Introduction
"Whatever you can do or dream, begin it."
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
First editions are special. Visit any auction house and you will find the bids leap when it comes to firsts of anything – be it books, comics, prints. There is no particular reason for this to be so. Just the symbolic importance we attach to beginnings. First editions are special because they signal a desire to march in a new and interesting direction.
This is an introduction to selected works representing the first graduates of the part-time and full-time MA Design Writing Criticism course at the London College of Communication – the students are a ‘first edition’, so to speak, and this publication is itself a first edition. It is divided into two main sections: abstracts introducing the Major Projects and selected writings with reprints of work published whilst on the course as well as examples of writing exercises. The intention of this publication is not only to provide an overview of writing on the course, but more importantly, to introduce graduates to their potential readers. Design writers and critics are integral to the development of the design profession as facilitators in shaping argu- ments and persuading their readership to move the discourse into new and unchartered territories. Critics have a responsibility to be demanding of their subjects in order to foster evolving practices and to generate a response and reaction from their audience.
When our programme began in 2008, Charlotte West wrote for ICON, that such MA courses ‘will soon be training an army of critics and equipping them with the writing weaponry required for intelligent inquiry into all things design.’ Whilst the first and formal phase of the ‘training’ is now complete, it will inevitably take time to be able to assess what kind of impact graduates will have upon design criticism, but also the practice of design. However, some members of this first edition have already proven their worth on that score.
MA Design Writing Criticism sets out to provide a framework for critical thinking and making with an accompanying ‘tool-kit’ with which students are able to locate their own voices as emerging design writers and critics. It seeks to develop postgraduates whose understanding of design writing and criticism enables them to become influential and useful practitioners. The course takes as its starting point the way in which text, image and a combination thereof, may be used to carry a ‘point of view’. This has been achieved in part, through the examination of conventional written forms of design journalism and criticism and the less traditional forms of the ‘new visual journalism’.
These graduates have come from a rich and diverse mix of backgrounds, approaches and perspectives which have directly informed the discourse of this emerging field of study. The broadly defined categories undertaken in their final Major Projects demonstrates the diversity of approaches to writing where ‘design’ is always at its core: the exploration of modes of writing such as those found within humour, the act of walking, and reclaiming ‘lost’ voices; revisiting writing conventions including captioning as well as material and linguistic devices; revisiting criticism as it is currently positioned in the fields of fashion, architecture, and more recently, videogaming and equally, perusing new avenues for criticism as practiced in the digital realm building upon co-participatory storytelling and hacking techniques.
And finally, the LCC community of design writers and critics is extended to the new cohort of students for 2011 who, currently at the start of their course, have chosen to raise questions as part of a continuing debate begun by the 'First Edition'.
Professor Teal Triggs, Course Director
Anna Gerber, Tutor
Dr Ian Horton, Tutor
