Sean

MORE MIDDLESEX

Autumn 2013 mdx.ac.uk

THE STATE OF

DESIGN EDUCATION Pensions: defusing the time bomb Business on page 10

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Catastrophic event resilience Environment on page 16

Rewiring our primate brain Psychology on page 22

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More Middlesex Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, conset tetur adipiscing elit morbi faucibus, lacus faucibus accumsan euismod.

Vitae mollis tellus lorem vel erostemp suspendisse vel fermentum neque augue.

Tuporta odio. Duis orci orci, elementum aleo a, pellentesque elementum lectus. Morbi vel viverra magna. Sed sed tempor urna. Aliquam auctor quam eget orci fringilla, id euismod lacus placerat.

Quisque mi nisi, vestibulum at mi et, pellentes ornare sem. Suspendisse viverra neque augued vive raligula rutrum vitae. Vestibulum viverra est in justo condimentum imperdiet vitae nec lorem. Maecenas vulputate facilisis leo at dignissim lacus placerat.

PROFESSOR MICHAEL DRISCOLL, BA CCIm frSA, vICE-ChANCELLor

CovEr fEAturES

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04

16

22

The STATe OF deSign eduCATiOn Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Morbi faucibus lacus faucib accumsan euismod.

CATASTrOPhiC eVenT reSiLienCe Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Morbi faucibus lacus faucib accumsan euismod.

reWiring Our PriMATe BrAin Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Morbi faucibus lacus faucib accumsan euismod.

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04 | More Middlesex

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Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:17 PM

THE STATE OF

DESIGN EDUCATION With the calibre of this year’s graduate talent higher than ever before, Adrian Shaughnessy considers if the current design industry is ready for the new generation of super-graduates

S

omething interesting has happened in design education. There’s been a revolution, and the old order has been reversed.

What do I mean by this? I mean that in many instances the students are now smarter than the employers.

You can see this most clearly in the way recent graduates are effortlessly absorbed into the new digital media landscape; students now emerging from design schools are the first generation of designers to be raised as digital natives.

Anyone born in the early 1990s has grown up in a digital world – a world as

natural to them as TV and newspapers were to previous generations.

You can also see how progressive many students are by their attitude to a world shaped by the global banking crisis, a world where the old idea of only doing something if it turns a profit is being questioned. In fact, many students are at the forefront of fresh thinking around the notion of design as a tool for social improvement, and also about finding an alternative role for design that is far superior to its traditional function of simply fuelling consumerism. Of course, not all students are enlightened visionaries,

Author A d r i a n S h a u g h n e ss y Professor Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer, writer and educator. He has written numerous books on design, and is frequently interviewed on television and radio. He lectures extensively around the world, and is a senior tutor in graphic design at Middlesex.

www. adri.mdx.ac.uk/alumni

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More Middlesex | 05

7/10/13 1:17 PM

Sp ecial Re p o rT

and not all studio bosses are blinkered.

But in the smart stakes, the balance has tipped in favour of the students. The work produced by, say, the top 30 per cent in the leading design schools is superior to the majority of commercial work we see around us. The only thing that these students are unable to offer is experience: when I mentioned recently to a senior design educator that many of the students I meet know stuff that I don’t know and have a wider set of skills than I can ever hope to possess, he said, “Ah, yes, but they don’t have your experience.” And in truth, it’s often only experience that separates design students from design professionals.

more ‘real world’ than paying £9,000 per year for an education? Many employers view education as a playground for young designers, and complain about students graduating with inadequate professional skills, possessing only a shallow view of what it means to be a designer.

There is inevitably some truth in this: there are plenty of self-indulgent students.

Yet perhaps it’s the professional designers who are behind the times, as they pursue outdated ideas of what it means to be a designer in a networked age where expertise and knowledge are shared and not imposed.

Perhaps it’s the students and the design schools who are ahead of the game.

The fact is, design students are emerging from three or four years of study and many of them are simply too advanced for the positions that are open to them. Put bluntly, the design industry is not ready for them, with the result

“the er a o f the all-kn o wing exper t is o v eR .

Thanks to the inter ne t”

BACK IN THE REAL WORLD Studio bosses have traditionally moaned about design schools failing to equip graduates for the ‘real world’ – a patronising term, since what could be

06 | More Middlesex

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Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:18 PM

DES IgN E DuCAtIo N

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

ALEX THURMAN Graphic designer

www.alexjoshua-thurman.co.uk Thurman put together his design for digital creative magazine Quota (opposite page) in three days flat.

“Two days were spent researching and designing, while the third was reserved for translating the 2D artwork into a fully responsive, interactive experience,” he says.

When creating his design, Thurman was conscious of the need to translate the particular appeal of a physical cultural publication onto a digital platform. “They possess a certain warmth and sensitivity that makes the owner cling onto them and happily store them alongside their other treasures,” he explains. The result is an uncluttered, pared-back design that allows the information to breathe.

