Tag: Design Education

Critical of / for what?

This project embarks on an investigation of what it means to teach, learn, and practice criticality in design. Set against the backdrop of a neoliberal economic system and an industry constantly disrupted by emerging technologies, it takes a deep dive into the tension between education and professional practice. It examines how design, as a field increasingly seen as crucial to navigating the future, is being redefined—and whether “criticality” is being nurtured or neglected along the way.

Prior to the Fellowship, initiators Candice Ng, Justin Zhuang and Vanessa Ban had conducted interviews with 12 local educators and designers on this topic. The Fellowship supported the organisation of an invite-only panel discussion, hosted at the SAM residency spaces, to further explore the role of criticality in Singapore design practices and how it is taught in local design schools. The primary goal of the event was to foster dialogue between industry and academia and encourage a shared understanding and vocabulary to advance the teaching, learning and practice of criticality within contemporary design practice.

➜ Read more about the project at the SAM Design Collection website

 

Becoming Modern by Design

The now-defunct Baharuddin Vocational Institute was Singapore’s first formal school for design. Justin Zhuang looks at how the institute laid the foundation for the design industry here.

➜ Read the full story in BiblioAsia Volume 16 Issue 4

#ADesignLibrary: A New Program for Graphic Design

Graphic design has traditionally been dismissed as “surface”, a subject more concerned with aesthetics more than anything else. Thus, a part of contemporary design education is often devoted to studying the profession’s history and theories to prove its deep connections with the world we live in. “A *New* Program for Graphic Design” by designer David Reinfurt (2019) is a “textbook” that sets out to do just that. Based on a series of three courses originally developed to teach graphic design to liberal arts students at Princeton University, Reinfurt takes us on an alternative path from graphic design as a commercial art to view it as an “interface” where various disciplines meet. He holds up the likes of printer-publisher Benjamin Franklin and designers Bruno Munari, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Muriel Cooper, to show how graphic design has also historically been produced at where it meets with printing, photography, art, mathematics, computing and engineering. Abandoning the authoritative air of traditional texts for education, Reinfurt invites students to explore the network of rabbit holes he has personally dug— and to arrive at their own conclusions on what graphic design has become.

#ADesignLibrary spotlights lesser known design books, and invites public access to my personal collection of titles that focuses on Singapore architecture and design, Asian design, everyday design, critical and speculative design as well as design theory and philosophy. I welcome enquiries and physical loans.