BBC News reports "Warning over universities' future"

This article from the BBC backs up perfectly the predictions being made at New Views 2:

Some universities will face closure or merger as they struggle to compete for a dwindling number of students over the next 20 years, vice-chancellors warn.

A report for umbrella body Universities UK says unless institutions adapt quickly to the changing demographics, some institutions will become unviable.

The number of 18 to 20-year-olds is set to fall sharply between 2009 and 2027.
This means universities could face a smaller demand for places and hence a drop in public funding, it says.
The Universities UK report looks at three different scenarios predicting what will happen if institutions react in different ways to the changing demographics and a more difficult economic climate.

[...]

In the second scenario, non-traditional private providers enter the market pace and "cherry pick" course areas with low entry costs.
A greater increase in e-learning also leads to partnerships with private firms. [...]
In this scenario, damage to the education system is predicted as private providers gain degree awarding powers and a small number of elite institutions seek to leave the publicly funded sector.

In the third scenario, the university sector becomes more employer-driven and flexible and there is full development of technology-based learning thanks to public and private investment.
Most students end up studying part-time on a virtual basis while they continue to work, but full-time undergraduate study does remain part of the system.
This leads to universities grouping together strategically with employers and establishing themselves as major regional providers along side further education colleges.
Again, private providers cherry-pick vocational provision which will net them substantial profits and they also take over failing institutions.

What this report suggests is that if design education is to survive as a university subject, it has to let go of its vocational roots, no longer training designers (leaving that to the FE sector and private colleges) but educating strategic thinkers. Exactly what we concluded.

D&AD is on its last legs too, it seems...

While at New Views 2 I happened to take part in or overhear about a thousand conversations regarding D&AD's education briefs and the New Blood show.
Everyone involved had one opinion: if they had their way they would not set D&AD briefs anymore and would spend the money for New Blood on something more productive.

I've long been a critic of the D&AD briefs and it was interesting to hear such views expressed publicly and with such strength. The consensus is that the briefs are pedagogically unsound, and that there is nothing to be gained from students doing the same things as every other graphic design student in the country. The industry reps I spoke to or heard were in agreement here: if you're coming for an interview, don't put a D&AD project in there. They want to see something more representative of you and your course.

So will courses start pulling out of D&AD? Mmm... I think this is one of those 'either we all jump together' things. No one wants to be the first (although having said that there were a few leading courses represented there who said they refuse to set D&AD briefs and don't go to New Blood). But I certainly think if there's another gathering like this there could be an agreement for a mass pull-out. But most concerned said their preference would be for some negotiated remodelling of the relationship - less preachy, less 'industry telling education what to do', less patronising and more supportive. Design educators feel hard done by at the moment in the UK, and it's no wonder. If D&AD were to remodel itself as a representative of academia to industry it might have a future but for now, I'd say the relationship is on seriously rocky ground.

Graphic design is dead. Long live... what?

The New Views 2 conference held in London last week produced more light than heat - something far more design conferences would do well to aim for.
All credit to Teal Triggs (LCC), Laurene Vaughan (RMIT) and the organising committee for arranging it around conversations rather than presentations. (Russell Kerr agrees - this was an engaging format)


(picture from cluster 6 via Flickr)

I heard that some of the conversations erred on the argumentative side but, surprisingly, the one I was involved in, looking at the area of graphic design education, was remarkably consensual.

Despite the various focuses of each cluster, the subject of what we teach and why seemed to come up everywhere and when the final presentations were given at the end of the two days it was clear that there was one overwhelming conclusion: graphic design, as we know it, is a dead subject. As we recited at one point in the international language of Monty Python, it has ceased to exist. It has gone to meet its maker.

This does not mean we think graphic design itself is no more, but that as a university subject it makes little point to teach people about something so limited in conception. Almost everybody complained that students arrive with what they think GD is, which means any attempt to broaden their horizons meets with resistance. Meanwhile, as my talking point made clear, too many employers are recruiting our graduates into unpaid (or at best low-paid) jobs at the bottom of the food chain instead of strategic roles.

There are plenty of vocational qualifications out there that produce well-trained graphic designers. When the question was put forward "what is it that a degree, an academic qualification, offers that is different", nobody had an answer. We could say what we thought it should offer, but were frustrated that we didn't. There was also a strong rejection of the notion that universities should follow industry; instead we should be mapping out new territory through our research and involving our undergraduates in that so that when they left us they could go in to industry - and not just the design industry - and start making changes.

