Placing Students Off The Grid

This paper shares an experiment in curriculum design that challenges established models of work experience and placement by taking a fresh group approach to a practice that has largely by been an individual activity.

Employability has always been an important measure of success for practice-based subjects like Design. How employability is achieved through curriculum design or graduate internship has been a subject of discussion and debate in academic and public press for many decades. More recently, as design programmes’ employability has come under mounting scrutiny due to their direct measurement in various league tables, finding better ways to support student make the transition from education to the work place has increased in importance.

The new curriculum design featured in this paper, broke with the convention by asking employers to take whole teams of students to work under their guidance. A variety of different workplace scenarios also challenged students to question preconceived notions of design practice.  And finally, it also asked the lecturers to work ‘off the grid’ of their regular timetabled teaching patterns to deliver something new and valuable for all stakeholders.

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Briefing for Digital Workshop

This workshop was given at Salford University 09/09/15 for the Graphic Design Educators' Network De-Brief Symposium.

It discussed how to plan and brief students for increasingly prevalent digital and interaction projects without getting fixated on the technology. The discussion addressed and explored ongoing debates and tensions around classic conceptual thinking verses modern digital craft skills for graphic designers.

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When to be social?

Education rather than design delivery can be the most time consuming challenge for web projects, as new clients with limited or varied social media practice slowly get to grips with their website’s functionality and their media commitments.

In this particular project we made an overt play for the use of social media to promote the initiative and the products that the Designer in Residence were exhibiting e.g. Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo etc. We knew that they would have to use them if they were to be successful on the internet, so we made them a feature of the identity in anticipation that they would have to use them!

We thought that certain tools would be quickly integrated whilst others would be much slower to uptake. What has been really interesting is that we incorrectly predicted which they would be. A number of the older designers we felt would love using Flickr and Vimeo to show photos of the project and tell stories about their work. However, after some reservations and discomfort at the thought of tweeting or writing longer format blog posts these appear to be the most popular.

The dilemma… what do we do with the the used buttons? Wait for them to create a Vimeo channel and a group Flickr account or lose them?

http://www.toolsforeverydaylife.com/journal/

Carousels! Label or lose them!

Sometimes there is nothing you can do to convince clients of the interaction design principles that users intuitive expect to be present in a design…

Whether you like carousels or not there is generally an expectation that you will be presented with a descriptive Call-To-Action somewhere upon them. Apparently this is not required by our client… Agh!

Despite some clever scripting to make sure the text is visible on either light or dark backgrounds and some guideline advice on the composition of carousel images, they have decided not to include any text because it looks better… Better for whom? I’m not sure many website users would like to click on an image with an ‘I’m feeling lucky’ attitude not know where it will take them?!

Let hope that with experience of editing and using the website they will change their minds soon!...