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Gary
Well, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to do this. I appreciate it. Before I jump into my questions, I think it’s probably important that I let the audience know that a lot of these questions came from a presentation that you gave at the SECAC Conference and so I just wanted them to know that a lot of this conversation may seem scripted in an unusual way but there’s some back-story there.
Meena
Sure, and that’s the South Eastern College Art Conference, I believe, yes.
Gary
I like the Conference so I’m giving it a plug right now. It was a nice little Conference.
Meena
I agree with you.
Gary
All right, so, can you talk more about the…in your presentation at the Conference, you talked about the typography technology shifts. Can you talk about what that is?
Meena
Yeah, absolutely. So, I work with this wonderful Professor whose name is Steven Skaggs and he developed this graph that I really, really identified with and I talked about it in my talk there at SECAC and it really sort of covers a timeline of printing from writing by hand to machine to computer and while it begins like the earliest writing systems as far back as I think 3000 BCE, what I’m really most interested in is the time just before and sort of since Gutenberg, so we’re sort of considering that in 1325 we’re using black letter script during the time of the Black Death, then we move to a Humanist script before landing on the invention of metal typography around 1450 to the first letterpress printed book by Gutenberg and that invention, that typographic technology that we’re talking about really sort of took us all the way through Michelangelo’s pieta, the first Thanksgiving, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the invention of photography, the invention of typewriters, two World Wars, Elvis, the British invasion: obviously the list goes on. In the 1960s some camera-ready typesetting was available in the workplace on these standalone machines but the rapid charge of digital technology was really already moving forward by that point and by the mid-1980s, Graphic Designers could use commercially available design software to create and print their own typefaces, so this democratization, I guess, of typography brought this design within arm’s reach and drastically lowered the cost of typeface production and changing really the landscape of design as we knew it at that point. And it all happened in this blip and that’s sort of what is on that slide that you had seen was just the word “blip”. We had letterpress for so long and then boom: computers. And the trajectory has just gone so quickly, things have gone by so fast.
Gary
So, can you talk a little bit more about the current shift though, the technology shift, after that boom?
Meena
What do you mean?
Gary
OK, so in your presentation, you also sort of like…one of my follow-up questions was, how are you training your students to meet these technology shifts, but can you talk a little bit more about the technology shift before you talk about how you train the students for it?
Meena
Oh my gosh! Well, we went through…so if we’re talking about letterpress and hand-written letter forms and these perfectly created forms, there’s a lot of control there and I’m just talking about one facet of this; just one facet of this would be the outstanding amount of say, typefaces that are available, or fonts that are available to choose from online, so this is just one facet of this technology shift but you went from having a select amount of typefaces to choose from and either using rub-on type, or rub-down type or having these typefaces that you had carefully curated that you had bought and spent a lot of money on, maybe in your system on your computer and then suddenly, say, the internet comes into play and now you’ve got an onslaught of fonts to choose from, from defont.com or wherever, and as a designer, you need to be able to discern what is best in terms of legibility, what is the most appropriate in terms of maybe the solution that you’re coming up with, so that is just one tiny little facet of what happens when we suddenly get our access to so much in terms of these technology shifts and that’s again just one small bit of the puzzle.
Gary
All right, so, how do you train your students to work within that new context?
Meena
Well, outside of reminding them that the days of feeling comfortable with any one set of text skills are gone by! I really try to teach my design students to have intention, and this is something that we’ve talked about before: intention as opposed to seeking out immediacy, so I try to help them curate substance in their work by looking at really everything that they can, reading everything that they can, writing about what they’ve learned, reflecting on the work that they’ve done and I realize that this might not be the answer that you would think that I would give but my students, they write more than I think they ever thought that they would in a Design class: they read more books. I assign them lots of reading and really for every piece of design that they complete, they are charged with articulating a reflection, articulating their intention through a presentation of their work and they also write about that, about their work afterwards.
Gary
OK. I want to follow up on one of those…so, the technology shifts in typography. There’s one that’s kind of a two-part that comes to mind and it’s performance. So, when you’re dealing with print, you could have…if it contextually made sense, you could have an unlimited number of fonts and it’s not going to hurt the design. If you try to do that with the web, you’re going to blow up the page because it’s just going to take forever to download, so have you started having those discussions with students? The performance idea of typography?