So differentiation is the key. Degrees shouldn't be technical qualifications with a bit more writing, and an honours year (or even a Masters year) should not simply be an opportunity to make your portfolio fatter. There has to be a difference.

Having agreed that, the next question was "what do we teach" and there was a struggle to move away from the desire to list core competencies. Instead we tried to imagine what somebody graduating in 2028 would need to be able to do, not just as a designer, but as a person.
We came up with an impressive list which, when I get hold of one of the photos that was taken will post here. What was impressive was not its comprehensiveness but the fact that when we looked at it the word 'design' wasn't there and it very closely matched the description that the UK Quality Assurance Agency already has of what a generic 'graduate' should be. As a few of us Brits lamented, if only people running courses would actually read those, things would be miles better.

We had been looking for a paradigm shift and this was it: we currently see design education as teaching people to design. Instead we want to teach people through design.

So we believe that graduates need to be politically and socially engaged. You'll never achieve that teaching Photoshop and yet this is what we fool ourselves in to thinking and claiming. Instead we shift approach and teach students about the world in which they are living, using design as the tool to do that and allowing them to demonstrate what they have learned through design. Learning Photoshop then becomes a skill that is picked up to show understanding of the world, not because it is a skill in itself. This moves us away from training designers to educating graduates. They can still design, but what they are designing is a model of the world, a worldview if you like, rather than (god help us) a double page spread and a web site.

There's no point in teaching people to design web sites, magazine layouts and so on - certainly not at university. Instead there's an urgent need for graduates who can identify problems and design solutons to them, and these go way beyond the narrow concept of 'graphic design' - graphic designers can't tackle crime, for example unless you think a nice leaflet will do that. But as 'Design Against Crime' has shown, designers can. Losing the word 'graphic' opens up so many possibilities it's hard to understand why anyone would resist.

This philosophical difference between a degree and other qualifications is one that I think everybody at the conference with one or two exceptions subscribed to. So the next stage was "how do we do this?"
The conference was attended by over a hundred designers - practitioners and academics - from all over the world. In my group we had representatives from the US, New Zealand, Australia, the UK (including England, Wales and Scotland), Qatar, Turkey and a few others I forget. We also had people who were at the beginning of their careers, students (as delegates and as observers recording the proceedings), those in the middle of their working lives and those approaching or even past retirement. To get so much agreement considering this range of people was amazing but as I pointed out to Teal and others, the danger with conferences like this is that you get comfortable thinking "Wow, I'm not the only one who thinks like this" but then you get back home and find that there, you are. Most people I spoke to knew that even though the conference had a large claim to legitimacy, that it was a gathering of experts and leading thinkers in the discipline, that they would arrive home and be told by colleagues that the future lies in not changing a thing. Yet the clear message coming from every country represented there was: change or die. In the US and Turkey, delegates warned, the rise of private universities offering narrow vocational qualifications is sapping students who simply want to fit in to a junior and well-defined role. This leaves the students who want to think and explore a discipline, but they are simply being given exactly the same courses except over a longer time and for more money. If we don't offer something different we'll lost them to other subjects.

(Interestingly, when I said I wondered why we still insist on taking students who study art at school, then braced myself for the reaction, others agreed and two delegates said they'd already stopped looking at portfolios and instead made offers based on school grades. As a result they'd started recruiting students who had studied languages, sciences and more with no fall in standards and often better results. Although it's something of a stereotype there was agreement that the danger of insisting students took art at school is that we attract people who think that's all you need to do, or that our subject is easy. What these approaches seemed to do was filter out those who were good at painting and drawing but didn't read or think or write critically. Design's future lies in people like this, not people who have nice portfolios demonstrating skills in different mark-making media).

So lonely though it may be at the front of the pack, we need to keep going and for this we need someone to help us keep the pace. And that's where networking comes in. We were determined for this not to be another conference where we collect business cards and then put them somewhere 'safe' on our return. I offered to look in to making a networking bid to the AHRC to get us back together soon, and there was an offer from Qatar to do something similar.

We also talked about an Open Source model, that instead of prescribing a curriculum as industry is attempting to, we agree on an international set of principles with our list as a starting point, and that individual institutions decide how they are going to get there. AS we develop modules or projects we share them with others so they can use them or adapt them and share them back. This could even be done by students who could build their own programme by matching intended outcomes ("understanding of ecological impacts" to give a deliberately broad example) and find a project brief from the library that they adapt to their circumstances. There would even be room for collaboration between students in different countries.

