The Burden of Technology, 2011
When I was in school we had two computer labs, the one we could touch and the one we could not. The latter belonged to the animation students and lived in a closet-sized room down the hall from our lab. The designers’ lab was larger, brighter, and for its day, pretty well equipped. We had twenty-five or so macs, some sort of wax-based printer, and a black and white laser. Classes were not held in the lab, but in a room filled with drafting tables. Our work was done outside of class, or if you were lucky, on your computer at home. An additional luxury would have been a scanner or the newest technology, an inkjet printer.
There was a reason that most of my designs could be constructed with 8.5 x 11 inch sheets of paper. As students we had to be inventive not only with our materials, but more importantly with the use of our time. There were no print centers that we could access to print things out fifteen minutes before class. Each piece created was a work of art; a one-off exclusive design.
Even as I entered graduate school, a decade later, I again was faced with the challenge of producing exquisite works with limited availability to technology. The professors and the school demanded perfection from our work, pushed us to produce artifacts that were as close to perfection as possible. It was up to the student to determine the use of materials, locate the services, and work with those necessary to have the design produced while meeting those high expectations.
In retrospect, the often negatively discussed lack of printing technology available to the student, makes perfect sense. Make the student plan for production time by taking away the main resource needed for quick, and often poor, production while also demanding perfect work.
Both school's pedagogy, even when experienced ten years apart, taught their students the importance of innovative thinking when dealing with technology and design. They pushed us to think ahead, think about the next steps while we were still on step one. We were encouraged to be creative not only with our work, but with our time. As students we knew that we should not expect anything to be given to us, but that we must work to earn what we got. And even then we would be pushed harder to achieve the greatness that we were expected to achieve.
For a generation of design students and many more to come, having technology at their fingertips will become design’s greatest burden up to educators to solve.
As a professor myself, I feel that to properly educate these generations, we must remove them from the technology they have become accustomed. Make them feel uncomfortable. Put them in a class with no computers, but a syllabus full of work to complete. Encourage discussion and thought, controversy and clarity, doubt and inquiry. Take away the printing labs and the free printing. Force students to look beyond the traditional — the easy route — to include other methods. Let them learn from trial and error, cuts and bruises, mistakes and cost; let them learn from themselves.
I am not suggesting that the educator be removed from the equation, but merely rethink the use of technology in the classroom. What I did not mention is that although my graduate classes focused on discussion and thought, we often sat in a room filled with computers. We read from photocopies of books and articles our professors would find. After leaving class, research was not done solely on the computer but in the library. Technology was a means to an end, never the starting point.