Nellie may be dead but her sister is alive - just about


In the mid 1980s, Cal Swann called for an end to the traditional teaching methods in Art and Design. At the time, these consisted mainly of one-on-one tutorials between the expert/master tutor and the learner/apprentice (the ‘atelier’ model), with the former sharing his/her ‘pearls of wisdom’ with the latter. Extensive individual supervision and a group ‘crit’ of the work at the end supported learning. Later, Swann described this as learning through ‘osmosis’. Swann argued that ‘sitting-by-Nellie’ is not viable when student numbers are high and staff numbers are low. To this, one can add increased paperwork, the pressures from validation bodies as well as administrative and managerial demands. Full-time staff have considerably less time to teach and to pursue development in their personal and professional world, argued Swann. His critique of ‘sitting-by-Nellie’ was based not only on practical considerations, but also on instructional concerns. ‘Sitting-by-Nellie' has never been valued for its challenge to the intellectual development of the ones who have to do the sitting, he proclaimed. nicos souleles

Swann’s ‘revolutionary’ answer to the conundrum was his proposal for a middle road between individual learner needs and group work. An innovative proposal – at the time – was that a balance is desirable and feasible through well-structured timetables, good teaching preparation and a recognition of what teaching and learning is about. What is required, he argued, is a well-organised three-year programme, with student engagement in the resolution of design problems, and an imaginative sequence of learning activities that are arranged in a systematic way in the early stages, but lead to less support and more autonomous learning in the final year of study. nicos souleles

More than twenty years later it may seem bizarre that Swann’s basic advice such as structuring a timetable, preparing learning materials and providing interim 'crits' and formative assessment, was considered innovative and revolutionary. It is even more bizarre however, at the start of the 21st century to still debate the significance of exposing design students to other disciplines, bearing in mind that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (New Bauhaus) in 1937 practiced inter-disciplinarity by introducing semiotics, literary theory, technology, and social science in the design curriculum. It is often argued that New Bauhaus provided the model for much of modern design education. There are examples much closer to home. During the late 1950s and through to the early 1970s there was a complete reappraisal of art education in Britain, largely based on ideas developed at Leeds College of Art and Design. At the time, the College was described as the 'Bauhaus of England', with inspirational tutors such as Harry Thubron, Tom Hudson, Tom Watt, and Adrian Heath. In brief, the guiding philosophy was that people who made functional things worked together with people who were more concerned with beauty, poetry, and ideas, i.e. working within cross-disciplinary teams. nicos souleles

Yet, throughout the 1990s and the early noughties (i.e. 2000 following), there remains the challenge for design education to move beyond teaching mostly discipline-specific, vocational skills within narrowly defined curricula. This challenge has been precipitated by the rapid introduction of information and communication technologies, globalization, the knowledge economy, and the realization that the designer/artist of today is likely to be a member of a multi-disciplinary team. Today’s designer works on several levels confirming that knowledge is not insular, but rather multi-dimensional. He/she is an analyst who discovers problems, a synthesist who helps to solve problems, a generalist who understands the range of talents that must be engaged to realize solutions, a leader who organizes teams when one range of talent is not enough, a critic whose post-solution analysis ensures that the right problem has been solved, a negotiator who deals with complex tasks. nicos souleles

Instead of facing the challenge, many design lecturers have been intent on magnifying the differences between the practice-based creative activities and traditional academic study, and thereby justifying the status quo. This insular protectionism is the younger sister of Nellie, a by-product of slow changes in teaching methods while clinging on to the ‘preciousness’ of mono-cultured and subsequently outdated disciplines within a rapidly changing global environment. Breaking free of the prevailing mindset entails a fundamental change toward design education - or to use familiar phrases, a paradigm shift, and an ontological change. If we are to seriously embrace the inter-disciplinary approach that is being called for, we cannot include the hefty proportions of mere mono-discipline practice that are characteristic of the art and design tradition. nicos souleles



We are now in the post-art school period and need to radically appraise the curriculum and not just make incremental and slow changes to teaching and learning methods. The trend unfortunately, is that BA programmes are fragmenting into craft specific courses within design - multimedia, photography, typography, and so on, rather than developing the field of design as a discipline in its own right with genuine cross-disciplinary programmes.

My own discipline of digital multimedia design is comparatively new and inevitably has grown out of the mass availability of computers as consumer products in the late 1980s. Outside the United States, the first tertiary multimedia programmes were founded in Australia and England. They did not always evolve from within existing disciplines – although they did borrow and adopt from traditional design teaching methodologies - but mostly had to be conceived from the bottom up. Multi-disciplinarity is at the core of all descent digital multimedia design programmes, and the range of knowledge these require is indeed very broad. Beyond technical expertise and high levels of computer literacy including some programming, we can easily add visual literacy, content and narrative development, contextual and historical theories, instructional design, and knowledge of other media such as sound and video. Digital multimedia designers are inevitably crossing disciplinary boundaries on a regular basis.

In many cases, digital multimedia courses developed within existing art and design departments and/or faculties, and often had to face the snobbery and hostility of other mono-cultured design courses. My students are often referred to as ‘tech heads’, which oversimplifies and underestimates the complexity of juggling knowledge drawn from very broad sources. While we endeavor to retain and expand that breadth, we face the ‘preciousness’ of traditional mono-cultured disciplines – and their disciples - in the knowledge that not only they live on borrowed time, but also inevitably and increasingly, they will move closer to our discipline and may even subsume it. Nellie may have taken a long time to die, but her sister is likely to have a much shorter life span.

Dedicated to yesterday's graphic designers