Design Education Talks - Ellen Lupton on the Evolution of Design Thinking and Inclusive Education

Discover the transformative shifts in design education with Ellen Lupton, the esteemed author of "Thinking with Type." Ellen joins us to illuminate the past two decades of design thinking evolution and the profound impact of inclusivity and diverse typographic traditions in shaping design education. She passionately shares the necessity for hands-on, process-oriented teaching methods and the importance of international students bringing their cultural identities to the design table. Her journey from student to teacher unveils the influential mentors who helped shape her approach to education, preparing a new generation to navigate the practical applications of design with innovation and creativity.

This episode is a deep dive into the enduring challenges and fresh innovations within the realm of design education, as we dissect the core visual design principles that remain crucial despite technological advancements. Ellen Lupton emphasizes the need for a design history and theory curriculum enriched by a variety of perspectives, addressing the critical issues of accessibility and cost within the educational structure. We engage in a thought-provoking conversation about how to craft a design program that fosters community involvement and experiential learning. From tackling societal needs like the housing crisis to encouraging students to draw inspiration from history and other cultures, this discussion with Ellen is an inspiring, enlightening journey that will ignite your passion for design and its capacity to change the world.

Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer, and educator. The all-new edition of her bestselling book Thinking with Type launched in March 2024. Other books include Design Is Storytelling, Graphic Design Thinking, Health Design Thinking, and Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-Racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. She teaches in the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA), where she serves as the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair. She is Curator Emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, where her exhibitions included Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision.

https://ellenlupton.com/
https://www.instagram.com/ellenlupton/

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:08

Hello and welcome to Design Education Talk from the New Art School. Our guest today is Ellen Lupton. Welcome, ellen, hi, great to be here. It's great to have you, fantastic so tell us about you and your work.

Speaker 2 0:24

I'm a writer, a designer, an educator, a former museum curator, an internet personality and a home baker Wow, so I have a lot going on and it all kind of goes together. It all connects because it's all about design. And it's all about design, yeah, and it's all about communicating design content to all different kinds of people amazing are you doing sourdough too?

Speaker 1 0:52

now I'm more into cookies but sourdough is definitely in my future yes, yes, I've been looking at gluten-free sourdough myself. It's, it's. It's quite tricky. There is this've got to get the measurements accurately.

Speaker 2 1:05

Science, design.

Speaker 1 1:06

Yes, absolutely Fantastic. Tell us about what you're working on right now.

Speaker 2 1:13

My new book just came out, thinking with Type third edition, which is an all-new version of a classic book that I first published in 2004, so 20 years ago. And, of course, the world of design has changed a lot over that period. I've changed a lot, I've learned a lot, the field has got bigger, the field has faced its own biases and limitations, and creating a new edition of this book really meant rethinking every page, rethinking some of the concepts and even the voice behind the book, to create something that is suitable for our students in our time.

Speaker 1 2:00

That's fantastic. Would you like to say something about how the world has changed in terms of design and design education?

Speaker 2 2:06

Yeah. So where I teach at MICA in Baltimore, a majority of our students are international and they come from all over the world to study design and of course, we're teaching in English and we're teaching Latin based typography and people have come to learn that and many of them hope to work in the US after completing their graduate degree. But nonetheless they're coming from different language traditions, different typographic traditions, different heritages in terms of design and decorative art and the industrialization of the landscape and all of that. So to me, to teach graphic design today, one needs to be a little more open and a little more questioning of how we define and limit the vocabulary of design, how we define and limit the vocabulary of design.

Speaker 2 3:04

So the new edition of Thinking with Type includes brief introductions to a few of the world's writing systems.

Speaker 2 3:12

It is by no means comprehensive and I picked a few that were relevant really to my teaching and my community, and so that's a big change.

Speaker 2 3:24

That's like the biggest change in the book and it doesn't change the emphasis on it as a book dedicated to Latin-based typography. That's what the book is. The native language is English, although it's already coming out in Spanish and Portuguese and will be in Italian next year and I hope maybe Greek and Russian and all the languages. That would be great, but the native language is English, the native script is Latin, and it's a book for learning Latin-based typography, but the earlier editions didn't question that. They simply assumed that this is what typography is, and so a change of perspective and an opening up of the lens of typography today is to say you know, even if this is our focus, the world is actually much bigger, and people coming to graphic design are coming from many different places, and they don't throw away what they know from their own culture. They bring it, and so creating a book that acknowledges that and celebrates it is really important to me in my teaching.