Meena
Yep. We talk a lot about accessibility. and I think that that is where that conversation starts to happen. I also often remind them that they don’t want their developer to hate them, so that when they’re designing, they have to keep in mind a certain ability for rendering these, say, graphics or lettering or type, so to keep that in mind when they’re developing their designs, first off, we don’t want to overload the viewer, make them blind to our design, but also we want to keep our designs accessible to the people who are using these, either these interfaces or these screens and also we want to keep our relationship with our developer good.
Gary
Yeah, and it’s kind of funny, it just popped into my head right now but fifteen years ago, we wanted to keep our relationship with our printer good.
Meena
Absolutely, yep!
Gary
It’s the same thing, it’s literally the same thing.
Meena
It is, and in fact I find, this is something really small, but I find that my students will interchange the words margin and padding; so we’ll be in a print class and they’ll be talking about padding and I find that to be sort of, maybe endearing to the fact that we are Professors of this but also it’s just kind of interesting that these two languages are starting to intersect in these courses.
Gary
Yeah, I always have to correct myself because I will say line spacing instead of leading and I’m always forced to correct myself because they need to hear both, not just one or the other. Can’t forget that history! So, one last follow-up on the typography: Are you familiar with variable fonts? I didn’t think to ask you this beforehand.
Meena
Yes, yes, I am. Not within…not extremely…
Gary
Yeah, OK, so just this is for the audience, this isn’t for you, because if you’re familiar with the term variable fonts, you get it, but you don’t have to understand it because I don’t fully understand it, but it essentially is…
Meena
…like a flexible typeface? Is that it?
Gary
Yeah, it’s more or less the entire font family scholar or universe all compiled into one font and now you can just adjust three settings to get a different weight, a different italicized or condensed or extra-wide or whatever: you can do it all in one font and I’m just thinking, I’ve been thinking to myself because I’m teaching a Beginning Type class this semester and I was literally…we’re designing something and I only say, OK, you can only use one font family for this project and I thought more and more, that’s going to be the way the web is going to work because of variable fonts being a smaller file size and giving you this enormous flexibility that that’s…I can see design bending that way because it’s going to be such a huge advantage to the development side that they’re going to kind of almost insist it. I’m just wondering if you had had any musings on variable fonts yourself?
Meena
Well, I’m going to go out on a limb and go out and say that maybe at an unpopular opinion: I would love that. I tend, in those projects, I do tend to give those assignments in a similar fashion: you can only use one family for this and any typeface or any font within that family is up for grabs. And I can see that; I can see that absolutely happening and I think again, in a world where data is something that we have to pay for and net neutrality is something that is looming over our heads, the easier it is to be able to see and interact with this information on websites which are…I’ll just say interfaces which are more and more content-driven, designed for content is what I mean, that sounds like a good way to go. And you know, and I didn’t even mention another thing is I mention accessibility that faces are also…we’re in this place now where you’re able to develop a typeface that helps someone who has, say in the case of my colleague Professor Skaggs, developing a typeface for someone who has Macular Degeneration and helping the aging population, the baby-boomers who are looking at their devices and needing them to work for them, he’s been developing a typeface that, called I think Maxula, which is for folks with Macular Degeneration. So, that’s another facet of this really amazing shift in technology that we’re seeing in terms of typographic tech that is really just I think incredible and again, I’ll say again, it’s happening so quickly. We had the letterpress for so long! And then very quickly, we all of a sudden were here and we’re already looking on the horizon constantly at the things that are coming down the pike.
Gary
Yeah, and with the variable fonts and other…another thought about that is…so, people with dyslexia, would the variable font, no matter what your visual or reading disability is, the variable font has these variable axes that could be changed that could easily be hooked into, with little button, JavaScript: make wider, so anyway, it’s geeky where all this stuff could kind of go and these are all variables that we’re going to have to teach students to be aware of.
Meena
Yes, yeah, and I don’t…I don’t usually…yeah, we teach them to be aware of them, so we’re teaching them to cast a really wide net in terms of their ability to learn on their own and put it into practice in our classes, yeah, I believe that.
