Europeans propose a new school of thought

The structure and philosophy of art and design schools around Europe must change for them to thrive in the future, an educational pressure group believes.

And students need a different training which puts design in its historical and cultural context to better equip them for the modern workplace.

With this in mind, members of the European League of the Institute of the Arts came up with a blueprint, that might be adopted as a model by colleges, at a fringe meeting of ELIA’s conference in Lisbon this month.

Joost Smiers, director of the Centre for Research at Utrecht School of the Arts, presented the concept of the “New Academy” as a place which would “unite visual intelligence with ethics and research”.

In a paper entitled The New Academy, the organisers state: “The academy’s self-image is ripe for correction.” The paper goes on: “A unity must be created between teaching and research, so that a sharper insight can be arrived at into the practice of design, the social and cultural context of design and the design process.”

According to Simon Clarke, senior lecturer in graphic design at Portsmouth University and an attendee at the meeting: “Some of these issues are urgent and many are common across Europe.”

But he contends that the New Academy is already starting to construct itself as more courses link up around Europe and ideas are exchanged more easily. “The amount of discussion between European graphic design courses is phenomenal,” he says.

The New Academy document outlines the issues facing the design industry, warning: “Design is in danger becoming a branch of product development, marketing communication and technological fetishism.” The problems facing design include the following:

Innovative design is becoming a “rare phenomenon”, with “designers degenerating into specialists in form, line and colour”.

The design process is having to bow to the influence of commercialism, and economies of scale are forcing consultancies to become ever larger. “Design has become far more closely intertwined with strategic communication. What threatens to disappear is an autonomous objective based on design thinking, whether or not it is nourished by a critical and humane picture of culture and society.”

Traditional quality criteria are suffering with the influx of design technology. “Information technology is forcing the existing barriers to come down, but it is doing so through the resources, not the objective of the teaching of design,” states the paper.

New balances of power are coming into being between local, national and supranational design cultures.

The image of the designer as the original author and copyright owner is disappearing into the sunset.

Clarke supports the call to reassess the teaching process in the light of new technology. “Graphic design students are lonelier and more fragmented. Their work has disappeared from the studio and is all on disk,” he says. Students must be brought together on joint projects and an atmosphere of debate must be recreated, he adds.

Maarten Regouin, who chaired the meeting, is director of St Joost Academy, part of West Brabant University in Breda, The Netherlands. He claims: “This is the first time for a long time that new ideas in art and design education have been raised.”

Regouin makes a plea to include more theory of design in the curriculum. Students can only contribute to society “when there is a thirst for theory”, he says.

This view is backed up by Clarke: “It gives the students a very good grounding and establishes very firm research methods.”

These issues will be revisited at ELIA’s next major conference, scheduled for two years’ time in Helsinki, says ELIA executive director Carla Delfos. Meanwhile, ELIA members propose to collect together essays on the topic of the New Academy and turn them into a book.

The European League of the Institute of the Arts (ELIA):

is based in The Netherlands

has about 300 member institutions in 36 countries

was set up six years ago

aims to improve the information flow between institutions

acts as a voice for art and design education in society

advises on grants and political developments affecting art and design