Speaker 1 4:45

Absolutely, that's essential. And also, how has the teaching changed itself? I mean, how has the teaching in relationship to how design has changed in 20 years?

Speaker 2 4:58

My teaching is very hands-on and when I first started teaching, you know, I was a young intellectual and I loved reading critical theory and Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault and all that sort of stuff and I thought my students would be interested in that as well and it turned out they were not as interested as I was, and although I still include much of that material in my history and theory classes, in terms of classroom teaching, I really want students to have access to methods of making and thinking and I think that in the 50s and 60s, when design education was kind of invented you know, post Bauhaus and you have the Ulm School and the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel you had the invention of methodologies for teaching typography in particular, and by the time I was a student in the 1980s, we were really rebelling against that right, rebelling against the systems, rebelling against modernism, rebelling against Eurocentric thinking. All of that. You know it was a whole new world. We called it post-modernism, of course, at that time, and what got kind of lost was methods.

Speaker 2 6:41

And I feel like in many graphic design I'm talking about, in many graphic design classrooms, students are just told to like here, go, design a brand, here, design a book, use a grid Design a book, but there isn't a method and a walking through the process. So that's really important to me, even though I teach graduate students and you would think that graduate students already have a method but actually they don't and they're so grateful to experience design in a more stretched out over time and kind of step by step, even though then they create their own way of working which might be much faster. So that's been a change in my teaching.

Speaker 1 7:38

That's great, so tell us how you got into teaching.

Speaker 2 7:41

Well, I was a student, you know Okay, got into teaching. Well, I was a student, you know okay. I, you know, went to art school. I studied design at the cooper union in new york and I had some amazing teachers there. Um a czech designer named george sodick, who was very like, you know, pure modernist, but also with a Dada touch, you know, because we think of modernism. Oh, it's all about function and rigid problem solving, communicating an idea without ambiguity. You know, modernism always had the Dada side, you know. We look at Maholi Nagy at the Bauhaus he was also a Dada artist. All these people. They were interested in humor and critique and making fun of society, as well as building a new rational world.

Speaker 2 8:43

So when I studied, I had this modernist training but also an interest in language and humor and jokes and messing with it. And because I was a postmodernist, you know, at 19 years old I also needed to question all the projects and question everything. You know, do it my own way. I'm sure I was the most annoying student ever, but I was a student and I loved learning and I still love learning. I still love taking Skillshare classes and writing classes. I've never stopped being a student.

Speaker 2 9:25

But as a young person I was like someday I want to teach and of course I was so full of myself and so overconfident I was sure I would teach better. You know, I would bring the unique insights of postmodernism to bear upon our discipline. So I just always wanted to be a teacher. I actually became a museum curator first and that's a different kind of teaching because you are encountering the public and telling stories and explaining things, but it's not in a classroom and it's not intimate and direct. It's. You know you're removed from your student, but it's still teaching. Writing is teaching, podcasting is teaching.

Speaker 1 10:18

So your first contact in a university was where.

Speaker 2 10:22

So when I graduated from Cooper Union, I became a curator of a small design collection at the school which has continued to flourish the Herb Luballen Study Center, and I was the first curator and the thing was founded by alumni of my school who loved Herb Luballen, who was an alumni, and our alumni also included Milton Glaser and Seymour Schwast and many other amazing designers of that generation. And so I became a curator at my school and so I became a curator at my school and I did some teaching there, some teaching of graphic design history. But then I went to Cooper Hewitt Museum, which is part of the National Museum System of the US it's a little bit like our V&A and I became a curator there, which I did for 30 years, and during that time I started teaching at MICA in 1997 and became a proper design educator capital D, capital E, with students and grades and you know, semesters and sabbaticals and all this stuff. So quite a long time ago, but into my career.

Speaker 1 11:48

Yeah, so what would you say? The challenges facing graduates. What has changed and what challenges are graduates facing right now?