Gary
That was one heck of a wonderful segue into the next question, and that is at the presentation, you also mentioned the I-shaped person versus the T-shaped person. So, for the listeners who don’t already know, can you briefly describe the I-shaped person and the T-shaped person?
Meena
Sure. OK, so this is a pretty widely used model and really one I think that we need to be referencing every time we talk about the future of design education. The I-shaped person can also be called the Functional Expert that really has a laser focus on a singular mastery, I’ll say, but…so it could be like content development, graphic design, maybe SEO, analytics or web development: they have a singular focus, they’re laser-focused on it, but there’s really no cross-functionality in the I-shaped person. So, enter the T-shaped person and that person is also a functional expert but utilizes more cross-functional awareness than the I-shaped person. This would mean that the T-shaped person has, I’ll say, again, casts a wide net so they sort of have a broad range of knowledge in a range of disciplines, but a deep knowledge in a single specialization, so they have a core specialization or area of interest, say graphic design; they also retain the ability to work outside of that area, outside of that core specialization so a designer who also has a good knowledge of content or web development would be a good T-shaped person.
Gary
Do you have a list of what are those necessary skills if you are…the target is we’ve got a graphic design student, so what gives them those T-shapes?
Meena
Oh my gosh, that is such a long answer! And I don’t necessarily have a list because I think that that does the opposite thing that really and truly, that a good Professor would be doing if they were trying to continue to teach these pupils to be T-shaped. But I will say a lot of it has to do with curriculum, at least for us at the Hite. So I’m at University of Louisville and we have the Hite Art Institute here at UofL and I joined about eighteen months ago, I guess about nineteen months ago by now, but in August of 2016 and really when I was brought in, I was sort of charged with bridging gaps in our curriculum to allow for more interaction and technologically complex courses in our offerings but you have to understand that when you come to that point, that the solution really is so multi-faceted, it’s not quite as simple as adding an Advanced Web Design course here or an Interaction Course there, so what my colleagues, Lesley and Steve and I did at the time was sort of take on the task of re-vamping our curriculum entirely, so we opened up room for students that have interests in particular areas of specialization to dig in and provide them with the freedom in this curriculum to do that. We created what we call now our Carousel classes and these particular classes are called Carousels because they’re offered every other year on a rotating basis and allow advanced students or really eager students if they’re not advanced, maybe they’re Sophomores, but they’re really, really eager to learn about say design for interaction or environmental design, so we created those classes for them to pick and choose areas of specialization to add to their design education experience, that was really casting a wide net…
…So, doing that big overhaul and re-vamp to our curriculum sort of gives Graphic Design at the Hite more encouragement to develop more T-shaped designers, so if design is at the stem of the T-form, we try to get them to extend their arms and have interest areas outside of design that inform the work that they do. Their core area of interest is always going to remain whether it’s design for interaction, UX/UI, print or package design; it’s at the root of their work but we encourage them to go outside of just the things that they like to do, trying to get them to discover ways of working or subject matter with which they’re unfamiliar and we have an MFA program here too and we find this to be especially necessary with our graduate students in the inter-disciplinary MFA program but at the Undergraduate level, what we’re finding with employers is that the importance of such dexterity is rampant and it’s something that we are deeply concerned with of course in our BFA program because we have eighty per cent of our students at least I believe at last count, at least, participating in an internship for an average of four semesters before they graduate and at least eighty-five per cent of our graduates are actively employed in the design field and they’re…ESPN or PepsiCo, Griffin Phillips, but what we’re trying to do is continue to keep them viable hires in this field that we know is rapidly changing so this is how we’re trying to begin to think about how we teach design for tech that doesn’t exist yet in a field that’s rapidly shifting.
Gary
You know, when it comes to…I guess I should have asked the question about the T-shaped person: I asked you what skills to put into the T part, if you will, but I think what I really meant to ask is, UX design, content strategy, coding. I’m fundamentally thinking that those aren’t the T any more but those are the actual I.
Meena
Mmm, OK, so you mean the arm versus the stem, can we be ….
Gary
Yeah, so the UX is the stem now and not just…
Meena
Just the arms.
Gary
Yeah, just the arms. Does that make sense?
Meena
Yeah. Absolutely. So, if I’m working with a designer who wants to be focused on User Experience, I hasten to use the word empathy because I feel like that word is becoming so much of a buzzword that we’re losing the truth of it.
