20 January 2008
Educational Power of Design!
)Published on January 20th, 2008 @ 12:17:20 pm, using 1202 words, 80 views
British Designer Peter Saville once said that “graphic design is the platform of the communication for the culture.” and with this sentence I will start my reflection to try to demonstrate if graphic design will have or not an educative role on the society.
Daily we are attacked by the presupposed which states that design is equal to culture, however, being the culture a “set of customs, of institutions and of workmanships that constitute the social inheritance of a community or group of communities", I would rather say that design is equal to general knowledge, in a figured way, since it’s through a good design that we are led to learn and to understand all the information that encircles us.
Contemporary Graphic Design is consistent with the contemporary culture and is, therefore, dependent of the context. To consider design outside its cultural context is to consider it as a form of independent art and not as a communication mean. However, the seven basic principles of design are: balance, emphasis, form, repetition, contrast, movement and rhythm, and it’s with these same principles that we have to use design to be able to argue with visual processes.
The way more simple to understand graphic design is to look around us, all the information that encircles us tries to communicate something, and that communication is the basis of design, and must whenever possible, include the ideia of citizenship, that keeps the observer not as a consumer with little attention capacity which must be continuously entertained and flattered, but as a critical and thinking individual of who we can expect a skeptical and informed interest by the circumstances. The more remarkable in graphic design isn’t that the people pay for it, but, that the designer had an active role in the real world and that its work is being seen by people who do not require any qualification to be able to appreciate it, and, at the same time, they can be instructed with it. No product or impression exist, that doesn’t have design. For smaller that it could be either the message or the article, it always had somebody behind the design of these products. Somebody had to decide the size, the form, the color, the materials and all the other visual details.
However, the flow of information between designers and the society, not always manifests itself for the best possible way, and this is, because many art and design schools satisfy themselves simply by creating handy people, instead of professionals capable to obtain logical, efficient and creative solutions. And for how much that costs us, this is the factor which will make that many designers work to get the approval of its colleagues and not to properly fix design problems in consideration for those to who it applies.
These designers receive bad influences from the fashion world and will continuously destroy the beddings and principles of graphic design of the 20th century.
Designers, while belonging to the society, should work in behalf to the recognition of the function for them performed. After all, nobody better then them knows what their art has to offer.
Although it has been delayed for some times, now we are able to consider design as an indispensable instrument of the contemporary society: it is not already an exclusive proposal of the vanguards, but, a property of our society in economic and cultural terms. From the moment where the market pronounced that the indispensable product was the symbol, design started to have an absolute protagonism. The majority of the products would not be selled by its better or worse quality, but, for the more practical or attractive design that they would have.
Design meets itself on an intellectual crossroad where the anthropology finds the communication, the art finds the marketing and cognitive psychology finds the commerce, and it’s in the position of becoming an integrate educational field and a liberal art for the next century.
Forcefully, designers talk for many times about acquiring a considerable portfolio of works, but rarely they talk about acquiring a portfolio of knowledge, and that is the primarily difficulty that for times prevents graphic design of having a decisive educational direction. Designers like to be nicknamed of executors, but rarely they called themselves of thinkers, they think of them as emissaries of the communication, giving a visual form to theoretical ideas, but, although we want to believe that this is truth, us, as designers, almost always, are called only to make that things have good aspect, instead of being able to contribute for the evolution and joint of the proper ideas.
Initially the work of designers had as motto the customer has always right. Later, in the days of modernism the motto moved for we know what it’s good for yourself, where the role of the graphic designer was to educate the customer on what was good design, but, unhappily, both these models were problematic, once they represented the designer as completely passive or pedagogically endowed in relation to the customer and the culture. However, so that the designer can be successful, it’s necessary that the product of its work be something instructive, that means, it’s enough an action, a strategy or an object, something that can guarantee the perpetuating, the evolving and transforming of a society through its express intention, or not, over the same elements of that same society. However, to reach such objective the designer is dependent of the dynamics of its own society, and what I want to say with that is that the process of learning and assimilation of values is inherent to the individual, and so that this learning is duly reached, there are some factors that will going to influence, namely the maturing, the language, the intelligence, the memory, the perception and the motivation of the individual.
It is easy to look at all the information, but that same information nor always is so easy to understand, and therefore, the first task of graphic designers is to communicate from comprehensive form, because even a well transmitted basic message has a tremendous power on the society. The proper information become understandable it becomes more elegant, mainly when its main intention is not in any form the beauty.
However, as designers, our task is far from easy because it is instituted that informative design is everything that it seems information, instead of what effectively informs.
Once Louis Pasteur expressed the following: “knowledge belongs to humanity: it is the torch which illuminates the world“, and we designers, as visual communicators, but also as thinking assets, would have to be the carriers of this same torch.
It fits now to each one of us, designers, to reflect on the value that we will be able to infuse to our work, and for such, we will not have to use the past to decide complex problems of the present, but instead, use the present to disclose the creative possibilities of the future. And in this context, we will have to wait that the young designers, appear realizing relentless questions on the way as the things are at this moment, and asking themselves, as visual communicators, what they will be capable to make therefore.
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