Jonathan Baldwin
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Jonathan Baldwin (1970 — ) is a British writer and academic who specialises in visual culture and education.[citation needed]
[edit] Early life
Baldwin was born in York in 1970. In his youth, Baldwin attended college with, and was close friends with, TV presenter Richard Hammond.[citation needed]
His early career began at Wolseley Centers[citation needed] as an in-house graphic designer, following which he moved into further and higher education, firstly at Reading College and School of Arts & Design where he quickly became programme leader of several courses,[citation needed] then at Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College in Epsom (now part of the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester). After four years at the University of Brighton he is currently teaching and researching at the University of Dundee.
[edit] Academic career
His views on design education and the role of design in popular culture are often controversial[citation needed] but have attracted a large following, particularly in the USA.[citation needed] As well as writing articles, conference papers and a blog, Baldwin co-authored More Than A Name with Melisa Davis and Visual Communication with Lucienne Roberts.[1] He has also worked as a consultant to UK universities, running workshops on teaching methods and advocating new and student-centred teaching methods.[citation needed]
In criticising the tendency of academics to be the most conservative group of people he has ever known, Baldwin wrote in 2004 that "academics should be willing to change their own minds before they can hope to change others'".[citation needed]
A fierce critic of design for designers, and rejecting the idea that graphic design is art, he coined the term 'designerwank' in 2005[citation needed] to describe the activity of narcissistic design aimed at self-aggrandisement.
Baldwin has been outspoken on issues of teaching graphic design, advocating courses that emphasise the intellectual breadth of the discipline, especially the cultural, social and political effects. He has also argued that many traditional methods of teaching design are no longer relevant in an age when the majority of students either do not want to, or never will, become designers - he believes much-loved methods such as 'crits' only serve to reinforce hierarchical relationships between students and tutors but have no demonstrable educational advantage.
In October 2005 he presented a paper at the New Views conference on Graphic Design History, attracting a great deal of interest from fellow academics[citation needed] in his techniques for delivering historical and critical studies to practice-based students. However, at the same conference, Baldwin was publicly criticised by Rick Poynor for his belief that the canon of great designers was counter-productive in terms of student learning, and that design history needs to be focussed on cultural and social history rather than art history.
Using the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Baldwin's book suggests that as graphic designers seek greater cultural and social capital through the production of self-generated work, they increase the gap between the design community and clients, which in turn leads to clients increasingly commissioning amateur designers to do work for them. The response of the design community - to seek greater distinction through increasingly 'artistic' work, further exacerbates the problem.
This is partly down to a misunderstanding on the part of designers as to how design is perceived by ordinary people. For the 'visually illiterate', issues such as aesthetics are relatively unimportant. Instead, people focus on the message and its potential impact on their social needs and wants. If an advertisement, for example, offers to meet someone's need for comfort, or food, or companionship, then the actual design of that advertisement is unimportant so long as the message is clear. He uses the example of pizza flyers[2] to make the point: they are generally perceived as badly designed by 'experts' but are remarkably successful in terms of quickly signifying cheap, fast food. To apply a designer's aesthetic to a pizza flyer would risk distorting the message, instead making people perceive a pizza as expensive and unpredictable.
Baldwin equates visual language with verbal language, using the example of the court of Catherine the Great in which French was the official language, while Russian was spoken by the masses. The end result was a widening gap between rulers and those they ruled. In graphic design, implies Baldwin, designers must speak the language of the people for whom they are designing, not impose their own.
Baldwin has also identified that while the design industry has been critical of design education in recent years for a lack of focus on skills, design students tend to see their time at college as an opportunity to create social and cultural capital. This has previously been identified in fashion students by Professor Angela McRobbie, but Baldwin suggests that the public focus of the design industry on economic capital (as seen in their skills focus) is contradicted by their actions in self-promotion via awards such as D&AD and profiles in magazines such as Creative Review, Design Week and Grafik. Suggesting that the design industry actually values cultural and social capital more than it admits, and exchanges them for economic capital, Baldwin believes that the skills focus of the design industry is problematic as it clashes with the aims of both design students and design education, and what they believe industry really values.
Consequently, Baldwin identifies two sites of conflict - that of the design industry versus academia and students, and of the design industry versus clients and the audience.
Baldwin is known to favour a deliberately controversial and polemical approach, but usually writes with his tongue in his cheek, often being very funny.[citation needed] Keen to play devil's advocate, he will sometimes put forward a point of view he does not agree with but which he feels should be considered seriously.