But…another conversation…but I do think that being able to place ourselves in the shoes of our user is imperative and I know I’m not the only one; the designer is really accountable for predicting outcomes of the design action that the user is experiencing, so I would say for the arms of this one, like I said, I don’t necessarily want to use the word empathy, so what about the word research? So, the students that I have in my Interaction courses, they are responsible for just so much research at the start of a project, so they’re developing personas, for instance; they’re getting a clear target demographic. This is research that we see a lot in maybe other areas of a college of arts and sciences that we see a lot in marketing and business and we need to be seeing in design schools this sort of development of demographic, in understanding clear target demographic, that research and then of course students are also carrying that research through the middle and the end of a project, so they’re doing plenty of story-mapping, revising those story-maps; they’re doing A-B and user testing of wireframes and things like that, so this research for in particular the UX designer is going to help them articulate the experience of the user better.
Gary
And I’m with you on the empathy one. And I’ll go out and I’ll say this for the record: I’ve probably already said it but I don’t like the term empathy because it’s not empathy, it’s simply just research. You can be an asshole, you can do research and you can make something functional for somebody that makes their life easier.
Meena
And you’re an asshole! You’re not empathetic at all!
Gary
Yeah. So it’s not…you’re not teaching them how to be an empathetic person: you’re teaching them how to identify a problem that somebody has experienced that may not be naturally visible through research!
Meena
Yes! Yes, and it’s quantifiable. You can have a conversation about that with somebody who is not a designer and I think that is also a facet of the T-shaped design student is that you are able to have a conversation about what it is that you do that is approachable by somebody who is not necessarily in your core specialization; that’s so, so important for what we do.
Gary
Yeah, and you don’t have to look at somebody and feel for their plight to do it!
Meena
Yes, that’s true!
Gary
I mean, we all should, and I hope we would, but that’s why I have so much trouble with the term.
Meena
I hear ya!
Gary
I have this question written down and you’ve kind of already answered it but, are there any classes that you’re currently teaching or in the recent past that you think prepare the T-shaped person, or how are you going about preparing that T-shaped person?
Meena
It’s funny that you ask this! I only laugh because I have a student in my Interaction class which I taught this morning and I let on a hint about, I guess, the next project that they’re doing. They’re currently doing a speculative design project and so the next project, I guess I had hinted to something and somebody else’s ears perked up and this one student goes…you know she’s just going to switch it up on us: don’t listen to her right now! And that’s kind of part of how I approach the answer to your question here. So, well, I try to bring this mindset of helping to prepare the T-shaped designer to all of my classes, it’s sort of become one of my teaching goals. There are really a couple of courses that I’ve written into our curriculum that I’ve really sought out to make that the entire purpose of the course, so I think what this one particular student was sort of citing was how I have…I will create a project and then I will throw a monkey-wrench into something and I will expect them, and these are advanced students, OK, let me just back up and say, they are advanced students, I’m not doing this to the younger students that we don’t want to scare too much yet, but to the advanced students, I’ll throw in a monkey-wrench that they will have to adapt to it, they have to confront and when they have to do that, it makes them re-look at everything that they’ve done and it reminds them that what they’re doing is not precious…
…it should not be precious to them unless it works for the user and that’s the important thing they have to keep in mind. So, one of the courses that I teach, the first seven weeks of this particular course is really about learning how to be resilient and dexterous and those are two words that I use often when I’m talking about how I teach: they’re very, very important qualities I think that I can help deliver to a student. The motto of this particular course is, a Seth Godin quote which is “art is when a human being does something that might not work”. It reminds us of both our fallibility and our responsibilities as designers, that’s why I like that quote so much and that course really focuses on prolific generation of content aggregation, curation, bridging physical and digital experiences and predicting the outcomes of design action and they work on seven different projects that are week sprints for the first seven weeks of this course and then the final seven weeks they choose one of those projects and they really hit it home and it’s been a very successful, very, very successful course so far I’ve been here.
Gary
With your monkey-wrenches that you throw into things, are they scripted that you’re like, oh, I know I’m going to throw this twist or are they totally organic, dependent on the situation and which way the wind’s blowing and random ideas that pop into your head?
