The paper discusses a globally networked learning project with graphic design students from Mexico, the United States of America, and South Africa. Globally networked learning (GNL) aims for cost-effective internationalization strategies where digital platforms replace physical student exchanges. The project was designed according to Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) principles, which included ice-breaker activities at the beginning of the project and reflection activities at the end.

Following a query in 2018 by the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) alumni office to establish in which industries or companies UJ alumni were predominantly employed, information was gathered by members of the department of Graphic Design and data accumulated on a large number of alumni from the Department of Graphic Design.

Graphic design as an academic and research practice is relatively young when compared to the established disciplines such as education, psychology, medicine, and history. It was only community-type colleges and technical institutions that offered design as a vocational trade. Universities in South Africa started to offer design in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is only in the last two decades that we have seen design research output in South Africa. The relatively low number of international design journals when compared to education, for example, attest to the young scientific discipline of research in design.

This paper is a supervisor reflection on theory selection for research design in design-orientated research. Selection and deployment of theory in a research design can powerfully affect what design research achieves. The research design of a graphic design master’s dissertation targeting ‘research for design’ illustrates this. The view of research design discussed in the paper is not typological or logistical, but instead one where relations between research components are interactive and emergent during the course of the study.

This paper compares selected analyses of the likely sustainability of society and the factors affecting it, including social, environmental, economic, and political. It examines the likely effects of these factors on South Africa, including possible interactions between them, cumulative effects and feedback loops. The literature increasingly suggests that these effects are likely to be extreme for the South African environment, society and economy, to say nothing of the rest of the world, within the working lives of current or near-future students, i.e. the next forty to fifty years.

This study expands the concept of cosmopolitan localism by Manzini (2010), which supports the approach of contextualised design solutions and not necessarily a global approach due to context differences. The research adopted an ethnographic approach for studying emerging sustainable graphic design practices with the aid of Sustainability Development Analytical Grid and Activity Theory. The results show the practice of sustainability through the aid of Ghana Food and Drugs Authority and Ghana Environmental Protection Agency who checked the content and materials of graphic design products for conformity to set standards.

Abstract

Abstract

This paper considers the discrepancies in the visual literacy of students prior to entering spatial design education at a public higher-educational institution. Because the school subjects Visual Arts and Engineering Graphics and Design provide feeder skills to visual literacy, students with exposure to these subjects tend to have higher visual literacy than students who are unlikely to have received exposure to these subjects. This is problematic because Visual Arts and Engineering Graphics and Design are not on offer in all public South African schools.

Although calls to decolonise education can be seen as threats to replace existing curricula they can also be seen as an opportunity to scrutinise what is valued in design education and how this might be impacted by calls to decolonise. In this paper, which makes use of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (Maton 2010a, 2014) to identify the underlying knowledge-knower structure of graphic design assessment, the significance of a specialist gaze for disciplines such as design is outlined. The gaze (Maton 2014) provides knowers with access to the valued knowledge of the discipline and in disciplines such as graphic design is essential to being able to recognise good and bad design and to make the decisions required in the design process.

This paper suggests two possible approaches to researching and conceptualizing aspects of a de-colonized design education for Graphic Design/Visual Communication Design (VCD). Concepts from Post-colonial theory, such as Ngugi wa Thiongo’s decolonization of the mind, Afrocentrism, Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, and appropriation, along with aspects of Social Identity theory are drawn on as means of investigating these approaches.