Summary of text
Samantha Lawrie is Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Auburn University. Her article English Language, appeared in: Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education Volume 6 Number 3: and the intended audience is art and design students in higher education.
This journal informs the reader of Lawrie’s understanding of the meaning of what the ‘direct experience’ is, and the issues and themes dealt with are designed to inform the reader of the author’s proclivity towards a return to the ‘direct experience’. The real, physical, lived world as apposed to their present understanding of graphic design which is a conceptually restricted, technology led way of thinking. Lawrie’s argument centralises itself around contemporary inabilities to embrace and Interact with human senses due to the interference of technology and the multitude of its hybrids. Lawrie also argues that graphic designs practitioner’s way of thinking in the contemporary world is also constricted, business focused, and biased towards a world of wasteful consumerism.
In my opinion, this journal is an academic article as Lawrie uses many examples of critical theorists essays from, Eisner, Hollein, Descartes and Merleau-Ponty, to clarify her understanding and endorse her arguments. These examples use post-structuralist and postmodernist theories to underpin their arguments towards a return to the direct experience and the reader requires academic understanding of these theories in order to decipher the text.
Lawrie’s belief is that communication produces interaction and design relies on the complexities of reaction and interaction, and is not purely conceptual or learned.
Lawrie has attempted to apply the teachings of these theorists in her own classroom in an effort to apply ‘direct experience’. Lawrie’s aim is to re-educate and inform her students through exploration of the real, physical and lived world, in contrast to the explanation, information and technological approach.
Lawrie attempts to deal with issues such as deconstruction, analysis and conceptual development through education and goes into great detail to explain the synaesthetic nature of perception and how we have unlearned to see, hear and feel.
Critical analysis of text
As a designer and educator Lawrie’s objective in this journal is to not only teach the importance of communicating between business and consumer but also between groups of scientists, activists, citizens and other social groups. She stresses the importance of graphic designers being mediators between human relationships.
The works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2007) are drawn upon to emphasis the, ‘something more’ that is vibrated and resonated through work generated from a willingness to experience through exploring the senses rather than solely from hierarchy and colour. Lawrie believes that the personal sympathetic touch gives ‘something more’. The pre-occupation with concept due to the experience of communication and language dulls our senses to the surrounding world.
The complexity of culture, language and education are outlined as encouraging linear mathematical thinking, which is in contrast to the life world of creativity.
Lawrie’s quest is to identify why her students behaviour and preoccupation with
computers and technical gadgets, has caused a lack of passion with form, ideas
and experience. The author believes this has created an uncertainty, concerning the purpose of graphic design, and the desire to make a difference in the world, within the work of her students.
Lawrie recognized the previously mentioned critical theorists and writers that have embraced the subject of ‘the direct experience’ as the main protagonists that may hold the answers to a shift back towards the real, physical, sensible, lived world that allows design to evolve in a more natural self-generating way. The diversion away from the real world appears to be Lawrie’s main trepidation and Lawrie shows a malevolent attitude towards technology because it isolates the student and designer from the real, physical and the visual.
An example Lawrie uses, the ‘TransForms’ exhibition, to underpin that ‘direct experience’ and that its downfall and lack of use had been recognized as early as 1976. The cultural trend of wasteful consumerism and technological malaise was being challenged and criticized as far back as then.
Lawrie qualifies that experience is active and personal as opposed to the conceptual, passive and generic origins that are reflected through the technically produced cold, bland, dispassionate and shallow. Lawrie maintains the importance as an educator that the world of ‘direct experience’ deserves considerable exploration. She backs up her argument by suggesting that through ‘direct experience’ there is to some degree at least, an element unmediated by cultural and conceptual conditioning.
Through reference to the texts of Hollein and Nelson (1976), Lawrie infers that through our basic human understanding of the real, physical and lived world the design world interacts with “Whether on a primitive level or highly sophisticated one, design – and designs – evolve very often in a self-generating way, instigated by demand or desire” (Hollein 1976).
Hollein and Nelson contrast experience with terms such as ‘didactic’, ‘explanation’, and ‘information’. This suggests that experience is active and personal.
