.T.D.N. Who we are   Virtual classroom   Project 2010   Project 2009   Project 2008   Project 2007   Project 2006 Project 2005 Project 2004 Galleries Register Login Designing with Type Soundbites Downloads How to Join & Upload Impressum	Freiburg Presentation http://tdn.freie-hochschule-freiburg.de/   New York Presentation http://www.designingwithtype.com/freiehochschule/   No man is an island John Donne, Philosopher, 1572–1631 ref.: »Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions«, 1624   your actions are pointless if no one notices Jenny Holzer, American Concept Artist, born 1950, Project: »Truisms 1979–1983«   Teaching Designers Network: Sounds great. I will read through it on my way home from Chicago. I am here for a »consortium meeting« of the IDX (information design exchange) programme — I can tell you more later. It looks like there could be connections between TDN and another initiative I am trying to get off the ground. The working title is DDIA (Digital Design Image Archive) which includes a multilingual online image artchive for design teaching. I also want it to be a portal for exchange among design teachers. We’ll stay in touch on this. Prof. Jay Rutherford Type Designer and Educator Faculty of Design and Art Free University of Bozen/Bolzano Via Sernesi, 1 39100 Bolzano / Italy http:// www.unibz.it   Good idea … just on my way to Cairo. When I’am back you can count on me! Prof. Rayan Abdullah Designer and Educator Hochschule für Gestaltung und Buchkunst Wächterstraße 11 04107 Leipzig Germany http://www.hgb-leipzig.de http://www.rayan.de | http://www.markenbau.de   As I came across the hall of my school in Barcelona I saw a former student (now a teaching designer) that contact me some weeks ago with the intention of visiting my school with a group of students. Inmediatelly I realized that teachers with interest are the ones that move the world of design. I saw passion on these students when looking at things, hearing his teacher and proposing some interesting ideas about what to do the next few days. I felt geen with envy to have such interested students; sometimes I have the feeling that teaching design is mass production. It is time for going back to the understanding of the fundamentals! The same in Spanish: Cuando salí al hall de mie scuela de Barcelona vi, con sorpresa, un antiguo compañero de escuela, que ahora se había convertido en profesor. Él me conatctó hace algunas semanas con la intención de visitar mi escuela con un grupo de estudiantes. Inmediatamente me di cuenta de que solamente los profesores con un interés especial son los que mueven el mundodel diseño. Vi que los estudiantes estaban apasionados con lo que veían y escuchaban de su profesor, incluso proponiendo ideas intersantes para el programa de los próximos días. Me sentí lleno de envidia de tener tales estudiantes; alguna veces tengo la impresión de que enseñar diseño es una especie de producción masificada. Es el momento para retomar la comprensión de los undamentos! Prof. Juan Jesús Arrausi Elisava Escuela Superior de Diseño Plaça de la Mercè Carrer Ample, 11-13 08002 Barcelona Spain http:// www.elisava.es   Teaching Designers Network: I like to pass the TDN concept arround to other teaching designers … Wolfgang Weingart Designer and Educator Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst Basel HGK Vogelsangstrasse 15 CH-4005 Basel / Switzerland http:// www.hgkbasel.ch   Dear Wolfgang, on behalf of International Institute of Advertising I have a pleasure to send the warm greetings and congratulations to You and to »Teaching Designers Network« due to the first presentation of Your students works. I estimate this cooperation as a great opportunity for students to establish cross cultural network of creative ideas, projects and challenging works. On the other side it is the platform for teaching designers to exchange ideas and teaching methods in visual communication. I trust in creativity of our students and I am sure that »Teaching Designers Network« reflects needs and demands of creative people in our changing world. Sergei Yu. Gorlov Professor Ph.D. Executive Director, Board of Founders, IAA Russian chapter, Vice-President for Education International Institute for Advertising Letnikovskaja str., 16 Moscow, 115114 Russia http:// www.iia.ru   I guess this cooperation would be great for us in two aspects. First of all for our students. It would be challenging for them knowing to be involved in an international design network and may be get contacts to students from other countries. Secondly