Suggested design history curricula

Curricula with PDF's attatched.

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Devolutions, Antecedents and Intersections
Leslie Becker
California College of Arts and Crafts
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Designers need to know more about the original culture of an image or object than visceral response tells us. Alternate histories surround image and object production. These histories may be found as subtext in the literature of a culture, various documentation and by revisiting the powerless whose stories were overlooked in the dominant, conventional narrative of any period or subject. Therefore, to engage soon-to-be-practitioners in historical studies suggests that we start with what is and look backwards to what was, in opposition to traditional histories which select potentially arbitrary (or at least arguable) starting dates for study.

It is the goal of this sequence of courses to develop a conscious and responsible practitioner with a strong personal voice. The sequence is intended to educate the graphic designer who will drive project content, develop into a competent researcher and interpreter of research, and ultimately serve intraprofessionally as a disseminator of design knowledge and delineator/provocateur of design issues.


To the Letter:
Language and Form from an Historical Perspective
Cheryl Beckett
University of Houston
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An effective approach to typographic understanding is the use of an historical perspective. This curriculum examines typographic changes brought about through cultural, political and sociological influences: language theories and technological development. Integrating lessons from the past with contemporary theory and technology facilitates a more profound use of type.


Master of Graphic Design; PhD in Design
Meredith Davis
North Carolina State University
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The master’s and doctoral programs at North Carolina State University attempt to build a research culture focused on the issues of circulation and reception. In the Master of Graphic Design program, information is presented, discussed and debated in seminars that focus on three critical frameworks. Graphic Design as Cultural Artifact exposes students to the work and writings of sociologists, anthropologists, cultural critics and philosophers in order to study graphic design from new perspectives. Students encounter the literature of cognitive science, linguistics and social psychology, and explore theories of representation in the seminar on Graphic Design as Cognitive Artifact. The New Information Environments seminar draws on work from media studies and techno-science in order to reflect critically on the impact of digital media on social patterns. The information from these seminars is directly related to the making activities of a corresponding studio, where students propose original projects that put critical theories into practice and transform ideas into visible form for speculation


Design Studies curriculum
Jack Williamson
University of Michigan
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The undergraduate and graduate Design Studies program at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design forms an interdisciplinary bridge between graphic, industrial and environmental design, and constitutes a necessary complement to studio-based study at the school. The program includes courses, seminars, independent studies, field projects, special research initiatives and publishing projects designed to help expand the student’s understanding of design through critical and historical thinking, research, verbal and written discourse, and cross-disciplinary investigations. The Design Studies program is unique in its comprehensive approach to design and offers courses in design history, criticism, issues, research and persuasion. By engaging the motives, processes, applications and outcomes of design past, present and future, the program creates cohesion between the various design disciplines and helps prepare students for a broad spectrum of existing and emerging careers in professional practice and academia.


Investigating Design History
Michael Worthington
California Institute of the Arts
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The philosophy of this curriculum would be to re-examine the validity and structure, as well as the contents, of the historical canon of graphic design. The class would explore these goals by using conceptual and cultural filters to examine graphic design. These strategies are intended to allow the individual to reconfigure and question design history on a personal level. When the “filtered” history is handed back to the design world, it gives students the opportunity to re-present design history with their own voice (rather than the standardized voice of academia), to make it subjective, to knowingly offer different lenses through which the complex web of design history can be viewed