Dr. Lin Sun
PhD, Graphic Communication Management of Technology, New York University
Associate Professor, Department of Art, Clark Atlanta University
LSUN@CAU.EDU

 

I have been blessed to be taught by excellent educators during my undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral studies. Among them some are international recognized scholars who made me believe that teaching is the most effective means of fostering artistic potentials and sharing knowledge. Education is the catalyst to transform the society.

Teaching should be personal encounters between the teacher and the learner. Overall the process rather than the result is the most important in teaching. While I expect to see the learning outcomes align with my expectations, I am more pleased to witness how the driving force within a talented individual could successfully gear her or him through countless trials and errors and reach the ultimate goal. I am also encouraged by my facilities for that person during the process, which could stimulate, provoke, and nurture deeper thinking abilities.

For me, the big “Knowledge” does not simply refer to the mastery of the subject. It includes understanding the student(s). One lesson I learned from my first-semester teaching at New York University was that knowing the subject well doe not necessarily lend it to good teaching. Another one is that teaching effectiveness is built on my own enthusiasm for the contents. With a natural energetic presence in front of my class, I truly want them to share my passion in the subject. A teacher’s character is most reflected in the classroom environment he or she creates. Patience is another important ingredient. My students are never afraid of posing questions as they know I am a reliable resource to whom they can turn.
I further illustrate my teaching philosophy in the following aspects: student-centerness, teaching efficacy, teach for tomorrow-sustainable graphic design, and new media design.
 
A. Student-Centerness
I relate to students as fellow designers, who, in their pursuit of academic and professional development, strive to establish intellectual dialogues about their discoveries. I realize that my role is more a facilitator than a teacher. Placing my students’ academic needs in the first place always safeguards such a perspective. It suggests a spirit of self-explorations in studio and further mentorship outside the classroom. I promote a classroom of appreciation, cooperation, respect, and support by being sensitive to students’ responses to my teaching methods and pace.

Student-centerness also means giving students an opportunity to try and to fail, and to try again, until the best way is revealed for them to find out about their inner beings Being receptive to individual learning needs, I always justify my teaching plan to cater to students’ just-in-time requests, especially when I identify possible hindrance in their acquisition of course content or during the creative process. I find that offering this flexibility helps establish an artistic community in the classroom.

Placing students in the center also enables me to think about their development over a long term. Being active in professional development activities in the area of visual communication, I found that the creative practice of visual design has changed significantly over the past decade, and there has been an increasing demand for technical and theoretical proficiency in the field of screen-based media among students. Industries are seeking talented and skilled minds who can develop advertising ideas and produce designs that sell products or services. It is with this continuous mindset that I took a myriad of the main topics into my graphic design courses that examines various methods, problems, and issues in screen-based media design, such as the web design, digital animation, and interactive multimedia, in addition to the traditional design methodologies in printing and broadcasting.

Finally, placing students in the center means knowing them, their academic abilities, personal learning styles, and individual concerns. Art foundation I is a departmental core course with students from different academic backgrounds as in fashion design, visual merchandising, fine art, advertising design, and other disciplines. I find it challenging to relate the same concepts to such a diversity. I usually ask my students to fill out a questionnaire during the first day of class, which not only helps me know better about their objectives of learning, but also inspires me to find the most appropriate teaching methods. I like to help students with class materials in and out of the class and would try to be there for them as a friend when they needed advice. In evaluation forms, students gave me good comments and said I was always willing to help.
 
B. Teaching Efficacy
Graphic designers communicate visually. Yet before the effectiveness is ever to be proven, the effort is firstly problem-solving. Design is the deliberate act of shaping objects to a purpose. Good designers carry out a structure with functions satisfying the original purpose(s), convey messages interpretable and acceptable by the culture, and are continuously evaluated by established arguments. To become such a one, an individual needs to be trained with many cases of ill-defined situations confined by nonnegotiable constraints. As always, ill-defined and complex problem-solving is logical, systematical, and intellectual, integrating an enormous body of expertise with intuition.

