)

- Review literature is a part of academic development, of becoming an expert in the field.
- Some researchers already had extensive knowledge of their topic before they undertook the work involved in their article and they were able to produce an exhaustive review of the influence of age, gender and subject of study on academic attainment.
- Other first-time researchers though they knew a great deal about issues relating to their work and had identified a topic of interest very early in their studies, they did not have the advantage of a firm knowledge base about previous research.
- It is sufficient for them to produce a relatively brief account of the selected literature and to draw some conclusions where possible, beaing in mind the care needed in making claims.
- Evidence of reading will always be required in any research
- Researchers collect many facts but then must select, organize and classify findings into a coherent pattern
- Framework will not only provide a map of how the research will be conducted and analyzed but it also give you ideas about a structure for your review.
- Literature reviews should give a picture of the state of knowledge and of major questions in your topic area.
- Ensure all references are complete
- Watch you language, make no claims which cannot be justified
- Examine sources critically before you decide to use them
- Always compare like with like
- Include differing reports
- Start first draft of your review early in your reading.

Know it all Wikipedia (Schiff)

- Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical too.
- It should stop being safe, in politics, in philosophy, in science.
- The greatest achievement of Wikipedia is the creation of a community.
- What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate
- Wikipediea is a combination of manifesto and reference work

Out of Print (Eric Alterman)

- The rise of internet has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive
- Newspapers have created websites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads
- Consumers nowadays want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened.
- They want to be able to use the information in a larger community.
- Huffington Post makes a come back
- Newspaper tends to stand by its story on the basis of an editorial process in which professional reporters and editors attempt to vet their sources and check their accuracy before publishing, the blogosphere relies on its readership for quality.
- Mullet: business up front, party at the back.


Course Reading 4

Graphic design Thesis (Vanderbyl)

- Designed to define the complex intersection between personal voce, conceptual understanding, and the ability to conduct and use research effectively in the service of creating a compelling, finely crafted public communication.
- The thesis proposal is a proposition or argument, usually based on an original observation, which you intend to support through research.
- Research will form the backbone of your project. It is the structural support on which your design flesh will hang.
- The thesis project is a proposition or argument explicated by design and supported by research.
- The process book is a bound record of your thinking and design process.
- Strategies’ goal is to elucidate an original observation about your topic, to make audience reconsider the topic or see it in a new light.

Design and Faux Science (Drentel Helfand)

On Bullshit (Design Observer)

- So into this vacuum rushes the bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; unprovable claims
about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed
business goals. As Frankfurt points out, it's beside the point whether bullshit is true or false: "It is impossible for someone
to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction." There must only be the desire to
conceal one's private intentions in the service of a larger goal: getting your client it to do it the way you like it.


Course Reading 5

Why designers can’t think (Michael Biernut)

- American programs seems to fall into two broad categories
- Process schools and portfolio schools
- Process school’s goal is to duplicate the idealized black & white boot camp regimen of far-off Switzerland.
- Portfolio school has a more admittedly mercenary, aim to provide students with polished “books” that will get them good jobs upon graduation.

I come to bury graphic design (Kenneth Fitzerald)

- Design’s first concern is reproduction
- A broader and deeper appreciation of design can, and should only lead to its demise as a specialist profession.
- Design constructed itself as professional service, formal speech to commune with industry.
- Design must join the culture and abandon attempts to seduce, party with, or ride herd on it.


Course Reading 6

The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in Action (Donald Schon)

- Universities are not devoted to the production and distribution of fundamental knowledge in general.
- “While I do no accept your view of knowledge, I cannot describe my own.”
- The professions had come to be seen, as vehicles for the application of the new sciences to the achievement of human progress.
- Auguste Comte
- Three principal doctrines of positivism
- 1. There was the conviction that empirical science was not just a form of knowledge but the only source of positive knowledge of the world.
- 2. There was the intention to cleanse men’s minds of mysticism, superstition, and other forms of pseudo knowledge.
- 3. There was the program of extending scientific knowledge and technical control to human society, to make technology primarily political and moral.
- By late 19th century, positivism had become a dominant philosophy.
- Following WWII, the U.S. government began an unparalleled increase in the rate of spending for research.
- This research spending was first dramatic, and visible, in the field of medicine.
- In real world practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens.
- They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations, which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain.
- Reflecting in action – If common sense recognizes knowing in action, it also recognizes that we sometimes think about what we are doing.

Semiotics: A Primer for Designers (Challis Hodge)

- Semiotics is the study of signs.
- Signs in a broad context that includes anything capable of standing for or representing a separate meaning.
- It allows designers to gain insight into the relationships between signs, what they stand for, and the people who must interpret them.
- Semantics focuses on what words mean while semiotics is concerned with how signs mean.
- Semiotics teaches us as designers that our work has no meaning outside the complex set of factors that define it. These factors are not static, but rather constantly changing because we are changing and creating them.
- Reality not only depends on the intentions we put into our work but also the interpretation of the people who experience our work.