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Perspectives of design training at the University of Wuppertal

by Prof. Dr. Johannes Busmann / busmann@uni-wuppertal.de

“I want to do something creative”. It’s a wish one hears ever and again on the lips of the young, both live and on the TV shows devoted to talent spotting and the like. Creativity seems to be synonymous with all that is good and positive, that fulfills every expectation of free, independent, untrammeled living and leads necessarily to recognition and admiration.

Is it, then, surprising that this same wish informs the students who year by year enroll in the design schools of North Rhine-Westphalia? There are far too many of them for the available places, too many taking the practical and artistic aptitude tests regularly conducted also at the University of Wuppertal, whose design school has traditionally been integrated in the Faculty of Art and Design. Yet, one might ask, is there any real understanding of what lies behind such intentions? What activity, in the minds of these young people, is connected with the word ‘design’? What does creativity mean when applied directly and exclusively to a profession and to the degree programs that train and qualify its practitioners?

Fig. 1: Lünen Cinefest. Media design students interview Heiko Pinkowski and Peter Trabner from ‘Dicke Mädchen’ (Big Girls) on improvisation. Learning interview techniques and professional handling of technology, they cut 30 hours of fi lm material into a documentary on narration in contemporary German cinema.

If this lack of definition is surprising, it has at least one clear implication: that design in the form of media contexts is all around us, determining our daily lives as never before, both intensively and extensively. Design builds the interface, the immediately visible bridge for almost every movement and function in our world; it determines the success and failure of products and services, and increasingly of an entire range of social communication. Nothing, it seems, escapes the need for design, the need to be mediated and medialized. Refrigerators equipped with 65 programs depend crucially on designers to make them usable; the image that conveys more than a thousand words must choose and shape its words into a moving narrative; the flat screens with their million pixels that are now the world’s number one communicative interface have inevitably catapulted their designers into a key position in the universe of digital communications.

Yet, although design is in all these cases the overriding context, visible, haptic, and as such readily intelligible, the design profession is not the driving force of this development. The central impulse for the radical changes in our culture is the exponential growth in data transport rates posted year by year by the microchip industry in accordance with Moore’s law – a growth whose effects can be seen in mobile telephony (LTE) as well as in static systems. It is the unstoppable thrust of digital technologies that dictates the rhythm of development,drawing energies of every sort into its gravitational field and penetrating social, economic and cultural life at the regional as well as the global level.

Fig. 2: ,Leonid’, a new cultural magazine for university and beyond, is a joint venture of humanities and design students. Students learn conception, editing, design and production for professional publishing.

The consequences of this technical evolution cannot be described in full, as they change so rapidly. Preferences and product constellations shift and sort themselves anew each year. Nevertheless, some general tendencies are emerging in the relation between design and technology that will in all probability exercise a fundamental impact on the profession and training of designers.

In the 80s and 90s, when design desktop publishing was revolutionizing the technical basis of the designing process, media design was still focused on print technologies. Posters, advertisements, corporate and editorial design represented the cutting edge of visual design, and as such constituted the framework for the profession and for the universities and institutes devoted to training designers. This is no longer the case. The Internet is now a (if not the) leading channel of distribution, conveying rapid, target-group-specific information in personalized, interactive modes that radically cut production and distribution costs and open entirely new vistas of communication. Partly replacing and partly complementing traditional print media, the Internet has been responsible for the transmedial strategies that can be observed today in the practice of almost all large news organs and publishing enterprises.

The leading German daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for instance, has recently advertised its own application for smartphones and tablets both in its standard print edition and on its recently relaunched website. Likewise W H Smith, the UK’s major newsagent, stationer and book retailer, runs its own KOBO e-book line alongside its many print products, extending and enhancing its market penetration via the interplay of traditional content with new technology. These ventures share a high level of exploitation of available technology, structured content and consistent design.

Fig. 3 + 4: ‘Leonid’. Inside pages designed and produced by Nick Placzek (Department of Media Design). Double spread with photos by Luise Frings for a poem by Jan Fried (above) and photos by Martin von Hadel (below).

In contrast with the early days of the Internet, technology and design are increasingly and persuasively intermeshed in the old-new design culture of media technology. After all, information, however well structured, can only be effectively conveyed via an interface that transforms its complexity into simple forms and images. Design thus becomes the mediator between user preferences and behaviors on the one hand and structured content of whatever sort on the other.

