Disruptive Creativity in the Graphic Design Classroom

By:
Professor Kim K Grable
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The work of the practicing graphic designer has become increasingly diverse, market driven and highly experimental. As the demands on designers as well as the tools for meeting those demands multiply, graphic design students are expected to master often obtuse digital disciplines while staying in touch with the fundamental premises informing their potential careers.

The pace of technology and the proliferation of mass-distributed authorship tools have changed the designer’s approach to the creative process. What changes to general design premises when virtually anyone can alter, customize, create and publish content? How do we approach new skill sets for idea generation, for powerful conceptualization, for creativity?

This paper explores how the creative process can shaken up, challenged, indeed, disrupted, by demonstrating to students in this model of the interactive classroom they can ‘learn’ key digital skills often without realizing it, and they can actually enjoy the process while producing startling, compelling results and artifacts of their disrupted creative process.


Keywords: Graphic Designer, Interactive Media, Creative Process, Digital Skills
Stream: Aesthetics, Design, Teaching and Learning, Other or Stream Unspecified
Presentation Type: Virtual Presentation in English
Paper: Disruptive Creativity in the Graphic Design Classroom

Professor Kim K Grable

Assistant Professor, School of Visual Arts, University of North Texas
USA

Kim Grable teaches graphic design and interactive media in the School of Visual Arts at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Although Grable began teaching within an emphasis of interactive media and communication design in 1996, and came to UNT as a visiting professor in 1999, she has continued to work professionally as a designer, producer, art director and as a business owner since 1988, earning a variety of media awards in the design and advertising industry, while working with a national/international client base.
To Grable, graphic design and advertising is increasingly less about creating object identity and more about creating
experiences...experiences that are immersive, interactive, physical and cognitive.
"What we know
about how people converse, negotiate and collaborate in their interactions with the world can
have implications for how designers construct specific interactive experiences for commerce,
learning, work, recreation, and decision making in and among various social and political
communities." Grable says. " I have found that teaching and introducing students to such an evolutionary process redefines excitement and challenge."

Ref: H06P0177