Design education as learning self-assembly
George Hardie’s cover for Varoom 16 Published by The Association of Illustrators
Exploring ‘making-change’ and impact for a class reminded me of the cover for issue 16 of Varoom, when we changed format from glossy A4 to A3 newsprint.
I think lecturer and illustrator Roderick Mills suggested to publisher Derek Brazell, designer Fernando Gutierrez and myself to ask George Hardie. From memory, Roderick as Illustration Course Leader at University of Brighton had been working on a retrospective of Brighton-alumnus Hardie.
You might not recognise the name, but Hardie’s work is in homes across the world. As a member of Hipgnosis studio in the 1960s and 1970s, Hardie had designed iconic music sleeve art for the albums Led Zeppelin(1969) and Dark Side of the Moon (1973).
I’ve had Covid. My taste is more skewed than normal. But I think Hardie should really be famous for this cover. He maps and narrates scales and speeds of change, classification and chaos.
Hardie diagrams the making of his making. The image teaches Hardie what he is making. It’s change as a model of learning, learning as self-assembly with change. By the end of the image, if there is an end, Hardie has assembled his body that’s ready-to-go.
“It’s a diagram of how students in Art and Design schools learn about learning from change”
It’s why studying in Art and Design schools is both life-changing and, despite prejudice to the contrary, incredibly difficult.
It reminds me of educationalist bell hooks, who says the misguided purpose of modern schooling “is that everything that they learn in the classroom is mere raw material for something that they will produce later on in life. This displacement of meaning into the future makes it impossible for students to fully immerse themselves in the art of learning and to experience that immersion as a complete, satisfying moment of fulfillment.”
As hooks reminds us we learn best when we are passionate about something. Without understanding how to design our learning, how our ways of learning designs us, we end up re-producing the old world in later life. When business, understandably, calls for students to be trained with specific skills or tools, it’s important to remember in a world of change these specific skills increasingly have a short shelf life, and in truth it’s the same with businesses, as old products and markets disappear and new ones are created.
As we emerge into a world forever changed by Covid, that is also time-stamped by climate change, how can we change education to meet the demands of our future rather than the past? Thanks for the thinking George Hardie.
Varoom can be bought here