Meena
Oh God! the latter would be terrible! I definitely plan the monkey-wrench because I also have another thing that I like to say which is that we want to prepare you for success; I’m not out to go in and sort of screw somebody’s mind here, but at the same time, anybody who has been in the field for long enough can tell you that when a client comes to you and says, oh, we’ve realized that what we asked for in terms of, say the size, that’s a simple one, what we’ve asked for in terms of size needs to be smaller or it needs to be changed. Now, we heard the Apple Watch was coming out and we want something for the Apple Watch now too. Those things really do happen, so when you add something like that, it does make sense but it also will cause a bit of scatter for the student.
Gary
Yeah, that was actually…I’m glad you’ve mentioned the Apple Watch because I was having my students read…it was a web class, Beginning Web, and we were re-designing a conference website and one student just out of the blue needed extra credit, and was like, can we get extra credit? No. And, what if we designed an…I don’t know why they said the watch, but they said, let’s design a watch…you know, they were playing around in XD and they had a watch template…
And he was like, can we design a watch for it? And I was like, well, do we need one? And so then we started having really a good conversation about what would an app for a conference on a watch, what would that look like and that was one of the most…that was probably our best conversation; totally unscripted, totally unplanned and it was like yeah, you know what? You’re designing a watch. You’re designing the interface. Well, whatever, there’s not that much you can design but you’re designing something: how do you do the schedule so it makes sense and it helps you? But I digress.
So, and the reason I originally was asking about the T-shaped I a context as I was thinking about you had UX out on the arms; you had HTML and CSS out on the arms; you had content strategy out on the arms, but you really don’t: those are in the core and so that’s why that…the realization of how you answer that, kind of mis-shaped that question, originally! But that said, during your presentation, you also threw up some statistics from the US Department of Labor and so for example, two per cent of…what is the…OK, so you put Art Direction as two per cent at 74,000 jobs; Graphic Design is one per cent out of 260…so what is that two per cent, the six per cent and the other ones before I mention them, what is that out of?
Meena
Well, it’s growth; it’s percentage of growth in those jobs.
Gary
OK, so anyway, so back to why I’m rambling off some of these stats. So, there’s expected a two per cent growth in Art Direction which would be about two thousand jobs, I’m rounding. Graphic Design is expecting a one per cent growth which would be about thirty five hundred jobs. But then you get into desktop publishing which is a negative growth which is expecting to lose three thousand jobs and you get into web design, where it’s a twenty seven per cent growth at about forty thousand jobs and then you’ve got software development which is a seventeen per cent growth at almost a hundred and eighty thousand jobs. Looking at those numbers, Graphic Design has fundamentally changed.
Meena
Oh yeah, I think that our web design name and our graphic design name, just the handles, just those two names, they’re starting to maybe meld a little bit; I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing, I think that we…well anyhow, I have questions about that!
Gary
OK, and I’m not asking this from a judgmental place…
Meena
Sure, sure!
Gary
But in the previous episodes, I’ve had people who were…one woman, she wrote an entire article about the different names that are being bandied about and I interviewed somebody else who was doing hiring and he was like, I don’t know what the heck to call this thing. I know what I need but…so, where’s your take, what is your take on that?
Meena
Well, I’m an observer: I listen a lot and I take things in and I’ll tell you, I’ve had two interactive designers in to speak to classes in the past two weeks and both of them have thrown up their arms when discussing their title; they’ll say they hate the name of their title, they don’t understand why it is that name, that everybody knows what it is that they do: their title is going to change, that they’re going to be one thing versus the other now and maybe the new thing is going to be a better title but really, what it is that they do is interactive design, coding, visual design, product design and then for some it’s product management and then no design any more at all. So, yeah, there’s a lot of questionable titles that are being used right now; I don’t really know what to make of it, so I’m listening a lot in those conversations.
Gary
Yeah, and that’s…I’m of the same mind because I just look at, I don’t know, I guess if I’m going to …some of my feelings on it is, I’m a graphic designer, I identify as a graphic designer but I can design for a screen; I can design for paper; I can use any medium out there on the planet. But I think kind of part of the problem is the industry is getting graphic designers who can only design for print.