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

ASHLEY MACKENZIE Illustrator www.ashmackenzie.com

Ashley Mackenzie’s final thesis, entitled Dangerous Ideas, uses visual metaphors to explore controversial and unsettling concepts proposed by contemporary intellectuals.

Seeking Substance (bottom) considers how unlimited access to data, as facilitated by technology, may inhibit our capacity to become truly knowledgable; while No Body, No Mind (left) looks at how, despite society’s emphasis on abstract thought, human experiences are so closely tied to our physical responses that the brain cannot truly become a mind without a body.

www. Adri.Mdx.Ac.uk/AluMni

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More Middlesex | 07

7/10/13 1:18 PM

Sp ecial Re p o rT

A view from the inside Dr Rebecca Wright, graphic design programme director at the world-renowned Art & Design Research Institute at Middlesex University shares her thoughts

that good quality graduates are forced to take poor quality jobs, at poor quality wages, with only limited opportunities for growth in an industry that hasn’t yet learned to deal with an environment where the role of the traditional designer is changing – and indeed in many cases vanishing.

So for anyone contemplating a design education, there are three questions worth asking: What is the value of a design education? What is the state of the industry that graduates are entering? And what does the future look like – inviting or scary?

the value of education

Is design education close enough to a ‘real world’ experience?

Design schools need to find a balance between delivering ambitious and exploratory curricula and preparing students for professional practice. These are not mutually exclusive of course, but it’s important to us that students understand that we are not training them for a job – we’re educating them in design.

What does a formal design education provide that can’t be learnt elsewhere?

Design school provides a space to learn about risk and failure, to make and break things, to think feely, to learn craft. It offers unique opportunities to learn alongside others with different views and to be part of a community that continues into professional life.

Do you think the current industry is well equipped to deal with new graudates?

A proper debate about the role of placements and internships is needed – both industry and education share a responsibility in supporting graduates entering professional practice. The current economic climate is helping to bring this issue to the fore.

How has design education has adapted to fit the changing face of the industry?

Our responsibility as design educators is not to produce graduates that ‘fit’, but to develop agile designers who are able to navigate a dynamic industry and can contribute to its future.

Which is more important to prospective professionals: hard or soft design skills?

A good design course teaches both, in relation to one another. However, the feedback we get from industry is that it’s the skills in thinking, research and critical scrutiny that have greatest value – software skills can be learnt on a job.

08 | More Middlesex

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There are many reasons why this is a good time to be considering the value of a design education. For a start, design is a subject that is changing so fast that skills learned today might be redundant tomorrow. Even after three or four years of study, most jobs open to design graduates are either unpaid, or at best poorly paid internships. So why should anyone contemplate a future of indebtedness for the sake of a design degree when our Robin-Hood-in-reverse UK government (it robs the poor and makes the rich richer), has made higher education punitively expensive? And yet, after spending time as an external examiner in four UK universities and visiting many schools at home and abroad, I’ve come to the firm belief that, there is real value to be had from a design education in a good university.

This is mostly down to the quality of teaching. Where once design educators taught students how to design wine labels, a new generation of teachers – many of them radicalised by events in design in the 1990s and 2000s – has created courses that value practical skills but place a heightened emphasis on creative thinking. This, in

my view, is the correct approach: craft and software skills are essential, but so too are acquiring new ways of thinking and acting that encompass research, autonomous practice and critical scrutiny. Without these ‘soft skills’, students are at the mercy of the marketplace, and dependent on a skill set that might become superfluous overnight. By producing thinkers, as well as makers, the risk of graduates becoming redundant (in the widest sense of that word) becomes lessened.

And for the most part, this is exactly what the current generation of design schools is doing.

However, it’s not only the lecturers and tutors that take the credit for the new breed of super-student. Just as the equivalent of an MBA degree can be gained from YouTube, so too can the modern design student turn to the internet, magazines, books and conferences to gain an insider’s view of what it means to be a designer.

The abundance of design knowledge – everything from books on design theory to eye-candy Tumblr sites – is staggering, and far greater than ever before. And it’s this as much as progressive design education programmes that has contributed to the creation of a savvy generation of undergraduates that are as familiar with the minutiae of design as the steely-eyed professionals.

Any institution offering to prepare students for a career in design must teach three things: flexibility, transference of skills and a certain degree of entrepreneurial autonomy.

Perhaps this can be summed up as: institutions must teach students how to learn. And not just for the three or four years that they are enrolled on a course.

Learning how to learn has to become a lifetime obligation. For students, education must be continuous; it can never stop.

