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Notes: 1 / 1 year ago from designaday
Teaching Everything
Leslie Jensen-Inman published an excellent article on A List Apart in January titled Elevate Web Design at the University Level. She discusses the fact that universities aren’t able to keep pace with web technologies and that their graduates are not prepared by the time they graduate. It isn’t an empty claim—she interviewed thirty-two web design leaders about the issue. In the article she makes many suggestions as to how institutions and professionals can address the problem.
As a professional interaction designer that works on web-based applications and teaches design, it is an issue that I am quite aware of. As I have explained before, the program in which I teach is a traditional graphic design program, by which I mean web design is not its forte. I’m doing what I can to change that.
The largest problem, as I see it, is that there isn’t enough time to teach everything. Design is not typically taught in High School, so students must go from knowing next to nothing about design to professional in, sometimes, less than four years. In the case of the program at WVU, students don’t have a design class until their sophomore year, after which they must submit a portfolio for acceptance into the graphic design program that continues through the junior and senior years. During that time, there are still other art courses they are required to take, so it is not as if they are strictly focused on design during those two years.
So, how then do you fit in all of the skills that they are expected to know? It’s nigh impossible. And it keeps growing, with the additions of interaction design and the web, service design, etc. When I was a student, I was taught the basics of Photoshop, Freehand, and QuarkXpress in class (although I had already taught myself Freehand). When I say “the basics,” I mean it. It was up to me to continue using the software in my project work and learn it by doing. I was one of a very few that stretched out to learn Director, and the only member of my class to utilize Premiere, Authorware, Infini-D, and Morph during my senior year. In graduate school, there was no instruction in software. I had one class that taught the basics of Java. I learned on my own how to build a webpage in Pagemill, and then later GoLive. I taught myself how to use a Flash competitor that specialized in animating text, the name of which I can’t even remember.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the technology, be it software, hardware, or scripting languages, shouldn’t be the focus of design education. It changes rapidly, and what you learn one year will be obsolete the next. Most of what I was taught in class during my time at WVU and CMU is just as applicable now as it was when I graduated. Students need to understand this and take much of the responsibility upon themselves to stay current with tools and technology.
That’s not to say that faculty shouldn’t worry about staying up-to-date themselves. They should take every opportunity to include the technology in their teaching. For example, I just gave a lecture a couple weeks ago on web typography that was based on a series of HTML and CSS examples. I showed the students how many of the nuances of typography that we had been learning so far could be controlled through a stylesheet. But I don’t have time to teach them HTML and CSS, nor should I. It is my job to instill in them the foundational knowledge of typography that will be applicable regardless of what capabilities CSS 4, 5, or 6 will have.
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