So we're hoping to set up a web site that will allow the conversation to carry on, and to begin collecting ideas for this library of open source materials.

We all agreed, I think, that this is not the sort of change that should happen slowly - we haven't got time. To misquote Terry Pratchett, if you drag this sort of change out people resist. If you do it quickly you just move from one state of normal to another. Graphic design hasn't got 20 years. It has to change now, and degree-level design education needs to define itself so that it offers something to the world beyond simply churning out people who can make a leaflet selling crap nobody wants.

My MA thesis Wordled...

This is rather nice. Wordle is a web tool that takes a bunch of text and converts it in to something akin to a tag cloud, with word size based on the frequency they occur.

Here's my 2001 MA thesis on polysemy in advertising:

Click on the thumbnail to try it out yourself, and take a look at these created from the subtitles for various episodes of Doctor Who.

Rituals of Violence

As a prelude to a radio programme on the rituals of violence, Laurie Taylor writes about his memories of following my own football team, York City. The last line is a great image...

I’ve supported York City ever since I took up my lecturing job at the university in the late sixties. There have been a few magical moments over the years since then – a 3-0 win over Manchester United at Old Trafford in the 1995-6 League Cup – but most weeks the fans have to dine on pretty thin gruel.

Like other supporters of lesser teams, though, they keep themselves going by telling jokes about their own team and its relative lack of success. They’ll talk about the time the new and much criticized striker finally earned a corner and the entire team did a lap of honour. And they’re bound to come up with the story of these two York fans fighting each other on the terrace. A policeman jumps over the barrier to separate them and says ‘Why are you two fighting. You’re on the same side.’ And then the fellow who started it all points to his protagonist and says ‘It’s not my fault. It’s his. He tried to shove a season ticket in my pocket.’

At some matches the only thing that enlivened the proceedings was the prospect of a little hooliganism. Even though visiting teams rarely brought more than a couple of hundred fans with them, these were routinely segregated from York supporters by a line of constables.

All was usually relatively quiet for the first half-hour of the match. Nothing much more than the routine chanting of insults between the two groups of fan. But then, after a particularly nasty foul, or a dramatic goal-mouth incident, matters would escalate and fans from each side would attempt to breach the police line, waving their fists in the air and shoving and pushing.

From close-up, it might have been disturbing but viewed from the other end of the pitch, it had a deliciously ritual quality. Half-a-dozen fans who were braver than the rest would shove against the police line, while their rivals would shove back the other way. And so it went on with neither side striking a blow until one fan – there seemed an element of arbitrariness about this – was picked on by the police and then, to cheers and chants all round, escorted along the touchline and out of the ground.

In the old days what added even more to the ritual quality of the hooliganism was that at half-time away supporters were often allowed through the police line so they could join home supporters in the queue at the tea stall.

A room with a view

Tayport sunset - 01, originally uploaded by artistry.

I hadn't planned on moving house but, after two years in my flat and just as I finally got round to unpacking the last box, my landlady decided she wanted to move back in and so I was out on my ear.
She gave me three months' notice, though, but as I hate the whole process of moving I decided to get looking.

The first few flats I saw were pretty awful and then this one came up, right on the harbour. I snapped it up and even though I'm still lacking in furniture (a bed would be nice) the view from the front window is more than paying for itself - this photo is one of a number I took recently. At the height of summer it doesn't get dark here until after 11pm and this is a month before midsummer's night.

I also have some resident swans who come by every now and then.

A great find - knowing my luck the landlady will sell it before I've even put the bed together...

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script | The Editing Room

This abridged script of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pretty much sums up my feelings about the film:

HARRISON gets away, only to find himself in the middle of a NUCLEAR TEST SITE that is apparently located within walking distance of AREA 51.

HARRISON FORD

Holy shit, a nuclear bomb! I’ll hide in this lead-lined fridge to protect myself from the radiation that will permeate the area shortly after the ten-million degree heat generated by the blast is done obliterating every single object in a 5 mile radius!

Somehow, this WORKS. HARRISON FORD emerges from the fridge with his face covered in black soot, holding a sign that reads ‘ouch.’

Read in full, especially the bit where

SHIA LEBEOUF flies up into the FUCKING JUNGLE and swings like FUCKING TARZAN along the FUCKING VINES with a FUCKING ARMY of CGI FUCKING MONKEYS. That actually FUCKING HAPPENS.

To hell via Chicago

I just got back from a great conference in Dallas organised by the chaps on the Visual Communications programme at the University of North Texas. I'll write more about that when my brain catches up with me - suffice to say I really enjoyed it and met some fantastic people.