Digital technology certainly aids in the development of such an expertise for more and more designers; learning in visual communication also enables us to understand how human individuals perceive and respond to visual representations; creativity, whether as the extraordinary gift or the daily cognitive ability, serves good results without doubt. As an educator in visual communication, I believe the following components feature the expertise of graphic design: first, an organized  body of knowledge, which includes factorial information and heuristic procedures, and tacit or implicit knowledge in designing. Within the realm of contemporary graphic design, it is represented by a combination of design foundations as well as computer technology expertise; second, the ability of creative thinking; and third, the excellent management skill to gear the creative process. Therefore, addressing all these three aspects – design and media knowledge, creative thinking, and project management skills – lays the foundation for my teaching efficacy. I identify the following higher-order cognitive and meta-cognitive development of expertise as the crucial standards for successful learning outcomes: on the design level, students become creative authors with a well-developed knowledge of visual styles and semiotics, being fluent with a variety of visual concepts and graphic design standards and typographic and layout principles and strategies, and are able to reproduce visual styles with relative ease. From a technical perspective, they demonstrate expert performance in terms of the ability to identify new media, choose among software, devise optimal plans to execute computer-based design tasks within programs, and develop heuristic strategies and controlling methods to cope with complications in using the programs in an often non-linear design environment.
 
C. Teach for Tomorrow: Sustainable Graphic Design
As a country producing the largest amount of graphic and visual products in the world, USA shoulders a huge responsibility to reduce the adverse impact on natural resources, cycles, human health, and the environment. In the artistic area of sustainable design, agents of vision must be encouraged to create changes towards alternative solutions by challenging the precedents. Since 2010, I have gradually incorporated into my classes discussions about the application of sustainability principles to graphic design. Through these dialogues, I encouraged students to consider the environmental impacts of graphic design products (such as packaging, printed materials, publications, etc.) throughout a life cycle, and possible techniques, processes, and materials that will help reduce the detrimental environmental, social, and economic impact of our designs.

I also believe in the power of sustainable thinking, which stands against the current global social emphasis on utilitarianism and consumerism. In stead of fostering designs that satisfy sensual pleasures, I hope to promote design works that relate to the cultivation of higher human faculties. As an artistic form, design interestingly carries dualism between two directions: on one hand, it carries purposiveness with the tendency to satisfy needs, on the other, it comes from the designer’s own critical thinking, creativity, and aesthetic sensitivity. As a result, we must be aware of setting up well-balanced dialogue between the outside (clients’ needs) and the inside (the designer) during the creative process.

Therefore, rather than training students to follow a career path of consumerism, I believe that design education should instead facilitate students to become broader visual thinkers and problem solvers. I make frequent use of social and cultural related projects in my courses to generate debates and encourage critical thinking skills. For example, a recent project in my graphic design class is a visual system design under the theme of text messaging. I have found that such projects can always encourage students to bring unique perspectives and insights to contemporary problems and stimulate more creative design solutions. Through discussion and dialogue, I greatly enjoyed helping students see the relevance of design in their own lives. My goal in the classroom is to create a fertile environment to explore the various social and cultural issues and provide students with creative understanding and tools to develop appropriate design solutions. Because of my keen interest in contemporary issues, I have also found this teaching approach allows me to be more creative as well, which is something I find highly motivating.

 
D. New Media Design
As a new media artist, I view computer technology not only a provider of design tools, but also an intellectual partner that facilitates an active thinking process. As a tool, it is an agent that shows the difference between experts and novices; as an intellectual partner, it shapes our perception, senses, and language on a daily basis, and therefore lends to creating systems that work with the cognitive parameters and even advanced reasoning capabilities of the designer. I was hired to teach new media design in addition to art foundations. Adobe Creative Suite is the primary software I teach my students for their digital production. I inform my students about current outlets of technological resources for discussing new media arts: professional online databases on design resources, academic on-campus library journals, videos, on-campus technolgoy, online design tools (color, fonts) and display tools (flickr), local projects (FLUX) and venues for exhibitions.

Although I truly believe in the important role of digital technology in the design profession, I do not think the design process should rely solely on technology, which often encourages students to disconnect themselves from the real world. This is especially true for graphic design majors. I believe that a human-centered technology, rather than a machine-centered orientation, is imperative to be advocated in a visually learning environment. Good design starts from thorough consideration of the needs of the learner and learning goal. Multimedia design and development, computational and networked media, can become cognitive artifacts for humans, and can then help users understand the design and process of educational goals and objectives when applied to different domains of cognitive structures.