it would be a plattform for teaching designers to exchange ideas of visual communication. Wolfgang Wick Teaching Designer Freie Hochschule fuer Grafik-Design und Bildende Kunst e.V. Haslacher Straße 15 79115 Freiburg / Germany http://www.freie-hochschule-freiburg.de http:// www.buero-magenta.de   Das »Teaching Designers Network« stellt meiner Meinung nach, vor allem für Studenten, eine wirkliche Vernetzungschance dar. Die Tatsache, dass das Projekt länderübergreifend angelegt ist, finde ich besonders interessant. Eine echte Plattform um gleiche oder ähnliche Bedingungen und Voraussetzungen im Design von verschiedenen Seiten bewertet zu bekommen. Diese Art von Kommunikation bringt Gestaltung voran. Bernhard Pompeÿ Designer | haus3.net & echtweiss | Heidelberg | Germany http://www.haus3.net   The TDN fit perfectly in the global feel young people have, being an MTV-, PlayStation-, Mobile Phone-, Bunji-jumping in Thailand-, Nike- and Internet-generation. Meeting digitally your fellow-students or -teachers should just be a first step. TDN can and should encourage the real thing: real meeting. Only without technoligy inbetween, the chemistry can start. The same in Dutch: Het TDN sluit perfect aan bij het wereld-burger-gevoel van jonge mensen als lid van de MTV-, PlayStation-, Mobieltjes-, Bunji-jumping in Thailand-, Nike- and Internet-generatie. Je medestudenten en -leraren digitaal ontmoeten mag niet meer zijn dan een eerste stap. TDN kan en behoort het echte werk te stimuleren: elkaar echt ontmoeten. Zonder technologie tussen beiden, kan er pas sprake zijn van een chemie. Michel van der Sanden graphic designer grafisch ontwerper Rotterdam The Netherlands http://www .mvds-design.nl   The Teaching Designers Network sounds like a cool initiative. I love the idea of creative interaction in general and even more so when it crosses geographic boundaries. Kirnan John Design Student Saint Lucia Caribbean Island kirnan@hotmail.com   Greetings colleagues, I have just received and read the outline of Teaching Designers Network from Wolfgang Wick and am very much interested in taking part. I agree that communication among design teachers is crucial for advancement in the field. I have already done a project myself with students here in Italy which might fit in with TDN. The »National Icons« project was part of an international exchange initiative, funded by the European Union and involving five design schools. The schools are in England, Lithuania, Denmark, Spain and Germany/Italy. The reason that Germany and Italy are »joined at the hip« in this list is that my official involvement is as professor of Visual Communications at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. I am on semi-sabbatical in Italy for two years – halfway through at the moment. Here is a short text explaining the project: National Icons Images of the World – Globalisation and Cultural Diversity »Design shapes culture. Designers are in a position to celebrate societal differences, to embrace the vernacular and to help avoid the unhappy melding of unique cultures into a bland global stew…« (Robert Peters, Icograda President, March 2002). As the European Union expands to the east, many countries are going through a process of re-appraising their past, looking critically at the present and establishing new aims for the future. It is the differences between our cultures, rather than the similarities, that make the concept of a European Union so exciting. Graphic design, often using a homogenized international style, has frequently played a regrettable role in the diminishing of national identities. In this project the concept of national icons was explored – cultural, social, industrial, scientific icons ... anything embodying characteristics appropriate to national identities. Following the research phase, students developed various design artefacts – e.g. posters, books, CD-ROMs and games. This work is part of an international project involving partner design schools in England, Denmark, Spain and Lithuania. The posters will be part of a travelling exhibition and research results will be shared among the partners and used in future teaching modules throughout Europe. I have also attached a text as a Word.doc which was used in the exhibition catalogue. The poster part of this project will also soon appear on James Craig’s DesigningWithType.com ( http://www.DesigningWithType.com ) web site. Please let me know if you’d like to see the posters and I can send them along. I am also working on an other project which could dovetail nicely with