“stu dents are em erg ing from years of stu dy, si m ply too adv anced for the posi tions that are open to them ”

Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:18 PM

DES IgN E DuCAtIo N

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

GIULIANO LO RE Digital artist www.behance.net/ gallinellimatteo

MATTEO GALLINELLI Digital artist www.behance.net/ giulianoantoniolore

Since graduating in spring this year with masters degrees in Art Direction and Graphic Visualisation, Matteo Gallinelli and Giuliano Lo Re have settled well into freelance life, securing work with several advertising companies in the US. Concept Flowers – which featured on the main gallery of Behance’s StudentShow to much acclaim – is the result of a series of experiments in 3D. “We came across some breathtaking results and decided to apply these techniques to create existing elements, like flowers, in a conceptual way,” explains Gallinelli.

Starting with sketches, the duo moved the designs into Cinema 4D to produce 3D models, before correcting the light and colour in Photoshop. “Characterising the 3D models so they resembled real flowers was the most challenging part,” admits Lo Re. “It’s been amazing to receive thousands of positive feedback messages.”

More www. Adri.Mdx.Ac.uk/AluMni

MM.inner.1bm.indd 9

Discover more outstanding design work by Middlesex students at adri.mdx.ac.uk/gallery

More Middlesex | 09

7/10/13 1:18 PM

10 | More Middlesex

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Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:18 PM

THE STATE OF

DESIGN EDUCATION With the calibre of this year’s graduate talent higher than ever before, Adrian Shaughnessy considers if the current design industry is ready for the new generation of super-graduates

S

omething interesting has happened in design education. There’s been a revolution, and the old order has been reversed.

What do I mean by this? I mean that in many instances the students are now smarter than the employers.

You can see this most clearly in the way recent graduates are effortlessly absorbed into the new digital media landscape; students now emerging from design schools are the first generation of designers to be raised as digital natives.

Anyone born in the early 1990s has grown up in a digital world – a world as

natural to them as TV and newspapers were to previous generations.

You can also see how progressive many students are by their attitude to a world shaped by the global banking crisis, a world where the old idea of only doing something if it turns a profit is being questioned. In fact, many students are at the forefront of fresh thinking around the notion of design as a tool for social improvement, and also about finding an alternative role for design that is far superior to its traditional function of simply fuelling consumerism. Of course, not all students are enlightened visionaries,

Author A d r i a n S h a u g h n e ss y Professor Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer, writer and educator. He has written numerous books on design, and is frequently interviewed on television and radio. He lectures extensively around the world, and is a senior tutor in graphic design at Middlesex.

www. adri.mdx.ac.uk/alumni

MM.inner.1bm.indd 11

More Middlesex | 11

7/10/13 1:19 PM

Sp ecial Re p o rT

and not all studio bosses are blinkered.

But in the smart stakes, the balance has tipped in favour of the students. The work produced by, say, the top 30 per cent in the leading design schools is superior to the majority of commercial work we see around us. The only thing that these students are unable to offer is experience: when I mentioned recently to a senior design educator that many of the students I meet know stuff that I don’t know and have a wider set of skills than I can ever hope to possess, he said, “Ah, yes, but they don’t have your experience.” And in truth, it’s often only experience that separates design students from design professionals.

more ‘real world’ than paying £9,000 per year for an education? Many employers view education as a playground for young designers, and complain about students graduating with inadequate professional skills, possessing only a shallow view of what it means to be a designer.

There is inevitably some truth in this: there are plenty of self-indulgent students.

Yet perhaps it’s the professional designers who are behind the times, as they pursue outdated ideas of what it means to be a designer in a networked age where expertise and knowledge are shared and not imposed.

Perhaps it’s the students and the design schools who are ahead of the game.

The fact is, design students are emerging from three or four years of study and many of them are simply too advanced for the positions that are open to them. Put bluntly, the design industry is not ready for them, with the result

“the er a o f the all-kn o wing exper t is o v eR .

Thanks to the inter ne t”

BACK IN THE REAL WORLD Studio bosses have traditionally moaned about design schools failing to equip graduates for the ‘real world’ – a patronising term, since what could be

12 | More Middlesex

MM.inner.1bm.indd 12

Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:19 PM

DES IgN E DuCAtIo N

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

ALEX THURMAN Graphic designer

www.alexjoshua-thurman.co.uk Thurman put together his design for digital creative magazine Quota (opposite page) in three days flat.

“Two days were spent researching and designing, while the third was reserved for translating the 2D artwork into a fully responsive, interactive experience,” he says.

When creating his design, Thurman was conscious of the need to translate the particular appeal of a physical cultural publication onto a digital platform. “They possess a certain warmth and sensitivity that makes the owner cling onto them and happily store them alongside their other treasures,” he explains. The result is an uncluttered, pared-back design that allows the information to breathe.

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

ASHLEY MACKENZIE Illustrator www.ashmackenzie.com

Ashley Mackenzie’s final thesis, entitled Dangerous Ideas, uses visual metaphors to explore controversial and unsettling concepts proposed by contemporary intellectuals.

Seeking Substance (bottom) considers how unlimited access to data, as facilitated by technology, may inhibit our capacity to become truly knowledgable; while No Body, No Mind (left) looks at how, despite society’s emphasis on abstract thought, human experiences are so closely tied to our physical responses that the brain cannot truly become a mind without a body.

www. Adri.Mdx.Ac.uk/AluMni

MM.inner.1bm.indd 13

More Middlesex | 13

7/10/13 1:19 PM

Sp ecial Re p o rT

A view from the inside Dr Rebecca Wright, graphic design programme director at the world-renowned Art & Design Research Institute at Middlesex University shares her thoughts

that good quality graduates are forced to take poor quality jobs, at poor quality wages, with only limited opportunities for growth in an industry that hasn’t yet learned to deal with an environment where the role of the traditional designer is changing – and indeed in many cases vanishing.

So for anyone contemplating a design education, there are three questions worth asking: What is the value of a design education? What is the state of the industry that graduates are entering? And what does the future look like – inviting or scary?

the value of education

Is design education close enough to a ‘real world’ experience?

Design schools need to find a balance between delivering ambitious and exploratory curricula and preparing students for professional practice. These are not mutually exclusive of course, but it’s important to us that students understand that we are not training them for a job – we’re educating them in design.

What does a formal design education provide that can’t be learnt elsewhere?

Design school provides a space to learn about risk and failure, to make and break things, to think feely, to learn craft. It offers unique opportunities to learn alongside others with different views and to be part of a community that continues into professional life.

Do you think the current industry is well equipped to deal with new graudates?

A proper debate about the role of placements and internships is needed – both industry and education share a responsibility in supporting graduates entering professional practice. The current economic climate is helping to bring this issue to the fore.

How has design education has adapted to fit the changing face of the industry?

Our responsibility as design educators is not to produce graduates that ‘fit’, but to develop agile designers who are able to navigate a dynamic industry and can contribute to its future.

Which is more important to prospective professionals: hard or soft design skills?

A good design course teaches both, in relation to one another. However, the feedback we get from industry is that it’s the skills in thinking, research and critical scrutiny that have greatest value – software skills can be learnt on a job.

14 | More Middlesex

MM.inner.1bm.indd 14

There are many reasons why this is a good time to be considering the value of a design education. For a start, design is a subject that is changing so fast that skills learned today might be redundant tomorrow. Even after three or four years of study, most jobs open to design graduates are either unpaid, or at best poorly paid internships. So why should anyone contemplate a future of indebtedness for the sake of a design degree when our Robin-Hood-in-reverse UK government (it robs the poor and makes the rich richer), has made higher education punitively expensive? And yet, after spending time as an external examiner in four UK universities and visiting many schools at home and abroad, I’ve come to the firm belief that, there is real value to be had from a design education in a good university.

This is mostly down to the quality of teaching. Where once design educators taught students how to design wine labels, a new generation of teachers – many of them radicalised by events in design in the 1990s and 2000s – has created courses that value practical skills but place a heightened emphasis on creative thinking. This, in

my view, is the correct approach: craft and software skills are essential, but so too are acquiring new ways of thinking and acting that encompass research, autonomous practice and critical scrutiny. Without these ‘soft skills’, students are at the mercy of the marketplace, and dependent on a skill set that might become superfluous overnight. By producing thinkers, as well as makers, the risk of graduates becoming redundant (in the widest sense of that word) becomes lessened.

And for the most part, this is exactly what the current generation of design schools is doing.

However, it’s not only the lecturers and tutors that take the credit for the new breed of super-student. Just as the equivalent of an MBA degree can be gained from YouTube, so too can the modern design student turn to the internet, magazines, books and conferences to gain an insider’s view of what it means to be a designer.

The abundance of design knowledge – everything from books on design theory to eye-candy Tumblr sites – is staggering, and far greater than ever before. And it’s this as much as progressive design education programmes that has contributed to the creation of a savvy generation of undergraduates that are as familiar with the minutiae of design as the steely-eyed professionals.

Any institution offering to prepare students for a career in design must teach three things: flexibility, transference of skills and a certain degree of entrepreneurial autonomy.

Perhaps this can be summed up as: institutions must teach students how to learn. And not just for the three or four years that they are enrolled on a course.

Learning how to learn has to become a lifetime obligation. For students, education must be continuous; it can never stop.

“stu dents are em erg ing from years of stu dy, si m ply too adv anced for the posi tions that are open to them ”

Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:19 PM

DES IgN E DuCAtIo N

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

GIULIANO LO RE Digital artist www.behance.net/ gallinellimatteo

MATTEO GALLINELLI Digital artist www.behance.net/ giulianoantoniolore

Since graduating in spring this year with masters degrees in Art Direction and Graphic Visualisation, Matteo Gallinelli and Giuliano Lo Re have settled well into freelance life, securing work with several advertising companies in the US. Concept Flowers – which featured on the main gallery of Behance’s StudentShow to much acclaim – is the result of a series of experiments in 3D. “We came across some breathtaking results and decided to apply these techniques to create existing elements, like flowers, in a conceptual way,” explains Gallinelli.

