Abstract
The core units in the Visual Culture course at the School of Visual Arts, Edith Cowan University, draw heavily upon key concepts in post-colonial theory. Particularly the premises of the social and political inequality of much cultural exchange, and the ultimate impossibility of cross-cultural understanding. These are considered essential for practice in a multi-culture such as Australia’s. Despite this contextualisation, during a final year professional practice tutorial, a group of students dealing with Aboriginal copyright law argued that cultural appropriation was simply a matter of formal stylistic borrowing. They proposed that designing was an unproblematic union of expression and technical means, seemingly jettisoning notions of the social and contingent nature of meaning in visual culture. When confronted with the reality of Bhabha’s “unmanned, antagonistic, and unpredictable sites of cultural contestation” it appeared some of our students retreated into the disconnected world of specialist activity. This paper proposes that whilst students could theoretically identify cultural transgression and its consequences, when faced with it intruding into their own lives they had no ethical framework by which to negotiate with it. It was evident that a sizeable minority of the student body saw the space offered to the individual by the subjectivities of post-structuralism as one in which all readings are of equal value. The concern is to develop an ethical design education, but how far does one educate the design student to become ethically self-reflexive (to use Giddens’ term) before substantial parts of the design profession’s practice become seen as ethically unsustainable?
Citation
Crouch, C. (2002) The study of design and the ethically reflexive student, in Durling, D. and Shackleton, J. (eds.), Common Ground - DRS International Conference 2002, 5-7 September, London, United Kingdom. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2002/researchpapers/21
The study of design and the ethically reflexive student
The core units in the Visual Culture course at the School of Visual Arts, Edith Cowan University, draw heavily upon key concepts in post-colonial theory. Particularly the premises of the social and political inequality of much cultural exchange, and the ultimate impossibility of cross-cultural understanding. These are considered essential for practice in a multi-culture such as Australia’s. Despite this contextualisation, during a final year professional practice tutorial, a group of students dealing with Aboriginal copyright law argued that cultural appropriation was simply a matter of formal stylistic borrowing. They proposed that designing was an unproblematic union of expression and technical means, seemingly jettisoning notions of the social and contingent nature of meaning in visual culture. When confronted with the reality of Bhabha’s “unmanned, antagonistic, and unpredictable sites of cultural contestation” it appeared some of our students retreated into the disconnected world of specialist activity. This paper proposes that whilst students could theoretically identify cultural transgression and its consequences, when faced with it intruding into their own lives they had no ethical framework by which to negotiate with it. It was evident that a sizeable minority of the student body saw the space offered to the individual by the subjectivities of post-structuralism as one in which all readings are of equal value. The concern is to develop an ethical design education, but how far does one educate the design student to become ethically self-reflexive (to use Giddens’ term) before substantial parts of the design profession’s practice become seen as ethically unsustainable?