Lorraine Wild

Los Angeles, July 1994

The fact that you have studied at both Yale and Cranbrook, and have taught at CalArts and directed the program there, gives you a unique perspective on theory and graphic design.
The big story in design education since around 1984 or 1985 has been the reworking of the design curriculum. There has been a movement away from two main tracks: commercial formalism and the straightforward modernist program. In the graduate program at CalArts, Edward Fella, Jeffery Keedy, and I handle theory--as part of the studio projects--in a non-academic way. The first project we do in the first year is called The Lexicon. We start with words that are used to describe literary as well as visual form--"metaphor," "ambiguity," and so on. Students research the meaning and use of these terms. The project immediately sets the tone that we're going to look at everything in verbal as well as visual terms.

CalArts has a great humanities and art history/theory faculty. We encourage our students to go to these other faculty members to broaden their perspectives beyond the confines of the studio. We're trying to demystify the notion that the designer's point of view is the sole source of meaning. We hope that connections made outside of the studio will lead designers to a greater understanding of both what they know and what they do not know. This understanding will enable more productive collaborations and partnerships, which seems critical for future practice.

This is very different from how I was trained at Yale in the early 1980s. I was never asked to consider that what I was making might be read in a different way than I had intended. In fact, I don't remember being asked to consider that my work would be read at all. Meanwhile, amazing stuff was happening in the Department of Comparative Literature--Umberto Eco and others were teaching at Yale at the time--yet students would be criticized if they took "too many" non-studio courses.

How do you think theory and design should interact?
One thing I don't like in art and design education is to watch design teachers try to present critical theory in a diluted way. Designers should be able to use theory, but they should understand the nature of their own interpretations of theory (and see them as that--interpretations). Theory has opened up a multitude of ways that we can understand our work, but it will not tell anyone how to produce better or more interesting design. Graphic design will continue to be measured--or seen--through its visual manifestations, in all their variety.

Some of the curricula now being developed acknowledge that design has a past. At the same time, technology is pushing teachers and students to think about the future, to imagine practices that are radically different from the print-based, analog past.

I suppose the conditions I am describing explain my continuing fascination with modernism right before and after World War II (after the avant-garde of the 1920s and before the codification of the 1950s). At that time, design was understood to be primarily conceptual, subject to a variety of visual interpretations. Designers working at the Chicago Bauhaus and Black Mountain College were proceeding optimistically in a period of great uncertainty.

So, unlike earlier educators, we are not looking for a set of universal rules, but we, too, have to talk about methods that will help students work through a future that can't be accurately predicted. This new element in the curriculum--theory--is what rattles practitioners who think that the "blue sky" experimentation of design schools doesn't apply to the problems of practice, and yet these designers are out there every day facing the same momentous changes. Though the realms of design education and design practice seem very far apart, we are probably closer now, in terms of the conceptual problems confronting all of us, than we've been in a long while.

© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum