Week 3: Personal Resources

Nontsikelelo Mutiti on the “Specificity of Locality” in Graphic Design
- “Education [in Zimbabwe] is problematic because we learn the Western canon—the way that the Western eye has been looking at our geography, or our language, or history. There’s always a hierarchy among our way, our being, our language, and what’s been given to us.”
- “I think about a book like Philip B. Meggs’ publication—it was produced by the Department of Education and is now a household name. It has one instance of an African work, by Africans, which is hieroglyphics. There’s nothing contemporary. And how many years of scholarship has gone into creating the foundation for him to be able to feel authoritative enough to write that narrative?”
- “The way we teach graphic design is we’ve tried to have this “global” arc of what has been happening in the discipline. This idea of the global has never been all encompassing, nor has it referenced how motifs, trends, and visual ideas have circulated since before colonialism and because of it. This allows us to miss out on how important spaces outside of Europe and North America have been to shaping our aesthetic world.”
  - Questions: who is top of hierarchy in graphic design? Why is Western design culture seen as aspiration to Chinese designers?

Audience vs Consumer

What we produce (flyers, books, websites) is distinct to our role as designers. Mediators, listeners, collaborators