Abstract
As a professor of rhetoric at an art and design college in the United States, I am keenly interested in philosophies of design education and their relationships to philosophies of rhetorical education. Clearly teachers of rhetoric and of design have much to learn from one another, yet we rarely interact. One way in which design and rhetoric should be informing one another is through the related concepts of branding, familiar to designers; and ethos, well-known to rhetoricians. I know from faculty colleagues in design how important branding is in design curricula. Students learn the value, as Richard Buchanan puts it, of designing a product whose voice people are willing to bring into their lives. Branding has obvious connections to rhetorical ethos, and in the general education classroom I have used Artistotle’s tripartite concept of ethos as the audience’s perception of the speaker’s phronesis (prudence), arête (virtue), and eunoia (goodwill) to deepen our discussions of both ethos and branding, particularly focusing on the ethical dimensions of both. This paper offers a survey of literature on rhetorical ethos, practical classroom strategies for teaching ethos to designers, and commentary on the possible productive relationship between teaching rhetorical ethos alongside branding.
Keywords
ethos, rhetoric and design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2013.042
Citation
Engbers, S.K.(2013) Branded: the sister arts of rhetoric and design, in Reitan, J.B., Lloyd, P., Bohemia, E., Nielsen, L.M., Digranes, I., & Lutnæs, E. (eds.), DRS // Cumulus: Design Learning for Tomorrow, 14-17 May, Oslo, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2013.042
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Branded: the sister arts of rhetoric and design
As a professor of rhetoric at an art and design college in the United States, I am keenly interested in philosophies of design education and their relationships to philosophies of rhetorical education. Clearly teachers of rhetoric and of design have much to learn from one another, yet we rarely interact. One way in which design and rhetoric should be informing one another is through the related concepts of branding, familiar to designers; and ethos, well-known to rhetoricians. I know from faculty colleagues in design how important branding is in design curricula. Students learn the value, as Richard Buchanan puts it, of designing a product whose voice people are willing to bring into their lives. Branding has obvious connections to rhetorical ethos, and in the general education classroom I have used Artistotle’s tripartite concept of ethos as the audience’s perception of the speaker’s phronesis (prudence), arête (virtue), and eunoia (goodwill) to deepen our discussions of both ethos and branding, particularly focusing on the ethical dimensions of both. This paper offers a survey of literature on rhetorical ethos, practical classroom strategies for teaching ethos to designers, and commentary on the possible productive relationship between teaching rhetorical ethos alongside branding.