Starting with sketches, the duo moved the designs into Cinema 4D to produce 3D models, before correcting the light and colour in Photoshop. “Characterising the 3D models so they resembled real flowers was the most challenging part,” admits Lo Re. “It’s been amazing to receive thousands of positive feedback messages.”

More www. Adri.Mdx.Ac.uk/AluMni

MM.inner.1bm.indd 15

Discover more outstanding design work by Middlesex students at adri.mdx.ac.uk/gallery

More Middlesex | 15

7/10/13 1:19 PM

16 | More Middlesex

MM.inner.1bm.indd 16

Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:19 PM

THE STATE OF

DESIGN EDUCATION With the calibre of this year’s graduate talent higher than ever before, Adrian Shaughnessy considers if the current design industry is ready for the new generation of super-graduates

S

omething interesting has happened in design education. There’s been a revolution, and the old order has been reversed.

What do I mean by this? I mean that in many instances the students are now smarter than the employers.

You can see this most clearly in the way recent graduates are effortlessly absorbed into the new digital media landscape; students now emerging from design schools are the first generation of designers to be raised as digital natives.

Anyone born in the early 1990s has grown up in a digital world – a world as

natural to them as TV and newspapers were to previous generations.

You can also see how progressive many students are by their attitude to a world shaped by the global banking crisis, a world where the old idea of only doing something if it turns a profit is being questioned. In fact, many students are at the forefront of fresh thinking around the notion of design as a tool for social improvement, and also about finding an alternative role for design that is far superior to its traditional function of simply fuelling consumerism. Of course, not all students are enlightened visionaries,

Author A d r i a n S h a u g h n e ss y Professor Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer, writer and educator. He has written numerous books on design, and is frequently interviewed on television and radio. He lectures extensively around the world, and is a senior tutor in graphic design at Middlesex.

www. adri.mdx.ac.uk/alumni

MM.inner.1bm.indd 17

More Middlesex | 17

7/10/13 1:20 PM

Sp ecial Re p o rT

and not all studio bosses are blinkered.

But in the smart stakes, the balance has tipped in favour of the students. The work produced by, say, the top 30 per cent in the leading design schools is superior to the majority of commercial work we see around us. The only thing that these students are unable to offer is experience: when I mentioned recently to a senior design educator that many of the students I meet know stuff that I don’t know and have a wider set of skills than I can ever hope to possess, he said, “Ah, yes, but they don’t have your experience.” And in truth, it’s often only experience that separates design students from design professionals.

more ‘real world’ than paying £9,000 per year for an education? Many employers view education as a playground for young designers, and complain about students graduating with inadequate professional skills, possessing only a shallow view of what it means to be a designer.

There is inevitably some truth in this: there are plenty of self-indulgent students.

Yet perhaps it’s the professional designers who are behind the times, as they pursue outdated ideas of what it means to be a designer in a networked age where expertise and knowledge are shared and not imposed.

Perhaps it’s the students and the design schools who are ahead of the game.

The fact is, design students are emerging from three or four years of study and many of them are simply too advanced for the positions that are open to them. Put bluntly, the design industry is not ready for them, with the result

“the er a o f the all-kn o wing exper t is o v eR .

Thanks to the inter ne t”

BACK IN THE REAL WORLD Studio bosses have traditionally moaned about design schools failing to equip graduates for the ‘real world’ – a patronising term, since what could be

18 | More Middlesex

MM.inner.1bm.indd 18

Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:20 PM

DES IgN E DuCAtIo N

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

ALEX THURMAN Graphic designer

www.alexjoshua-thurman.co.uk Thurman put together his design for digital creative magazine Quota (opposite page) in three days flat.

“Two days were spent researching and designing, while the third was reserved for translating the 2D artwork into a fully responsive, interactive experience,” he says.

When creating his design, Thurman was conscious of the need to translate the particular appeal of a physical cultural publication onto a digital platform. “They possess a certain warmth and sensitivity that makes the owner cling onto them and happily store them alongside their other treasures,” he explains. The result is an uncluttered, pared-back design that allows the information to breathe.

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

ASHLEY MACKENZIE Illustrator www.ashmackenzie.com

Ashley Mackenzie’s final thesis, entitled Dangerous Ideas, uses visual metaphors to explore controversial and unsettling concepts proposed by contemporary intellectuals.

