The Design Division at CCA welcomes Geoff Kaplan as our second speaker in the 2022 Fall Design Lecture Series. These live lectures bring us together across time zones and disciplines as we meet leading designers, strategists, curators, and educators to speak about contemporary practice, discourse, and making.
Former MFA Design professor Geoff Kaplan returns to CCA to introduce his new book After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet, which traces the history of graphic design education as it moved from a craft-based making practice to a theory-based cultural practice. Kaplan shares his experience as a Cranbrook graduate student in the mid-1990s when he was exposed to the previous generation of semioticians and philosophers - Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes among others - who were deconstructing language and culture in their search for meaning in a postwar world. Cranbrook design professors and students alike mined semiotics to inform their design, deconstructing visual elements to get to the essence of graphic communication. Kaplan notes that the impact on pedagogy was long-lasting. Graphic esign pedagogy focused on toconceptual artistic practice, exploring theoretical approaches to image-making and ultimately questioning the meaning of communication itself.
Kaplan notes that the impact on pedagogy was long-lasting as graphic design education at the graduate level shifted into more of a conceptual artistic practice, exploring theoretical approaches to image-making and ultimately questioning the meaning of communication itself.
Kaplan’s continuously layered slide deck echoes the visual language of his website and is rich with visual puns and intentionally awkward juxtapositions that reflect the complexity of the theories he encountered. He shows how his bookshelf expanded with recommendations from mentors and peers who were also reading theory to inform their graphic design practices as they became increasingly conceptual and experimental. Today, he concludes, theory and practice are inextricably linked.
Authored by Mara Holt Skov
23 июл 2023
