Teaching Philosophy
A primary approach for me as an adjunct professor with creative arts education is to instruct students from the position of mentor, in order to support design students as they create and own their own work. My goal is to help my students see the quality of their own work without imposing my personal design philosophy on them. Through lecture, example and resources, I teach not creative direct student design itself, but instead highlight cost/benefit awareness of the design process and teach students to be aware of the implications of their design solutions while choosing their cost/benefit ratio themselves. I avoid using my studio’s own work as example, as I do not want to set up false “right or wrong” assumptions about design solutions by showcasing my own professional work. Instead, I take students well outside my own work through a variety of accessible examples, using research exercises that exemplify diversity in solution-making that comes from applying more flexible criteria to design.
As an example, when a student comes to me with an brand/identity concept and asks me my opinion, I respond by asking what the student thinks and why: what decisions did the student make to get to this point and what was the decision-making process? In this way I guide students to proceed or adjust their work based on their intentions, not mine. I might advise more specifically on the legibility of the student project, bringing to bear basic tenets of the design process that are the foundation of the assignment, but I then push the student to explore and own his or her own ideas, tastes, and limitations. This serves to guide students toward the most effective development of their concepts and helps them add depth to their approach, with the result that students produce more effective and resolved design solutions for projects and assignments.
In order to cultivate creative talent and creative focus I challenge students to go beyond their own skill sets, and support them by letting them make mistakes so they can learn from a process that necessarily involves a series of local successes and failures. I also set up coursework as a methodical and pragmatic process at the start, then accelerate the development of the project process through the semester to their final formats at the end. This helps students acclimate to the quick turnaround demands of actual work in real time, and by the end, I find that my students are not afraid of rapid idea and solution-making in their work.
I also believe it is important in design education to provide experiences that helps students learn how to both generate pie-in-the-sky ideas that exercise their creative muscles, and then, more importantly, how to think those concepts through so they can bring ideas to an applied solution, and conclusion. Cultivating creativity is essential for good design education, but design education is much more effective when it provides a grounding in reality. I ultimately believe it is the limitations involved in any project that provide the real challenge that spurns true creativity and problem solving. Sometimes those limitations, the very realities of bringing pie-in-the-sky ideas into solutions, are what help students find their true creativity in themselves.
Project Assignments/Syllabi/Student Work Samples
Click images for a detailed look at the weekly schedule, syllabus, and student work.
