Method Designing:Jessica Helfand

Method Designing: The Paradox of Modern Design Education

Jessica Helfand

• Konstantin Stanislavsky revolutionized the modern theatre by introducing a new system of training, in which the actor would draw on his or her own emotions to achieve a true understanding of a character.
• protested against the old manner of acting and against theatricality, against artificial pathos and declamation,"
• If you could achieve this honesty, your performance would resonate with a kind of pitch-perfect humanity and you had a far better chance of truly engaging your audience as a result
• the part that glorifies feeling and celebrates vanity; the part that amplifies personal memory and replays it as objective truth. It's extremely subjective and it's extremely seductive and more often than not, it's extremely misplaced as graphic design.
• The good news is that in an effort to produce designers who can think for themselves. -Such an emphasis on authorship is, by and large, a way to train young designers as thinkers — and not merely as service providers.
• At the same time, we encourage them to seek references beyond the obvious: the richness of their sources testifies to an ability to engage a larger universe, and their work benefits from locating itself along a trajectory they've chosen and defined for themselves.
• The bad news is that as a consequence of seeking validation elsewhere, there is an unusual bias toward false identity: so the design student, after looking at so much art, believes that s/he is making art. The design student, after considering so deeply the intangible forces framing the interpretation of visual form, comes to believe that the very act of interpretation is itself the form. This is where the method backfires so paradoxically: in being true to ourselves, we distance ourselves from a more universal truth.

Where did we go wrong? The problem with method designing is not our students' problem: it is our problem. Let's teach our students to keep asking difficult questions, to keep solving harder problems, to keep inventing better worlds and yes, to be true to themselves. As emissaries of visual communication, our audiences deserve nothing less. To better understand ourselves as authors requires a certain amount of self-reflection, but when did the mirror of autobiography become our canvas, our public lens to the world? If such self-love leads to more honest communication, to more novel form-making, to more meaningful solutions, then so much the better. But for designers, such self-knowledge can not be a method. It is simply a motive.