But I thought I should share the hellish experience I had on the way back. I wrote this at Edinburgh Airport and haven't had a chance to edit it - it was one of those 'get it out of my head in one go' things...
My thanks to American Airlines for making my journey so, erm, eventful.

I arrived at Dallas Fort Worth airport well before time on Sunday for the flight to Edinburgh via Chicago and Heathrow. When I got there I saw the flight was delayed by an hour (thunderstorms in Chicago - the news was full of floods in Louisiana and other states, quite bad), but as this was the flight to Heathrow anyway it didn't matter. The poor buggers going to Brussels were given a choice: go to Chicago and hope, go to Chicago and stay over, or stay in Dallas.
For me it was just a case of getting to Chicago and waiting till they'd refuelled.
So the flight to Chicago is packed, mainly with domestic flyers. I'm sat next to a young lad who clearly hasn't flown before as he asks me all sorts of questions, like I'm the Ancient Mariner or something. He's going to Jordan.

As the flight lands in Chicago, the pilot tells those of us going to Heathrow that we need to go to gate L8 and get a plane from there instead. So a few of us confirm what we've heard and, not knowing what time it's going (the information screen just, very helpfully, says 'on time') we all leg it to L8 which is about half a mile away in the same terminal. You have to go through all the shops and things and step over people sitting down on the floor using their laptops or calling on their phones.
Eventually I get there and discover the flight to Heathrow isn't going until 6pm, so an hour to kill. So I kill it - having gone to the desk to check this is the right flight. It is.

Come 6pm the flight just starts to board and as the guy at Dallas helpfully moved me forwards in the plane I'm one of the last groups to be called forward. I give the woman my boarding pass, she swipes it and... a red light flashes.
"You're not on this flight you need to be on AA86" she says. That's the flight I was on before, the one they told us to change. She shouts to another woman "is AA86 gone?" They're still boarding, apparently. "You'd better run".

So I run. It's half a mile at least and everyone's really slow and really fat and I've got my laptop bag on and my leg's sore from a cramp that morning, and it's hot hot hot.
I don't think I'm going to make it but I run to the desk and see the words 'Heathrow boarding" and throw myself in front of them, breathless. "Calm down sir, you're fine" says one of the staff there. I don't feel fine, I tell her, through gasps.

She scans my pass and checks me in and I go to join everybody else in the departure lounge. I don't see any of the other people from the earlier flight and I wonder what happened to them.
There's another flight letting people on and an attendant goes up to the girl and says 'all done, let's go' and they both step on to the plane and I watch the bridge retract, leaving the plane alone on the tarmac. By now I'm beginning to catch my breath and I look around and see another passenger looking at the screen I'd seen earlier. "7.45" she says and I assume this is when my flight is going, which is too late for my connection to Edinburgh. So I get up to go to the desk to check I can make a later flight at Heathrow and I see the words "Heathrow: Boarded". I look back to the window and I realise: that's my fucking plane! And it's going!

There are two passengers talking to a lone attendant at the desk and a religious-looking guy behind him. I decide not to be British and interrupt: "Excuse me, that's my flight! I'm not in it!" I'm staying calm inwardly but screaming like a madman externally.
"Didn't you hear the call?" she says. There was no call, I say. I was waiting for the call. In Britain if you check in but don't get on the flight they shout your name from the rooftops. "I can't get you on the flight, sir, there's nothing I can do."
"But my bag's on there," I say, at which point she thinks. The thing that surprises me about the US and Chicago in particular: the security is tight. At DFW I had to go through a body scanner that puffed compressed air at me and made some grinding noises, which interestingly had no one staffing it, so I suspect it was just some bicycle pumps and an old washing machine.
And there are no calls. At Chicago the only calls I heard were that members of the military service were welcome in the smoking area (which is public, so it's hardly a perk) and that the current threat level is amber. And I think that's what's got her concerned so I press the issue: "How can the plane leave with my bag on it? Surely that's a security risk?" One thing I know after Lockerbie is that they introduced rules that say baggage that's checked in by a passenger can't go if the passenger isn't on the plane. Which is one of the reasons they make all those calls for "Passenger X" to get out of the bar or the duty free shop and get to the gate before they have to go through all the bags to get theirs off.
This hadn't happened here, and they hadn't even done a head count: 500 passengers checked in, only 499 on the plane equals, as Dickens might have said, a might cock up.

