Thinking Design
Have a Good Eye
A brief note on teaching first-year design
Our students come in as good thinkers, but not as good see-ers. Design students coming into the first year thrive on preconceived notions of their world. Part of the learning process requires students to unlearn much of the symbolic determinism they carry from their pre-college education. Relying mostly on inductive processes, they tend to settle on rational and reductivist understandings of their environment. Especially when facing a new challenge, we tend to shrink back into our comfort zone, and what we know. For a designer, this is a missed opportunity to visually decipher what we actually see. It is the difference between vision — what we see — and visuality — the culture of seeing [1].
Our first task is to redevelop their impulse to see by discouraging the temptation to recognize, label, or take for granted what is otherwise familiar [2]. Goethe reminds us that ‘the hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes[3].’
In all of their projects, students are asked to look at their world with fresh eyes to constantly see new things.
In the same way, our teaching approach encourages the student to see the potential in their initial idea and to nurture it towards further maturation through visual explorations. Taking design as a language, students discover the rules, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary as part of their learning. An important goal is to help students gradually open their eyes and use their hands to make three-dimensional transformations of the world they inhabit. The challenge is to keep the students motivated and create a nourishing environment that encourages them to explore, ask questions, look carefully, make beautiful things, and see meaning in visual relationships. In the process, each student expands their ability to view their work critically in order to develop their design skills and improve their ‘good eye’. As a musician is trained to have a good ear, our role as design educators is to teach our students to have a good eye.
N O T E S
The notion of the ‘good eye’ comes from Sewell, Brian, in Fletcher, Alan. The Art of Looking Sideways, Phaidon, 2001, 188.
1 Foster, Hal. Vision and Visuality: Discussions in ModernCulture, ‘Preface’, ix–xv, The New Press, 1988. See also Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Im/Pulse to See’ in the same volume, 51–78.
2 Paul Rand calls this the ‘designer’s problem’, which is to ‘defamiliarize the ordinary’. Rand, Paul. Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
3 As quoted in Fletcher, Alan. The Art of Looking Sideways, Phaidon, 2001, 178.