Seeking Substance (bottom) considers how unlimited access to data, as facilitated by technology, may inhibit our capacity to become truly knowledgable; while No Body, No Mind (left) looks at how, despite society’s emphasis on abstract thought, human experiences are so closely tied to our physical responses that the brain cannot truly become a mind without a body.

www. Adri.Mdx.Ac.uk/AluMni

MM.inner.1bm.indd 19

More Middlesex | 19

7/10/13 1:20 PM

Sp ecial Re p o rT

A view from the inside Dr Rebecca Wright, graphic design programme director at the world-renowned Art & Design Research Institute at Middlesex University shares her thoughts

that good quality graduates are forced to take poor quality jobs, at poor quality wages, with only limited opportunities for growth in an industry that hasn’t yet learned to deal with an environment where the role of the traditional designer is changing – and indeed in many cases vanishing.

So for anyone contemplating a design education, there are three questions worth asking: What is the value of a design education? What is the state of the industry that graduates are entering? And what does the future look like – inviting or scary?

the value of education

Is design education close enough to a ‘real world’ experience?

Design schools need to find a balance between delivering ambitious and exploratory curricula and preparing students for professional practice. These are not mutually exclusive of course, but it’s important to us that students understand that we are not training them for a job – we’re educating them in design.

What does a formal design education provide that can’t be learnt elsewhere?

Design school provides a space to learn about risk and failure, to make and break things, to think feely, to learn craft. It offers unique opportunities to learn alongside others with different views and to be part of a community that continues into professional life.

Do you think the current industry is well equipped to deal with new graudates?

A proper debate about the role of placements and internships is needed – both industry and education share a responsibility in supporting graduates entering professional practice. The current economic climate is helping to bring this issue to the fore.

How has design education has adapted to fit the changing face of the industry?

Our responsibility as design educators is not to produce graduates that ‘fit’, but to develop agile designers who are able to navigate a dynamic industry and can contribute to its future.

Which is more important to prospective professionals: hard or soft design skills?

A good design course teaches both, in relation to one another. However, the feedback we get from industry is that it’s the skills in thinking, research and critical scrutiny that have greatest value – software skills can be learnt on a job.

20 | More Middlesex

MM.inner.1bm.indd 20

There are many reasons why this is a good time to be considering the value of a design education. For a start, design is a subject that is changing so fast that skills learned today might be redundant tomorrow. Even after three or four years of study, most jobs open to design graduates are either unpaid, or at best poorly paid internships. So why should anyone contemplate a future of indebtedness for the sake of a design degree when our Robin-Hood-in-reverse UK government (it robs the poor and makes the rich richer), has made higher education punitively expensive? And yet, after spending time as an external examiner in four UK universities and visiting many schools at home and abroad, I’ve come to the firm belief that, there is real value to be had from a design education in a good university.

This is mostly down to the quality of teaching. Where once design educators taught students how to design wine labels, a new generation of teachers – many of them radicalised by events in design in the 1990s and 2000s – has created courses that value practical skills but place a heightened emphasis on creative thinking. This, in

my view, is the correct approach: craft and software skills are essential, but so too are acquiring new ways of thinking and acting that encompass research, autonomous practice and critical scrutiny. Without these ‘soft skills’, students are at the mercy of the marketplace, and dependent on a skill set that might become superfluous overnight. By producing thinkers, as well as makers, the risk of graduates becoming redundant (in the widest sense of that word) becomes lessened.

And for the most part, this is exactly what the current generation of design schools is doing.

However, it’s not only the lecturers and tutors that take the credit for the new breed of super-student. Just as the equivalent of an MBA degree can be gained from YouTube, so too can the modern design student turn to the internet, magazines, books and conferences to gain an insider’s view of what it means to be a designer.

The abundance of design knowledge – everything from books on design theory to eye-candy Tumblr sites – is staggering, and far greater than ever before. And it’s this as much as progressive design education programmes that has contributed to the creation of a savvy generation of undergraduates that are as familiar with the minutiae of design as the steely-eyed professionals.

Any institution offering to prepare students for a career in design must teach three things: flexibility, transference of skills and a certain degree of entrepreneurial autonomy.

Perhaps this can be summed up as: institutions must teach students how to learn. And not just for the three or four years that they are enrolled on a course.

Learning how to learn has to become a lifetime obligation. For students, education must be continuous; it can never stop.

“stu dents are em erg ing from years of stu dy, si m ply too adv anced for the posi tions that are open to them ”

Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:20 PM

DES IgN E DuCAtIo N

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

GIULIANO LO RE Digital artist www.behance.net/ gallinellimatteo

MATTEO GALLINELLI Digital artist www.behance.net/ giulianoantoniolore

Since graduating in spring this year with masters degrees in Art Direction and Graphic Visualisation, Matteo Gallinelli and Giuliano Lo Re have settled well into freelance life, securing work with several advertising companies in the US. Concept Flowers – which featured on the main gallery of Behance’s StudentShow to much acclaim – is the result of a series of experiments in 3D. “We came across some breathtaking results and decided to apply these techniques to create existing elements, like flowers, in a conceptual way,” explains Gallinelli.