Speaker 2 11:59

Well, I mean there are many challenges, you know. I think in the US the job market has been disrupted by all those tech layoffs that are now two years ago. I think that really created a lot of skittishness and fear in the design industry and kind of slowed down hiring. I think that's been kind of tough. Design thinking as a discipline which is more consulting-oriented, that's taken a dip and kind of the pullback on that. At the same time, there's all kinds of you know, growth of, you know, digital product design, ux design. So there's lots of opportunities and I think branding remains extremely important and has lots of. It isn't just making logos. You know it's a very big, diverse area. It isn't just making logos. You know it's a very big, diverse area. Environmental graphic design is a big area with a lot of opportunity in it, because all buildings need signs and that's becoming more interesting, more digital, yeah. So there's a lot to learn and a lot to teach, absolutely so there's a lot to learn and a lot to teach.

Speaker 1 13:21

Absolutely. But what would you say? That you talk about these challenges, but what has changed in the challenges? I mean, what has changed in the challenges the students have been facing?

Speaker 2 13:35

Well, students have to master more and more different tools, but the tools keep changing. So, like now, figma is such an important bridge and a very flexible, easy, relatively easy tool for people to use, but that's new and and that replaced other tools that people used to say were the standard and you had to learn. And then tools like Canva are challenging the supremacy of the Adobe Creative Suite and the cost of the Adobe Creative Suite is a big challenge. Our students get access to that software as students, but then it's shocking if you have to pay for it yourself, and I've actually met alums who said that they left the field because they couldn't afford the software, which is really crazy if you're like an independent person and trying to start out as a designer and they migrated to something like Procreate.

Challenges and Innovations in Design Education

Speaker 2 14:48

I guess they could, but in terms of software for really publishing and doing multi-page documents and having access to all the fonts, it's still an ecosystem that's pretty important to how design is practiced in the world. Yeah, so there's. You know, there's always like new things to learn and I think one of the things that stays consistent is the principles of visual design Absolutely. And if you take a UX boot camp, you know this does not make you a visual design Absolutely, and if you take a UX boot camp, you know this does not make you a visual designer. It's like, very difficult to learn how to work with type and color and form and narrative and storytelling and the relationship between language and layout. You know that's very tough and that stuff doesn't change that much. You know there's different trends and styles but there's a lot of continuity, absolutely.

Speaker 1 15:51

So what are the limitations you're facing in your teaching?

Speaker 2 15:55

Well, I don't know all the new technologies. You know new technologies. So in my teaching I focus on the content, the message, the storytelling, the typography, creating ways in to typography for my students that are methodological. I teach design history and design theory where there the challenge is like opening up the discourse to decolonizing design, inclusive design, feminism and queer aesthetics and design things that were just not mentioned when I was a student. It was like there were certain things you had to know and they were all like the modernism and not opening it up. So as a graduate-level faculty member, I'm responsible for delivering that bigger discourse about design to students and engaging them in reading and critical thinking about the field, as well as helping them with their independent research and with learning some of the basics of graphic design. But I'm not teaching them Figma, of course. Of course, it's just not going to be my thing, you know.

Speaker 1 17:22

I'm talking more about limitations that you know. For example, if you could do anything, you know, if you had the magic wand, would you change anything in design education?

Speaker 2 17:31

I would make it free you would make it free.

Speaker 2 17:33

Yeah, of course, of course of course, you know Europe is way ahead with that, but not if you're an immigrant, you know. So, like people, oh, everything's free in Europe. Well, only if you're a certain kind of citizen. And in the U? S it's so privatized and it's so expensive and it is really not good. And we do have a public education system with very good universities, but they're still very expensive. Yeah, so that's the biggest limitation, and how to pay for it is not answered. We don't know how to do that.

Speaker 1 18:12

Absolutely. I'm more talking as well about structures or about anything in the way we're doing it, how we're delivering it, those limitations you know anything in the way we're doing it, how we're delivering it, those limitations.

Speaker 2 18:54

Well again, I teach in a graduate program and we have a lot of time to spend with our students, and I don't know how graduate courses are run in the UK or in Europe, but at my school it's very intimate. So we have, you know, a limited number of students in each class. You know 18 to 22 for the whole graduating group and we get to really work with them one-on-one a lot and in groups, you know, as a class and that is really wonderful we don't say here's a room, go make some graphic design. It's very structured and I'm very happy with that. Our students are graduating next week and I've had so many of our graduates come up to me and say this is the best thing I ever did. This is the best experience I've ever had.

Speaker 2 19:55

I feel like I didn't know anything before when I look back at who I was. Two years ago I didn't know anything and now I know. So that's pretty exciting, absolutely, and that's the kind of teaching that requires spending a lot of time with your students. You know which is expensive, right? You can't do that with 500 people. You can't do that online people. You can't do that online?