And that’s why there’s a distinguishing…that’s why people are pulling out these names: I can also…and clearly these numbers are saying that the growth area is web design, so how do you say that you’re a web designer by literally saying it?
Meena
Well that’s a good question. I pulled up a job description for Cotton Bureau a couple of…a few months ago…
Gary
That was the one I did the interview with.
Meena
Are you serious? That’s….that’s so funny! OK, well, in this particular job description that I pulled, and again, this was a while ago, I remember it said something like, maybe you’re not exactly a designer who can code but you’re capable of turning your designs into live prototypes of some fidelity but if you can crank out production-ready code, even better. That…and I love Cotton Bureau so I don’t mean to really call them out, this could have been anybody, it’s just an example of this…I don’t know, should I call it hemming and hawing? That’s sort of a Southern thing but it’s a wishy-washing sort of…we need this thing but we understand it’s kind of hard to find them right now, so what do we call a designer who has a really good visual sensibility and also knows something about coding and prototyping? Well, that’s the designer then.
I’m educating right now but I also realized that this particular job description also asked for three to five years’ work experience, so now, if you go back in time and you’re looking at people who graduated five years ago, yeah, you’re getting a lot of print design so I get it, you’re in this place as a company that you need to be bringing in somebody who’s got this, I’ll say, dexterity again, and you need this but you don’t know how to ask for it without exiling a whole bunch of people that could be good for your company because really you want the right fit.
Gary
Yeah, and that was a fun episode because Jan Fanelli, he’s the owner of Cotton Bureau, we talked a lot in that particular episode, I was asking him literally about that job description, but we got into the fidelity part and then the conversation went down into nuts and bolts: OK, using InVision to create a clickable prototype, is that a high enough fidelity for you or does it need to be…or the fidelity of throwing something into Bootstrap or Foundation, a framework like that, is that…
Meena
Is that what you mean? Yeah.
Gary
Yeah, how do you define fidelity because…anyway, it was a fun discussion and you’re right, nobody knows quite what to do with it.
Meena
I have thoughts on that too. If we cannot be the ones who define what it is that we do, someone else is going to do it for us. So we’re going to see a lot of graphic design jobs going away and we’re going to see a lot of web design jobs coming into play; if we can’t articulate as Graphic Designers that, oh no, no, no, no: this is…this falls under our preview: this is what we do now. And by the way, it’s what we’ve always done: we design for legibility, we design for visual story-telling, we design for a message and this is now part of our toolkit, so there’s never been a time where we didn’t do this but if we don’t, if we aren’t raising our hand and saying that this is what we do, and articulating the role and finding the value of the design process in the context of this shifting tech landscape then we’re going to let people who may not know what it is that we do, do it for us and that’s really dangerous.
Gary
This is my perfect analogy for me: this is what crystallizes it for me is, I can write HTML and CSS; I could do it fairly well and I stay up to date on everything like that but if you’re…when you’re out there looking around, you will see a lot of CSS frameworks for typography where they’re calling it a typographic scale and you can pick…and so the ratio between a headline font and a…I mean a headline and a body-copy or the different sub-headings, you can choose a typographic scale based on the golden mean and then like a musical scale and those to me, I’m looking at those and those to me scream, I am a developer: I know that typography is important and I’m going to use a programming logic to solve that; I’m going to use a mathematical equation to solve that problem and so now they are the experts: these are what’s in modern magazines, they’re like, it’s important to chose a typographic scale…it’s like, no, every font is different! Every context is different. You need a well-trained designer to say, this is what your skill needs to be, and then develop the CSS framework off of that, not in reverse and we’re going to…the same thing with animations. It’s who’s designing how something moves in and off the screen? It’s not the graphic designers because we don’t have the tools other than mocking it up in Aftereffects: it’s the developers who are doing it because they’re the ones who literally can code it.
Meena
Right.
Gary
They are making the visual decisions, without the visual training that designers have and we’d better do something about it!