Starting with sketches, the duo moved the designs into Cinema 4D to produce 3D models, before correcting the light and colour in Photoshop. “Characterising the 3D models so they resembled real flowers was the most challenging part,” admits Lo Re. “It’s been amazing to receive thousands of positive feedback messages.”

More www. Adri.Mdx.Ac.uk/AluMni

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Discover more outstanding design work by Middlesex students at adri.mdx.ac.uk/gallery

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Autumn 2013

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THE STATE OF

DESIGN EDUCATION With the calibre of this year’s graduate talent higher than ever before, Adrian Shaughnessy considers if the current design industry is ready for the new generation of super-graduates

S

omething interesting has happened in design education. There’s been a revolution, and the old order has been reversed.

What do I mean by this? I mean that in many instances the students are now smarter than the employers.

You can see this most clearly in the way recent graduates are effortlessly absorbed into the new digital media landscape; students now emerging from design schools are the first generation of designers to be raised as digital natives.

Anyone born in the early 1990s has grown up in a digital world – a world as

natural to them as TV and newspapers were to previous generations.

You can also see how progressive many students are by their attitude to a world shaped by the global banking crisis, a world where the old idea of only doing something if it turns a profit is being questioned. In fact, many students are at the forefront of fresh thinking around the notion of design as a tool for social improvement, and also about finding an alternative role for design that is far superior to its traditional function of simply fuelling consumerism. Of course, not all students are enlightened visionaries,

Author A d r i a n S h a u g h n e ss y Professor Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer, writer and educator. He has written numerous books on design, and is frequently interviewed on television and radio. He lectures extensively around the world, and is a senior tutor in graphic design at Middlesex.

www. adri.mdx.ac.uk/alumni

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Sp ecial Re p o rT

and not all studio bosses are blinkered.

But in the smart stakes, the balance has tipped in favour of the students. The work produced by, say, the top 30 per cent in the leading design schools is superior to the majority of commercial work we see around us. The only thing that these students are unable to offer is experience: when I mentioned recently to a senior design educator that many of the students I meet know stuff that I don’t know and have a wider set of skills than I can ever hope to possess, he said, “Ah, yes, but they don’t have your experience.” And in truth, it’s often only experience that separates design students from design professionals.

more ‘real world’ than paying £9,000 per year for an education? Many employers view education as a playground for young designers, and complain about students graduating with inadequate professional skills, possessing only a shallow view of what it means to be a designer.

There is inevitably some truth in this: there are plenty of self-indulgent students.

Yet perhaps it’s the professional designers who are behind the times, as they pursue outdated ideas of what it means to be a designer in a networked age where expertise and knowledge are shared and not imposed.

Perhaps it’s the students and the design schools who are ahead of the game.

The fact is, design students are emerging from three or four years of study and many of them are simply too advanced for the positions that are open to them. Put bluntly, the design industry is not ready for them, with the result

“the er a o f the all-kn o wing exper t is o v eR .

Thanks to the inter ne t”

BACK IN THE REAL WORLD Studio bosses have traditionally moaned about design schools failing to equip graduates for the ‘real world’ – a patronising term, since what could be

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Autumn 2013

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ALEX THURMAN Graphic designer

www.alexjoshua-thurman.co.uk Thurman put together his design for digital creative magazine Quota (opposite page) in three days flat.

“Two days were spent researching and designing, while the third was reserved for translating the 2D artwork into a fully responsive, interactive experience,” he says.

When creating his design, Thurman was conscious of the need to translate the particular appeal of a physical cultural publication onto a digital platform. “They possess a certain warmth and sensitivity that makes the owner cling onto them and happily store them alongside their other treasures,” he explains. The result is an uncluttered, pared-back design that allows the information to breathe.

grADuAtE ShoWCASE

ASHLEY MACKENZIE Illustrator www.ashmackenzie.com

Ashley Mackenzie’s final thesis, entitled Dangerous Ideas, uses visual metaphors to explore controversial and unsettling concepts proposed by contemporary intellectuals.

Seeking Substance (bottom) considers how unlimited access to data, as facilitated by technology, may inhibit our capacity to become truly knowledgable; while No Body, No Mind (left) looks at how, despite society’s emphasis on abstract thought, human experiences are so closely tied to our physical responses that the brain cannot truly become a mind without a body.

www. Adri.Mdx.Ac.uk/AluMni

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Sp ecial Re p o rT

A view from the inside Dr Rebecca Wright, graphic design programme director at the world-renowned Art & Design Research Institute at Middlesex University shares her thoughts

that good quality graduates are forced to take poor quality jobs, at poor quality wages, with only limited opportunities for growth in an industry that hasn’t yet learned to deal with an environment where the role of the traditional designer is changing – and indeed in many cases vanishing.