In my opinion this is a cathartic and important expression and Lawrie further qualifies texts by Maurice Merleau-Ponty who developed an extensive theory of the direct experience in his book, Phenomenology of Perception (2007). Merleau-Ponty describes that it is the interaction between the human being and the living world that allows graphic design to flourish and connect with its intended audience.
Lawrie moves on to explain how she is drawn to graphic design that resonates within her “sympathetic vibration, a bodily response and not just the hierarchy of information and eye-catching colour or careful use of typography”.
The author attempts to enlighten her audience and further pushes the question of how she can get the message across that analysis and conceptual development can only be informed by an emphasis on form, exploration, mood and feeling.
The ideas Lawrie explains were new to her, and in her quest to understand how to get the message of the ‘direct experience’ and the ‘something more’ across to the students when she discovered the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and others that she had acquired a vocabulary in which to frame the problem.
Illustration 1. (The example above By Katherine McCoy, Is a poster for the renowned postmodern, Cranbrook Academy of Art, “The Graduate Program in Design”. Undoubtedly a fine example of “the direct experience” through the use of deconstructive tactics). (Poynor, 2003, pp.50)
In the pursuit of ‘something more’ Lawrie outlines a problem that is, a graphic designer is primarily concerned with only the visual. For this reason in this essay themes by Merleau-Ponty such as sensory perception, ‘direct experience’ and the use of our senses are presented to be far more important than reflective analysis and the author provides a relevant extract By David Abram from his book The Spell of the Sensuous.
According to Abram and Merleau-Ponty, we are unable to recognise the synaesthetic nature of how we perceive, we have become estranged from our direct experience (Abram 1996) no longer are we able to see, hear and feel (Merleau-Ponty). In my opinion this is pertinent within the framework of this journal.
The issue Lawrie finds most complex is how culture and language shared by communities influence those members within the community to how they perceive their visual world. This theme is particularly recognised by the author in indigenous cultures and how they visualise the world, in contrast to our mechanistic, scientific teaching and its influence on our contact with the real living world.
Using the authors understanding of the teachings of Descartes the mind is disembodied and the essence of human being has nothing to do with our bodies. Descartes believes our popular culture and educational structures disassociate embodied perception and continue to satisfy our needs and not the emotional aesthetic in our culture. This, in my opinion, could be considered to be a postmodernist theory because it emphasises the influence of popular culture and educational institutions, which is, recognised as postmodern theory.
Lawrie then moves on to inform her audience through the teachings of Elliot Eisner that schools emphases restricted thinking and tend to mediate by words and numbers, although many of the most productive ideas are non-verbal. This artistic mode of thought Eisner believes is neglected due to the lack of good quality education within the arts in American schools. Lawrie suggests that these modes of thought are latent at best as education moves forward ever more detached from creativity and intuition through the isolation and non-reliance on imagination due to technology.
Lawrie further argues that due to the concern of communication, graphic design is increasingly more and more influenced by the visual. This anxiety Lawrie explains, comes out of the lack of understanding of the importance of meaning that comes directly from experience, the ‘direct experience’; communication can come only from the ability of the intended audience already having a concrete experience of what the design intends to communicate. Designers, Lawrie implies, must be able to adopt and understand the meanings already experienced by those we intend upon communicating with. She further qualifies that for the last twenty years designers have tried to build a theory based on the post-structuralist theories of language, thus privileging them to be the producers of meaning. Lawrie uses the text of Conklin to qualify this as she writes; Because the signification of a text ‘cannot be resolved in advance… what matters is not the intent of the…source…but the interpreter’s meaning at the point of application…to a concrete context (Conklin 2006). Convention, Lawrie adds, within American graphic design is aligned with the interest of business, and it is the author’s belief that a better balance of communication is paramount.
Samantha Lawrie uses many examples and touches on many critical theorists texts to underpin her argument. There are many themes Lawrie engages with in her quest to find a better balance between conceptual thinking and the ‘direct experience’. Lawries vocation is that the reader is informed of the importance of keeping an open mind and he or she is capable of understanding the importance of the real, physical and lived world.
Word count: 1611
Bibliography:
Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education Volume 6 Number 3. Article English language, Lawrie, 2008
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty, 2007
The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram, 1996
Quotations
Man Transforms, Hollein, 1976, p.12
Lon Fuller’s Phenomenology of Language, Conklin, 2006, p. 117
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