bau1: rebuilding design basics

Last year, FLOMM founder Steve Mehal­lo re­built a de­sign fun­da­men­tals course into a five week study of the­o­ries and work done at The Bauhaus (1919–33). This BAU blog se­ries will doc­u­ment the lat­est teach­ing of the course – with les­son plan – Sum­mer 2015 to a group of 8 col­lege stu­dents. What’ll hap­pen, who’ll shine, who’ll drop. Names (and some sit­u­a­tions) have been changed to pro­tect the in­no­cent as well as the guilty.

 

‘I don’t re­mem­ber any of that. It was over a year ago.’

… This be­came some­thing I’d hear over and over in my ad­vanced graph­ic de­sign cours­es. Stu­dents would file in with their work to be cri­tiqued and I’d sort of just stare at the work – won­der­ing why ba­sic form, col­or the­o­ry isn’t con­sid­ered.

De­sign stud­ies are sup­posed to be based on a pyra­mid. This was not hap­pen­ing and I want­ed to do some­thing about it.

foun­da­tion stud­ies
De­sign fun­da­men­tals are crit­i­cal build­ing blocks that al­low stu­dents to in­crease their skills in in­cre­men­tal steps. That’s the ped­a­gogy. Stu­dents start at bot­tom and work their way up.

The prob­lem is: As part of a cur­ricu­lum, the steps weren’t aways work­ing. Stu­dents were not trans­fer­ring (the ed­u­ca­tion­al term) their stud­ies from one class to the next.

A few years back, I de­cid­ed to poll a Ty­pog­ra­phy 4 course on my first day of con­tact:

‘What do you ex­pect to get from this class?’

The re­sponse was: ‘We want to get a grade.’

No one in the group brought up knowl­edge, learn­ing craft, skills, any­thing a bright eyed stu­dent should want. ‘just a grade.’

And as I dug deep­er (over weeks of work), most of them just want­ed to fin­ish and Get That Job. The high­ly-paid graph­ic de­sign po­si­tion where they drink wine, make tees and hang with Karsashi­ans.

(though odd­ly-enough, I do have a few for­mer stu­dents who have jobs like this. So much for de­bunk­ing that.)

reimag­in­ing ba­sics
So a year ago I was asked to teach – in a rush, last minute sort of thing – a mid-quar­ter col­lege-lev­el de­sign fun­da­men­tals course. Had about a week to prep, and was al­ready buried in about six oth­er class­es.

I re­mem­ber hear­ing, ‘Oh. I thought you taught this be­fore.’ I hadn’t. And that’s what was about to help with this. Be­cause I wasn’t to­tal­ly sure what I was walk­ing into.

I al­ways start with es­tab­lished cur­ricu­lum and learn­ing out­comes. This course cov­ers fun­da­men­tals of com­po­si­tion, colour, and ty­pog­ra­phy in de­vel­op­ing lay­out; good crafts­man­ship (or­ga­ni­za­tion, skill, ex­per­tise, pre­ci­sion, neat­ness); thumb­nail sketch­ing, and (most im­por­tant) de­vel­op skills for the use of crit­i­cal think­ing – while iden­ti­fy­ing ar­eas for im­prove­ment – in your de­sign process. With a pre-picked text­book that rather blunt­ly breaks out tech­niques to teach, with his­tor­i­cal ex­am­ples:

De­sign Ba­sics 8th Edi­tion by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pen­tak
Cen­gage, ©2011, ISBN: 978–1111353988

It led me back to the prob­lem I kept see­ing: Trans­fer. How do I get the stu­dents to not only do this work – which they of­ten won’t see the val­ue in – and get them to keep the knowl­edge in or­der to pro­duce bet­ter work in their lat­er cours­es?

I set out to change things. Reimag­ine de­sign fun­da­men­tals. Cause if I re­mem­ber cor­rect­ly, I for­got my ear­li­er stud­ies too – and had to re­think them years into my de­sign ca­reer.

bau
Staatlich­es Bauhaus (1919–33) is where de­sign fun­da­men­tals orig­i­nat­ed.

And with my love of his­to­ry, what if The Bauhaus it­self be­came the fo­cus of the course? Where stu­dents ex­pe­ri­ence the per­son­al­i­ties and sit­u­a­tions that cre­at­ed the foun­da­tion stud­ies that are used in art schools and de­sign pro­grams around the world?

