“Audience, Context, AND FORM… oh my!”

Marty Lane & Rebecca Tegtmeyer
Masters of Graphic Design, North Carolina State University

“Audience, Context, AND FORM… oh my!”

The graduate program at NC State is a two-year program, with a three-year track available for those students who do not have an accredited degree in Graphic Design. The two-years, or four semesters, are categorized by umbrella topics: Design as a Cultural Artifact, New Information Environments, Design as a Cognitive Artifact, and the Final Project.

We recently finished our first year in the semesters Design as a Cultural Artifact and New Information Environments (NEI). During the NEI semester we focused on specific self-chosen learning communities. NC State supports projects that are not “self-serving”, in that they facilitate some change or shift greater than the artifact itself. This is not to say that we don’t love form and value the artifacts themselves. We do. We just believe that all form should be reflective of specific situations. This can only occur when we understand the conditions in which the artifacts will be used.

Working respectively with the learning communities of Parents of Autistic Children and the Slow Food Movement, we spent a semester researching the community members and their context. We constructed the conditions for an interactive experience, utilizing three sub-projects: community identification, exchange, and collective task. All of the projects were to support the community.

Our class of six all came from backgrounds in print design. This has set the stage for a great opportunity to explore and push what we view as interactive and not fall into the tropes of anything we have done before. All of our studio work is supported by a seminar class. In seminar, we are encouraged to make conceptual and theoretical connections to our self-driven studio projects. Each semester there is a great deal of writing done, with one major research paper of our choosing. For many of us, improving our critical writing skills is one of our major goals.

Research, writing, and design education are some of the main reasons that we chose to attend NC State. We would like to be on the MFA panel to discuss these ideas and the related work.