Speaker 1 20:23

I mean graphics, visual communication classes have always been small and they are small our schools want them to be bigger.

Speaker 2 20:34

You know, get more people in there and it doesn't work, you know absolutely, because then you don't have the time. Then, if you divide, the time you don't get to see anybody. Yeah, and what do you think the challenges are? You seem to be driving at an answer, so I'm curious.

Speaker 1 20:54

No, no, no, I'm not driving at any answer, I'm just trying to build. If we could build the ideal school, you know, of course is free is very important, but but of course you know, even the Bauhaus was not free when it, when it started, uh, so no, it certainly wasn't exactly. So I'm saying that if you had like, if you could build the ideal school without any limitations, would you? What would you change in the structures? I'm not driving at any answers, it's just.

Speaker 2 21:24

It's just all about removing the limitations I mean I think of the limitations in my own program. I wish there was more like open space for building things and you know we often think of design as something happening at a desk. You're at a desk, I'm at a desk Right, and it's very limiting. So rethinking, you know, a more Bauhaus idea of like a big workshop where people are making stuff, a big kitchen and you can be cooking and baking, that would be really cool. To be able to involve the community more would be interesting. I don't know quite how you would do that, but to make design programs somehow more permeable to people, less of a barrier, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 22:25

I mean, for me it's always interesting in various countries how good design is applied at a more universal level, because some countries, you know, we only see, for example, good design in the schools or in the exhibitions, but we don't see it in the products anymore. We don't see it in the some countries you go and they do have it.

Speaker 2 22:45

Oh yeah, you go to the Netherlands and everything is beautiful but they have no place to live. They have a housing crisis, so there is a big design problem.

Speaker 1 22:53

It's interesting how to democratize this more, because, because you know, okay, we can be getting into the buildings and seeing the beautiful design, but but it's only for us, or it should be for everyone. It's always been that good design should be for everyone and everyone should be exposed to it Fantastic. So how can our viewers and listeners find you?

Speaker 2 23:13

I'm on Instagram at Ellen Lupton and I have a lot of fun there doing little design lessons involving cookies and cakes and things in my house, so that's kind of fun. So follow me at Ellen Lupton and, of course, my books are available wherever books are sold, including my new book, thinking with Type third edition, but some of my other books are evergreen third edition, but some of my other books are evergreen. My book on design is storytelling, which came out in 2017, still really sells a lot of copies and has been translated into many languages. Or graphic design the new basics still in print, still very successful. A lot of these books are used as textbooks, which I'm really proud of, and sometimes it's just the faculty member has it. That's cool, like. However we can get the message out is fun.

Speaker 1 24:12

It's absolutely true. So what advice would you like to leave us with Anything we haven't told you? For teachers, for teachers, for students.

Embracing Curiosity for Design Inspiration

Speaker 2 24:22

For teachers. You know, one of the things that I learned is that you should always do the project. Like when I first started teaching, I came up with these sort of theoretical design briefs for my students and I wasn't really clear what I thought they would make. Like I had something in my mind but I had nothing to show them. Like here's what, here's where we're headed, and I didn't understand how someone would do the project. So when you're creating a new project for your students, I think it's really important to actually try it yourself and to understand what does it actually work? I find it really useful to show students examples of other student work. So if you develop a project over time, you can really improve it. I feel that the new generation especially, they really want to know, like, what's expected of them. They want to know how to do it, and so showing people examples is really helpful. And the other thing is like developing a vocabulary for talking about the work that is concrete and objective and that's really challenging.

Speaker 2 26:16

So, building into a project like criteria for success, so that when we talk about it it isn't vague and unclear to students how to succeed and how to improve their work. It's kind of old school, it's not very postmodern, it's more like here we're learning how to do something yeah, fantastic.

Speaker 1 26:27

What about your advice to students?

Speaker 2 26:29

well, to be curious, you know it's just so easy to go on pinterest or on instagram and see all the things that other designers are doing. So to be curious about history, to look at things that were created 50 years ago or in another culture, you know, go to museums, watch movies, look for inspiration, not just in like the latest piece of graphic design Curiosity. It's hard to be curious when you feel really stressed just to make something that looks good wonderful, wonderful, so thank you so much for coming thank you, I loved it keep in touch with the podcast and hopefully see you soon yeah, I love it.

Speaker 2 27:19

Thanks so much for the conversation. Bye.