I wrote in the miseducation of a designer about my experience at NC State and specifically about the value of the studio in my education. And, yeah, I do think it’s better in many ways. But, given the lack of space and resources most schools face, I think there might be an expanded way to think about the space of the studio for students. Much as this site is becoming a studio for me.
My senior year at NC State, 1992, we collaborated on a project with Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication ( I think it’s in Kent, not sure though-Jonathan? ). Our instructors were Teal Trigs at Ravensbourne and Joani Spadaro at NC State. The project was called output. Joani and some students of her’s at Herron (where Maya and I ended up) created this journal as a way to give form to students’ voices. The project originated at Herron, went to Cranbrook, Austin, and NC State. There may be others, and I’m not sure of the order. At any rate, most of the outputs were very insular. They were discussed and designed by students at one school in particular. Ours was a collaboration by fax + post. Some of the discussions were naive and many were based on cultural judgements and prejudices, but many were really thoughtful ranging from the role of the computer to theory to education to our shared history. We talked a lot, and fought a lot, but seemed to come to some kind of understanding. In the end, we each designed one side of a poster. The poster was printed in the UK (it took seven floppies to get our freehand files there– and no hard copy). Horrors. It was printed on velum so you can see both sides at once. There is a quite nice black and white version of it in emigre ( i forget which ) as part of Steven Heller’s The Cult of the Ugly. There were lots of problems conceptually with how it ended up looking that I could get into if anyone is interested later.
This project taught me more about DESIGN than any other class. The process was really slow. We really had to be open ended in the begining and edit through the process to come up with a way to frame our conversations (which were all over the place). We had to really think about what the design object should be and how it would function. Poster, book, plates, etc. And, we had to figure out what it was we wanted to say, or if we had anything to say at all.  Then, we had to design it in collaboration with our entire studio. ( It ended predictably ). It’s nice to re-visit from time to time (its really fragile now) to see where we were then and how many of our questions (especially those centered around the computer + the role of the designer) have been resolved or re-questioned or become moot.
At any rate, I wonder why there isn’t more of this type of collaboration between schools around the world given the state of technology. Or, maybe there is and I just don’t know about it. If so, I would love to hear about it. The project is also published in URGENT IMAGES: THE GRAPHIC LANGUAGE OF THE FAX (sorry I don’t have all the particulars, just a xerox of the page) and the write up begins with a quote I think from Teal and Joani, “ In an increasingly technological world, communication networks have been readlily created, bringing together individuals once separated by geographical location...” 1992 was not a long time ago. Things have really changed.
Could there be a space where students from all over could come together to learn from each other in much the same way? I would assume some guidance from instructors, but how much, I’m not sure. We had guidance, but it was our baby. We ulimately made all the decisions. I wonder, too for the sake of focus, should collaborations between institutions be set up formally? How does this tie in with online learning which I know nothing about? I sure write a lot for someone who doesn’t fancy himself very verbal.