Therefore, students’ interaction with technology in my classes should be second nature, which should be carefully shaped until they have been exposed to the general conceptual framework and formal parameters of new media arts. The use of technology should always be purposeful and based on observations of the social systems it represents.

In my teaching, students must undergo a deep exploration of the visual language, make their own discoveries about the ideas, before they develop their own expressiveness using a medium. I make efforts to help an individual form his or her artistic sensibility, unique perception, personal interests, personal language. All my courses are framed on a knowledge/research base, and I have used a blend of lecture, demonstrations, in-class workshops, group discussions and critiques to encourage students to develop their own creative practice in ways that will enhance their problem-solving skills. I allow students to brainstorm outside their skills and discipline as we strategize together how to implement such projects. Traditional techniques and hand-crafted experimentations, such as sketching, collage, cut paper, book making, and photography are often utilized in my classes to lead students toward more creative and unexpected solutions. In addition, a process book is suggested for every student in my courses to document their creative process and capture their intuitive thoughts. I often find that new ideas emerge when students have more incentive to experiment with design materials and process.

 

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Advertising Design Curriculum Design

The following pedagogical design has been implemented in the four core courses of Advertising Design track: Art Direction & Design I, II, III, and IV.

CART301 Art Direction & Design, Level One:

step one: graphic design history

step two: design basics

step three: introduction to typography

This 3-credit course focuses on the visual language of type/letterforms and its applications from the tradition of print design to the frontier of web typography. Students work with type as a stand-alone visual language, and also learn how to incorporate type successfully with other visual elements. It is a specialized course to produce design with type as the primary element.

 

CART302 Art Direction & Design, Level Two:

step four: Layout

step five: Color Theory

step six: Advanced Typography

This course introduces students to graphic design as a form of visual communication through the organization of various visual vocabularies – type, image, form, and color. Students will learn the basics of how to control what people see when they look at created artwork. The study and application of graphic composition skills, page layout and design skills, headline and caption writing skills, and advertising are emphasized. Projects explore design processes in two and three dimensions, visual identity and communication, thematic structure and hierarchy, creative problem solving, and business graphic design practices.

• Advanced Typography

Students will advance their knowledge of typography through experimenting typographic design with applied graphic design elements and principles. They will learn advanced typographic theory and vocabulary, will display a working knowledge of the concepts by completing computer-based typographic studies. They will also learn advanced typographic tools available in vector-based graphic design programmes, Adobe Illustrator.

 

CART401 Art Direction & Design, Level Three:

step seven: Photography in graphic design

step eight: Logotype design

step nine: Design system I

This course is the third core course for Advertising Design. It is designed to be an advanced experience in graphic design. Students must have a working knowledge of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. In addition to learning new technical applications the student will also be able to show the development of visual ideas beyond introductory attempts from concept through completion of actual projects. Emphasis is placed on utilizing critical thinking skills in content development. Each project will demonstrate not only technical ability, but also thoughtfulness/reflection tied to project goals. There will be four main components in this course:

• Photography

This class does not teach photography. However, students will have the chance to apply what they learned in Photography I to shoot and post-produce graphics as a graphic designer with Adobe Photoshop.

• Logotype Design

In this part, students use tools to create typographic systems and dynamic logotypes. They will be introduced to the creative process and will learn how to use it to create, analyze, and manage concepts. They will learn how to manipulate letter-forms to create legible, well crafted, dynamic and meaningful word-marks. In the meanwhile.

• Design System I

Students will show a command for design principles by creating a graphic interpretation of a chosen subject. They will illustrate with vector-based software to develop their marks, through a creative process that plays in concept and design.

 

CART402 Art Direction & Design, Level Four:

step ten: Design system II

step eleven: Advertising design

step twelve: Preparing for the job

This advanced course is designed for building up students’ in-depth experience in print media production as well as web publishing. It provides students with opportunities to work with advanced technology, strengthen their analytical and problem-solving skills, improve their visual communication skills, and manage design responsibility. Students receive guided instruction in the fundamentals of business graphic and print design, printing technologies, website design and production, basic programming, basic animation and motion design, multimedia design, advertising, budget management, and organizational skills.