Meena
We absolutely have to. I don’t know, I’ve thought about how we can talk about this in terms of the short term and the long term and this is something that you had asked me, but in the short term, I don’t know if we’re going to agree on this, but in the short term, we need to continue to teach graphic designers basic coding language: I think we both agree on that. Obviously CSS and HTML are must-haves and I also teach Aftereffects to my students as well and I provide them with projects to use After Effects too and I think that as Professors, we really need to not be afraid to try new technology in our classes and I realize that this sounds sort of wild and crazy for those of us who are maybe Junior Faculty and who are afraid of getting the bad teaching evals, or the questionable teaching evals, and I remember, I’ve gotten, of course, we’ve all gotten them, but for teaching and teaching from a learning standpoint, which is I think a really important thing to start to feel comfortable doing, for every one mild teaching eval that I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten fifteen great responses; I show them everything that I come across that I think is going to be helpful to them, not just everything, but the things that are going to be helpful for them; I’ll show them wireframing apps that are being rolled out and are getting good reviews; I’ll show them prototyping applications that are in the same ilk and native, of course, native Adobe apps for building sites and prototyping, just so that they are aware of all the different tools that are out there and so they understand that there is not one right way to approach this from a design standpoint and I think that we need to get comfortable as Professors teaching from that learning standpoint when we’re talking about tech.
Gary
You know, I’m glad you said that because I’m the same way and I’m going to use InVision, it’s coming out with a new program called Studio and I don’t know if you’re familiar with it or not?
And I was…and up until I talked to you, I was super-excited about it and I was excited about it because it does everything that Adobe XD does, but it does it like Sketch…
Meena
Right!
Gary
And it adds motion.
Meena
Yes!
Gary
Animation, which none of the other ones have but I was super-excited about it until you said it was like, you know what? But we can’t…I just had this realization, it was like, I shouldn’t get excited about it because that’s not what I…because it just immediately dawned on me is that what I should do is instead of just saying, oh, this tool’s going to be able to let you do this, is you are in charge of showing the client and the developer the animation.
Figure it out. There is no right or wrong way to do it, because I was getting excited about Studio because there was now going to be a right way to do it and that’s why I was like….oh…
Meena
Yeah. Insert skeptical grunt here! I don’t know! I don’t know about a right way; something’s going to come along and eclipse it. I love InVision and my students use it and they’re very much looking forward to Studio. I’ve given Adobe some feedback on XD and where the gaps are, my students have plenty of feedback for them too, by the way, but where InVision is starting to close some of those gaps, but like I said at the very beginning, ’tis but a blip: these things are happening, they’re rolling out so quickly that at least when it comes down to education as Professors, we really need to just sort of let the discomfort of constant new technology wash over us and just sort of keep teaching…keep teaching the best laboratory practices as opposed to teaching the technology, which again, I do and we should but you just can’t put all your eggs in those baskets any more.
Gary
No, absolutely not because there’s a whole web design. I mean, once it became responsive, it’s only what, seven years old? Because you could really trace it back to when did Ethan Marcotte write that article and when did browsers start actually adopting the CSS media query? Not until fully 2011.
Meena
Is that right? Wow!
Gary
So our profession is that young. Of course we don’t have…there is no right tool to do it, there’s no right process because we’re figuring it all out together, right now.
Meena
Absolutely, absolutely. But from the design students’ standpoint, these are twenty year olds; when they were thirteen, maybe they were just learning about this. By the time they get to us, the expect that there’s been some decision that has come down from the heavens and I have said this before, I invoke the quote here, actually, is by Meredith Davis and of course it’s not much of a quote, she just said in one of our conversations I think at the AIGA Design Educators’ Community: this is a really exciting time to be in Graphic Design and, oh my gosh, yes it is, because who wants to be in a stagnant field? Obviously there’s no growth there! You want to be in a field that is expanding and that is pushing the boundaries of what used to be and what it could be: that’s exciting.
Gary
OK. Well, I started noticing the time, so I’m going to ask, before I ask my final question, this is a huge question and I don’t know if you can answer it. Answer it however you feel, you know how much time you have! I’m not going anywhere: so, if design education is going to…OK, see, I don’t even want to ask it this way now but my original question was, if design education is going to meet the demands of the market, what can educators do, and I’m going to preface saying that, as design educators in this super-pinnacle moment in time, I don’t want to be meeting the demands; I want to be setting the expectations. I want to define what it is to be a designer because we can, we have this one, unique moment.
Where design education could…ignore the fact that we’re behind on design, behind on everything, and we could just leapfrog. So, that said, what…how…your thoughts?