TDN. The working title is DDIA (Digital Design Image Archive) and the idea is to create an archive of visual materials for use in design teaching and research. I am in contact with the creators of the prometheus project in Cologne http://www.prometheus-bildarchiv.de , who have an online archive of visual materials in the areas of art history and cultural sciences. We are talking about a possible collaboration where we might share the interface they have created with the image archive I am working on. Mike Daines, editor and co-publisher of baseline magazine, has also approached me with a proposal to collaborate on his eLexicons in Typography endeavour http://www.e-Lexicons.net or http://www.e-Lexicons.co.uk . This collaboration would connect Mike’s textual archive on typographers, type designers, foundries, etc. to my image collection. So, lots of irons in the fire (these are only a couple of them). Let me know what you all think and let’s see if we can’t get something going. Prof. Jay Rutherford Type Designer and Educator Faculty of Design and Art Free University of Bozen/Bolzano Via Sernesi, 1 39100 Bolzano / Italy http://www.unibz.it   Design students from all over the world are right now spoiled in the technique and lost in the creation process. Students have lost their interest in history of visual communication. Most of them have only the immediate visual landscape of what they find in the society as culture. They are missing their knowledge of the past and have no visions in the future. Too much visual pollution is around. Every year, too many people are arriving in the field of graphic design and not enough work positions is the situation that is waiting for them. Are schools building more workless? Or short term cheap visual workers? How can we try to develop the old school system into something new that can survive in long term. What is the role of the schools. As a professional I could eventually be a part of the global critique. Jean-Benoît Lévy Designer Trafic Grafic and General Visual Basel / San Francisco Switzerland / USA http://www.and.ch   The TDN idea for a joint project reminds me of a project I did when I was a student. The students designed a design history poster (according to a brief) and then printed a second set to exchange with another school. On the final crit. It was interesting to see another set of posters from a different school. Jeffery Keedy Designer, Writer, Type Designer and Educator CalArts – Califorina Institute of the Arts 24700 McBean Parkway Valencia, CA 91355 USA http://design.calarts.edu   British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow is a young design institution and the internationalism is one of our fundamental principles. From the one side design is an international and versatile thing so it is extremely important for design students from various countries to be involved in a process of exchanging ideas and projects. As to teaching designers this kind of experience is also very useful. It gives them a powerful impulse of creative energy and students feel that. An opportunity to be a member of the global exchange network helps tutors to keep their teaching programmes at a high level. It motivates to be creative and global-thinking person. If we organise personal meetings in future (I am sure that we will) they might establish new contacts and next time somebody could answer on a hard question or give an advise. New Russia looks at the world by wide opened eyes and the world does the same thing. We want to know more about each other to get ourselves better. Alexander Avramov British Higher School of Art and Design ul. Shosse Entuziastov, 21 111123 Moscow Russia info@britishdesign.ru http://www.britishdesign.ru   What an excellent co-operative initiative! I wish you every success. Chris Green Course Leader: New Media Design Manchester Metropolitan University All Saints Building Manchester M15 6BH Great Britain enquiries@mmu.ac.uk http://www.mmu.ac.uk/   Hochschulen international auch über Dozenten und Projekte zu verbinden – und dadurch einen weltweiten Überblick über Design-Kultur zu ermöglichen – ist eine Idee, die man schon längst hätte realisieren müssen! Jede Initiative, die vorhandenen Möglichkeiten des internationalen Hochschulaustausches wie Gastprofessuren und Sommerakademien zu erweitern, hilft der Orientierung und der Kommunikation. Prof. Uwe Lohrer Visuelle Kommunikation Fachhochschule Pforzheim Hochschule für Gestaltung, Technik und Wirtschaft Tiefenbronner Straße 65 D-75175 Pforzheim Germany http://www.fh-pforzheim.de/