Disrupting Simplicity

This was an hour-long workshop delivered for graphic designer educators exploring educational time and space through diagramming.

Educational time and space has its own distinct visual language. We tend to conceive of it as linear, packaged neatly into units, credits, slots and rooms. This logic creeps into our presentation of the graphic design process. It’s all part of the role graphic designers play in making complex things simple, and the role educators play in packaging a commercialised educational experience.

In this workshop, diagramming was used to critique and unpack the neat little boxes design education lives in, reflecting on our own messy experiences, considering the ways we deliver teaching and learning.

We shared examples of how we, as designers and educators, have used a diagramming process to:

— resolve interdisciplinary conflicts
— make students more self-aware and responsible for their own learning
— reveal opportunities to restructure course activities
— challenge our own assumptions and biases about student needs

We finished by reflecting on diagramming as a process, inviting thoughts on opportunities to apply this more widely in varying contexts.

The Graphic Design Educators’ Network advocates graphic design education by developing, sharing and cultivating:
— Pedagogy
— Research and scholarship
— Discussion, collaboration and events
— Respect for plurality of practice
— Links with collaborators
— Membership

About the conference
Time + Space, asks: as educators and students, what are the realities of the environments we work within, how do we navigate these and what are the possibilities? How do we look at the management tools and structures that operate around us and use them to create – rather than hinder – space, fairness, transparency? How have we been successful in prying things apart and finding solutions that allow us to focus on what we do, what we want to do, rather than falling back on: ‘I don’t have the time and space’?