(Graphic)
Design
School
School

Here's an opportunity to freely imagine what should be done, unhindered by administrative worries about what can’t possibly be done.

- Howard Singerman in an email to Frances Stark in Primer: On the Future of Art School, 2007

Leaving the university campus and setting up at The Physics Room for exactly one academic term, lecturer Luke Wood and his students from the Ilam School of Fine Arts will work together to reflect on both an ideal curriculum for graphic design inside an art school and alternative possibilities for the practical implementation of such within the current tertiary environment.

Responding to graphic design’s seemingly inevitable and complicit relationship with capitalism this project seeks to propose an alternative, a curriculum in graphic design that is not primarily motivated by profit-driven 'problem solving' or innovation. How and why these terms have been co-opted by neoliberal agendas, and furthermore, how graphic design might be of value and contribute to culture and society will be central to this project.

As part of (Graphic) Design School School Melbourne-based artist, designer, publisher and lecturer Brad Haylock is The Physics Room artist-in-residence.

Symposium: A Slight Return will be held in conjunction with this project involving local designers, lecturers and students from the design programme at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts. Documentation and video content from A Slight Return will be made available online. An accompanying publication is forthcoming.

Public Programmes

Wednesday 16 July: Brad Haylock, 'What is the problem in 'problem solving'?'
Wednesday 23 July: Brad Haylock, 'Design and Rhetoric'
Wednesday 6 August: 'Design is One' film, in association with Design Assembly
Wednesday 13 August, 12 noon: Carl Pavletich, 'Confessions of a commercial designer'
Wednesday 13 August, 2pm: Reading group
Wednesday 20 August, 5.30pm: Stuart Geddes public lecture
Friday 22 August, 5.30pm: Graduation party!

Luke Wood is a graphic designer, musician, and lecturer at the Ilam School of Fine Arts (University of Canterbury). He was founding co-editor of The National Grid, New Zealand’s only critical journal on graphic design, and in 2012 published the multi-award winning magazine Head Full of Snakes. Luke’s work has been exhibited as part of Millenium Magazines at MOMA (New York, USA), and Facing Pages at the Dutch Art Institute (Arnhem, NL).

Brad Haylock is an artist, designer and publisher. He is an Associate Professor of Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and is founding editor of Surpllus, an independent commercial press focusing on critical and speculative practices across art, design and theory.