Taking the argument a step further, we find similar changes taking place in television, which – alongside publishing – is the second great marketer and distributor of words and images. Here, too, the technological innovations of the recent past and imminent future are substantially affecting the format and production of moving images and the competitive structures that depend on them. Broadcasting companies, subject as ever to the technological limits of transmission volumes, are, with access to ever increasing broadband capacities and LTE, continuously expanding into new media, whether Internet, stream or download, on demand or live. And, as a corollary, program sequencing is being replaced by individual user interests and determined by user profiles. The ultimate goal is that every user should be able to access everything all the time.

For the major broadcasting corporations the technological revolution creates a new competitive situation. The distribution of moving images is no longer their exclusive domain: websites like YouTube, as well as special interest providers, enterprises, and private persons profit from the extremely low technological threshold and its interactive communicative structure. The intensity of the competition between the classical media in the (for them) new field of the Internet can be seen in the recent legal battle between Germany’s leading publishing houses and the ARD (Channel One TV) about the website and application for the latter’s main evening news program, the Tagesschau. Where and how the traditional border between text and image is to be drawn on the Internet remains a moot point; what is clear is that the contents of the two media converge.

How, if at all, do these considerations impinge on design training? Irrespective of all presuppositions, whether technological, empirical or specific, the immanent categories of the discipline and its raison d’être in the field of visual communication remain what they always have been: concept and design. Over and above this, media-specific technological innovations impose inevitable stringencies. Design training that seeks to qualify its graduates for professional life will in future have to take this dialectic more closely into account. With this in mind, UW’s combined BA program in media design provides a clear space for media and design technology input.

Fig. 5 – 8: Four publishing design products developed, edited and designed by students Bettina Uelpenich, Sascha Tim Fischer, Oxana Schmidt, and Stefan Buss. Incorporating interactive media design (Prof. Kristian Wolf), publishing design is a key area of UW’s media design program.

The university’s combined BA in design plays an exemplary role in North Rhine-Westphalia in possessing a structure specifically geared to meeting the growing demands of the profession. The polyvalence of the program opens the door both to professional practice and – via a master’s degree in education (MEd) – to design education. An explicit media-specific focus will be added in winter semester 2012 with accreditation pending for electives in interactive (IA) and audiovisual media design (AV). Combination with relevant disciplines such as German, philosophy, economics or politics in the case of AV, and informatics in the case of IA, will pave the way for appropriate professional specialization.

Within the framework of these programs both the range of combinations available at UW and its media-specific focus present sound bases for thesis projects and research. The inherent interdisciplinarity of UW’s design programs provides ready access to specializations in narratology and in editorial studies. And while the professorship of audiovisual media design will focus on classical film history and on research in the areas of film theory and narration, the professorships in media design and its didactics, as well as in interactive media design, will be concerned with theoretical issues in the reception of edited material on the one hand and empirical research into the convergence of multimedia publishing on the other. Wider potential cooperations may, for instance, involve the Faculty of Humanities in the context of its MA in editorial studies, where the growing relevance of issues in digital publishing suggests the proximity of the design disciplines.

Fig. 9: Lünen Cinefest. Students meet professionals, make a documentary, and talk to Ruth Bickelhaupt from Berndt Media prizewinning ‘Dicke Mädchen’ (Big Girls). UW’s new audio-visual design Prof. Erica von Moeller focuses on fi ctional and non-fi ctional narrative competence.

Alongside historical and empirical research, a highly relevant pool of questions centering on the technology of digital publishing and interactive communication will fall within the remit of UW’s new professorship of interactive media design. These questions include issues of 3D publishing, empirical research into the adaptation of future interface structures, and the distribution of time-based material via broadband and mobile telephony.

A new professorship in the didactics of visual communication, to be launched in fall 2012 within the framework of UW’s twin MEd programs in media design and design technology, and in color, space and surface design and technology, will focus on the communication of design processes related especially to the didactics of design training. The new specialty will establish UW’s Faculty of Art and Design in a unique position nationwide in this field of teaching and research.

The new direction of design studies at UW promises successful future development based on the interdisciplinarity inherent in a wide range of media-specific combinations, and above all on the polyvalent structure and aims of the combined BA, which allows for the parallel, integrated training of teachers as well as practitioners of design, with corresponding cross-fertilization and synergies. The interdisciplinary combinations will predictably yield research specialties in technology, didactics and history.

www.gt.uni-wuppertal.de/lehrgebiete/busmann