She took my name and disappeared for a minute, then came back with a man. "You'll have to get the bridge back out there" she told him and he rushed me to the door. I stopped to gather my stuff, dropping bits everywhere.
Now you know that scene in Star Wars where Luke and Leia are running from Stormtroopers and they come to a retracted bridge? Luke nearly falls in but Leia pulls him back.
Well this was very nearly what happened as I ran after the little fat man but didn't notice that he sidestepped into a control booth while I clattered towards the open door leading to the tarmac. He started moving the bridge while I steadied myself. Eventually it hit the plane and he, get this, *knocked* on the door! Like he was just popping round for a cup of sugar. God knows what they were thinking inside but after a few seconds the door opened and I fell inside, completely unable to speak, dropping things everywhere. The attendants smiled at me and asked for my boarding pass - but I'd lost it! I only had the ones for the first and last leg of the journey, not this one! "I'm in seat 23H" I said, remembering it from the ticket.
"I trust you" said the head woman - you trust me? It's bloody amber alert out there and you TRUST me??
Suits me, I thought, and went to get to my seat, still dropping then picking things up.

I get to my seat and I'm sat next to a young woman who smiles at me like "bugger I thought I was going to be sitting on my own" but then an attendant comes up to me and says "that row's free" and points to the back row in the front cabin, lots of lovely seats all unoccupied except for one American woman who spreads herself over three of them and says "they're mine" while miming sleep. Fine, I think, and sit down, still sweating from the half mile jog.
After this the flight seems to go smoothly except there's a screaming baby up the front and across the aisle from me there are four American lads who don't know the meaning of the words 'quiet whisper' who talk and laugh all the way through the flight. The woman next to me knows them (turns out she's their teacher) and tells them twice to be quiet so others can sleep, which they are for about five minutes. At about 4am UK time I tell them to shut up too and that works for about three minutes. Bastards.

The flight makes up time and we land an hour late. I notice my connection to Edinburgh is actually half an hour later than I thought so I have time to make it. I rush off the plane to get the bus to Terminal 5 (third visit now, still don't see what the fuss is about) and then through security, which is held up, as last time, by a lack of trays to put stuff in. Unlike last time I don't have to hold a random baby while his mother folds up the push chair, but I do worry about the large old American lady who's puffing away behind me while telling the staff she can't go through the metal detector because she has a pacemaker.
I get through all that and rush to the gate... and the plane's delayed anyway. Of course.

On the flight to Edinburgh I find I'm sat next to a compulsive throat clearer. But not just a normal bit of throat clearance - he makes a meal of it (well, not quite literally) getting a good run-up to it. Every few minutes. For the full 55 minutes of the journey plus the 20 minutes sitting on the tarmac. But at least I made my flight - I'm going to be on time getting back home despite everything!

The flight lands (during the flight the staff try to wheel the breakfast trolley up the aisle while the plane's still ascending and all the meals slide out on to the floor, but as I got mine I don't chalk that up as a personal event in teh catalogue of disasters) and we all go to belt 6 to get our bags. Now I remember joking with the guy at DFW as my bag disappeared behind him. "Will it get transferred all the way to Edinburgh?" I asked him. "It should" he said, "but this is an airline". I watched it go off fearing I'd never see it again and wondering if I'd been insured for the trip.
Belt 6 goes round and bags appear. Last time I did this the first thing that appeared was a suitcase handle. Just the handle, with the airline luggage tag attached to it. No suitcase. Poor bugger, I thought and, judging from everyone else's faces they were thinking the same too.

The belt went round. More bags. More bags. Then not so many bags. Then just a couple. Then more bags! But this was the next flight. Eventually I gave in and went to the baggage office.
"Was there any problem with the flight?" the guy asked me. "Any delays?" I wanted to tell him the full story but I thought it might get in the way of any film rights I could exploit, so I just murmured something about delays in Chicago. He typed something in to his computer. "It's on the next flight" he said, "should be here at 12.30. Do you want us to send it on?" When he learned where I lived he said it wouldn't arrive with me till tomorrow so I said I'd wait the 90 minutes. "You sure?" he said. "Oh yes" I said and then I went to have a little cry but couldn't. So I sat down with a cup of tea (a real one! Yes!) and typed this.
I'm going to be writing a brief letter to American Airlines soon to suggest that their boarding procedures might need a little bit of tightening up. And maybe a few useful announcements in the airport instead of telling us we're good to smoke if we're soldiers or that we need to keep our baggage with us at all times. I'm beginning to think I learned that particular lesson.