A vocational design education strategy is vital
I mentor at a local college. It’s a great way to see how the next generation are being taught to approach advertising and design. I learn a lot about expectations, processes and ideas.
Oh, and I suppose I’m of some help to the students.
Whatever.
Each year, without fail, I see things I don’t like. It could be that students are being given six months to explore a brief when I know one day they will have, well, one day.
This year I got to talking about a design the student had done and I asked why he’d done it, what thought processes had led to it. We discussed it in some detail because I’d got quite a different interpretation of it. Ultimately I asked how the student “sold” it into the tutor.
The answer was that designs weren’t sold in. They were given no rationale.
It made me wonder that if students weren’t required to explain, if they weren’t required to show their working out, then what would encourage them to do any working out to begin with.
And without being able to explain why a design works then what faith could I have in the message it is supposed to convey?
Moving to old man mode, I believe that part of the reason there is any kind of debate about the quality of creative at the moment (a topic being run in The Drum lately) is that very little in the way of rationale and message is actually being demanded.
Perhaps if colleges took up the challenge to be more commercial in their teaching technique then we might see this change at grassroots level. Certainly a more vocational approach to design wouldn’t hurt as students learn to better understand the demands clients will one day put upon them.