My mind raced through what could be done with this! There is so much in Bauhaus the­o­ry that I could eas­i­ly over­whelm these un­sus­pect­ing stu­dents – by tak­ing them in a di­rec­tion of who, what, where, when, why, how, the­o­ry, the­o­ry and more the­o­ry!

This could be GREAT or a to­tal night­mare! (ahhh, my kind of reck­less funn)

Odd­ly enough it went well. A year lat­er, I have ad­vanced stu­dents who are do­ing won­der­ful vi­su­als, con­sid­ered lay­outs, colour and ex­per­i­men­tal think­ing.

les­son plan
This post, of course, is to blog my lat­est teach­ing of this course. The les­son plan starts with fig­ur­ing out who is tak­ing my class. This helps me break out what their in­ter­ests are so I can (at­tempt) to play off of them.

Fri­day morn­ing, I end­ed up with a small (8) but in­ter­est­ing group. Some right out of high school, some re­build­ing their lives. Two 3D an­i­ma­tion stu­dents (one with fine art sculp­ture back­ground), three graph­ic de­sign­ers with di­verse back­grounds, a re-en­try stu­dent, an ad­ver­tis­ing and a fash­ion mar­ket­ing ma­jor. One is re­al­ly into taxi­dermy. Think­ing we can do some­thing with that.

Good dis­cus­sion makes a good class. This group can talk. This is great. They also take lots of notes so this is even bet­ter. And so far all are ded­i­cat­ed to not have a ‘bor­ing’ ex­pe­ri­ence in my class­room. I’m de­ter­mined to not let that hap­pen. Even though we start at 8 in the morn­ing.

Dis­cus­sion starts with defin­ing ‘de­sign,’ which is some­thing not every­one knows what it is. And ‘graph­ic de­sign’ is a field even more neb­u­lous to the gen­er­al pub­lic (graph­ic de­sign­ers only do lo­gos is the con­sen­sus). This is built into a con­text of you may think you know what we’re about to do, but re­al­ly, you don’t.

Once we got syl­labus legale­sus out of the way, I de­cid­ed to jump into slides – which in­tro­duce the ba­sic con­cepts of Point Line and Plane from the Bauhaus. These are sup­ple­ment­ed with im­ages from Graph­ic De­sign: The New Ba­sics and Point stud­ies from Armin Hofmann’s clas­sic Graph­ic De­sign Man­u­al:

Graph­ic De­sign: The New Ba­sics by Ellen Lup­ton and Jen­nifer Cole Phillips
Prince­ton, ©2008, ISBN: 978-1568987026

Graph­ic De­sign Man­u­al: Prin­ci­ples and Prac­tice by Armin Hof­mann
Braun, ©1965, ISBN: 978-3721200065

We start with Points (which will be our first as­sign­ment). We talk about ab­strac­tion. We dis­cuss Kaz­imir Male­vich (1878–1935) and his rad­i­cal ideas, Supre­ma­tism, and set­tle on his Black Cir­cle, a Point piece. We talk about feel­ings:

Kaz­imir Male­vich, Black Cir­cle, 1915

How we want to swat it back in place. Cause it’s bug­ging us.

We dis­cuss how hu­mans tend to or­ga­nize ma­te­ri­als when asked to place them in a giv­en space. With the Male­vich Black Cir­cle be­ing a cre­ative counter to this.

‘Male­vich is long dead. And as you can see, a hun­dred years lat­er, he’s still fuck­ing with you.’

They get it – I take them thru mul­ti­ple sides show­ing points in use, asym­met­ric lay­outs (they don’t all get those, not quite yet) – then I give them their first as­sign­ment:

POINT AS­SIGN­MENT
I dump a pile of punched holes – and have stu­dents use the holes to cre­ate TEN­SION in five drawn out 5x5 inch squares.

They can add colour and oth­er el­e­ments, but they need to cre­ate TEN­SION in these stud­ies.

This is their home­work.

Plus READ De­sign Ba­sics Chap­ter 1, pages 4–5; 18–25

And find on­line and watch
Ge­nius of De­sign Episode 1: Ghosts in the Ma­chine [BBC]

Tues­day, we’ll see if this will work or if some­thing – fear, un­cer­tain­ty, doubt, ab­strac­tion-pho­bia – will get in the way.

—steve mehal­lo

 
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