Meena
Well, first off, that’s the motto right there: leapfrog. If these are bullet points, which I actually…I’ve got some I guess some bullet points on that but at the top of the list I think would be yeah, as we said, you and I both have said in so many words, define what it is that we’re doing, just define what it is so that no one else can take that from us and no one else can do it for us. But if we’re talking about in the classroom, the day to day…rubber meets the road, sort of day to day classroom experience, I really think that it’s going to take, and you’ve heard me say this before, but intentional adventuring, human-centered approaches to design; it’s going to take those things to thoughtfully discover and shape the future of our profession, so I think we need to prepare for the long game and what that means to me is banking on human experience, building environments in our classrooms for constructive conversations that really embrace failure: not encourage, just embrace it and learn towards success, that’s what I…I’m not celebrating failure here necessarily, I’m embracing it with the students to learn more successful outcomes. Teaching, as you’ve heard me say, for resilience and looking at more stuff and reading everything because it is all pertinent.
We will make connections. So, we want to bank on the human experience and walk on issues of our user if we can, we can do research to experience their journey with them and test, test, test, so research is really going to be important. Building environments for constructive conversations that are going to embrace failure. In all those tests that we tried to bank on the human experience, all these tests that we’re doing, we’re not always going to be right, those tests are going to be failing many times over and as practitioners we know this, so, getting students used to this really as quickly as possible is going to help them cut through the frustration that they initially feel so they can learn how to see what their users need more than feel their own ego, which is a tough one: the crit is really good at that! Teaching resilient behaviors so, speaking, what I just stated sort of speaks to this, but there’s the user and then there’s the client relationship that needs to be considered, so I’ve been the unpopular client, like I said, that changes specs in the middle of a project and that really helps my students learn how to re-look at things and reconsider, save the copy and do a new one, to re-start and feel empowered by that, is hopefully how they’re feeling and then look at more stuff.
Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to look at it from a new direction. We’ve heard that. One of the great benefits of a Liberal Arts education, which is what I have, and where I teach is the exposure to history and philosophy and literature, biology and more in the arts and sciences, so there are learning opportunities in those lessons that impact our work as designers and it’s still just so important for the design student to take advantage of those classes and not just see them as, oh, another Gen Ed requirement!
Gary
Yeah, I actually agree with you one hundred per cent because we do advising and even at the beginning, when it comes time for students to sign up for classes whenever that comes round, I’m always barking, OK, you want to take anything in the Social Sciences; the more you learn about how people operate, cultural anthropology and all those kind of things, those are unbelievable.
They make you better designers. They make you empathetic. Ugh! I hate that term!
Meena
I was really hoping you weren’t going to go there!
Gary
No, but it teaches you the methodology for understanding people.
Meena
Mm-hm, yes and you can use it to your advantage!
Gary
Yes! For the good or for evil!
Meena
That’s the honest truth, right there.
Gary
All right, Meena; before I let you go, is there anything that you are personally working on that you’d like to share or something you want to promote?
Meena
Well, thanks for asking that. I’ve just come off a really long year, about twenty shows and that’s including some solo shows, so I’m back in the studio right now, so I’m cooking up some digital work and some animated work and that’s going to be the culmination of some work I did this past summer when I spent time at the Tipoteca Italiana in Cornuda, Italy; the Tipoteca is the home to a museum of typesetting machines, letterpresses, type specimen books and forms, it’s like…it’s such a magical place and of course it’s in Italy so it’s even more amazing, so a shout-out to Tipoteca. And I’m also developing some work for a new project with the Kentucky State Parks Foundation which should be out some time I think in mid to late Spring, so I’m in the studio these days, Gary; I’m working!
Gary
That’s awesome and I’m glad you said that because this is a shout-out to you but it’s also kind of like a lesson to everybody else. If anybody still listening to this episode, all we’ve talked about was variable fonts and user experience and research, but at the same time your practice is kind of your…your practice recently was doing letterpress. So you don’t have to change your practice as a designer to be really good at teaching what design have evolved to. You can find your place in it, that’s all.
Meena
Yeah, yeah.
Gary
I just wanted to give that message to everybody.
Meena
There’s plenty of room here!