So for anyone contemplating a design education, there are three questions worth asking: What is the value of a design education? What is the state of the industry that graduates are entering? And what does the future look like – inviting or scary?

the value of education

Is design education close enough to a ‘real world’ experience?

Design schools need to find a balance between delivering ambitious and exploratory curricula and preparing students for professional practice. These are not mutually exclusive of course, but it’s important to us that students understand that we are not training them for a job – we’re educating them in design.

What does a formal design education provide that can’t be learnt elsewhere?

Design school provides a space to learn about risk and failure, to make and break things, to think feely, to learn craft. It offers unique opportunities to learn alongside others with different views and to be part of a community that continues into professional life.

Do you think the current industry is well equipped to deal with new graudates?

A proper debate about the role of placements and internships is needed – both industry and education share a responsibility in supporting graduates entering professional practice. The current economic climate is helping to bring this issue to the fore.

How has design education has adapted to fit the changing face of the industry?

Our responsibility as design educators is not to produce graduates that ‘fit’, but to develop agile designers who are able to navigate a dynamic industry and can contribute to its future.

Which is more important to prospective professionals: hard or soft design skills?

A good design course teaches both, in relation to one another. However, the feedback we get from industry is that it’s the skills in thinking, research and critical scrutiny that have greatest value – software skills can be learnt on a job.

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There are many reasons why this is a good time to be considering the value of a design education. For a start, design is a subject that is changing so fast that skills learned today might be redundant tomorrow. Even after three or four years of study, most jobs open to design graduates are either unpaid, or at best poorly paid internships. So why should anyone contemplate a future of indebtedness for the sake of a design degree when our Robin-Hood-in-reverse UK government (it robs the poor and makes the rich richer), has made higher education punitively expensive? And yet, after spending time as an external examiner in four UK universities and visiting many schools at home and abroad, I’ve come to the firm belief that, there is real value to be had from a design education in a good university.

This is mostly down to the quality of teaching. Where once design educators taught students how to design wine labels, a new generation of teachers – many of them radicalised by events in design in the 1990s and 2000s – has created courses that value practical skills but place a heightened emphasis on creative thinking. This, in

my view, is the correct approach: craft and software skills are essential, but so too are acquiring new ways of thinking and acting that encompass research, autonomous practice and critical scrutiny. Without these ‘soft skills’, students are at the mercy of the marketplace, and dependent on a skill set that might become superfluous overnight. By producing thinkers, as well as makers, the risk of graduates becoming redundant (in the widest sense of that word) becomes lessened.

And for the most part, this is exactly what the current generation of design schools is doing.

However, it’s not only the lecturers and tutors that take the credit for the new breed of super-student. Just as the equivalent of an MBA degree can be gained from YouTube, so too can the modern design student turn to the internet, magazines, books and conferences to gain an insider’s view of what it means to be a designer.

The abundance of design knowledge – everything from books on design theory to eye-candy Tumblr sites – is staggering, and far greater than ever before. And it’s this as much as progressive design education programmes that has contributed to the creation of a savvy generation of undergraduates that are as familiar with the minutiae of design as the steely-eyed professionals.

Any institution offering to prepare students for a career in design must teach three things: flexibility, transference of skills and a certain degree of entrepreneurial autonomy.

Perhaps this can be summed up as: institutions must teach students how to learn. And not just for the three or four years that they are enrolled on a course.

Learning how to learn has to become a lifetime obligation. For students, education must be continuous; it can never stop.

“stu dents are em erg ing from years of stu dy, si m ply too adv anced for the posi tions that are open to them ”

Autumn 2013

7/10/13 1:21 PM

DES IGN E DUCATIO N

GRADUATE SHOWCASE

GIULIANO LO RE Digital artist www.behance.net/ gallinellimatteo

MATTEO GALLINELLI Digital artist www.behance.net/ giulianoantoniolore

Since graduating in spring this year with masters degrees in Art Direction and Graphic Visualisation, Matteo Gallinelli and Giuliano Lo Re have settled well into freelance life, securing work with several advertising companies in the US. Concept Flowers – which featured on the main gallery of Behance’s StudentShow to much acclaim – is the result of a series of experiments in 3D. “We came across some breathtaking results and decided to apply these techniques to create existing elements, like flowers, in a conceptual way,” explains Gallinelli.

Starting with sketches, the duo moved the designs into Cinema 4D to produce 3D models, before correcting the light and colour in Photoshop. “Characterising the 3D models so they resembled real flowers was the most challenging part,” admits Lo Re. “It’s been amazing to receive thousands of positive feedback messages.”

MORE WWW. ADRI.MDX.AC.UK/ALUMNI

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Discover more outstanding design work by Middlesex students at adri.mdx.ac.uk/gallery

MORE MIDDLESEX | 27

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