Scratch, Tear, Build, and get Dirty

Patricia Cué, Assistant Professor
School of Art, Design, and Art History / San Diego State University

MySpace and Flickr. This is the generation that experiences culture, their own and others, through the Internet. The world for these students has become an abstract and very accelerated blur, an entity made up more of information than realities.

In my teaching I have used an array of cross-cultural experiences that have given design students the possibility to get in touch with life, with their audiences, and to immerse themselves in new realities that have prompted them to rebuild their personal aesthetic and to develop a renewed sense of responsibility as designers.

I will show the process and outcome of the projects developed during a ten-week design trip to Cholula, Mexico in the winter of ’08. Through this experience, students explored the notion of “local design” and articulated how the design practice contributes to the formation of national cultural identity. Digging through garbage, tearing posters from walls, and having a lousy Internet connection brought up issues of colonization, language, history and ethics as genuine motivations to inform design.