ARCADE: On living, learning, and design educating.

ARCADE Summer 2012 issue, designed and edited by Karen Cheng and Annabelle Gould. Photographed by me.

ARCADE is one of my favorite design magazines. It is published quarterly, and the Summer 2012 issue features guest editors and designers Karen Cheng and Annabelle Gould, two of my design professors while I was at the UW. I was fortunate enough to be in Seattle during the launch party for this issue (held at Makers, an awesome new co-working space in Belltown). The topic was design education and here are some of the highlights:

What We Don’t Teach – But Should by Annabelle Gould

How To Survive Critique: A Guide To Giving And Receiving Feedback – by Karen Cheng (having survived many of Karen’s critiques and subsequently directed many of my own, I can attest to all she has written).

The Essential Design Library by ARCADE readers.

On Teaching Architecture – by JM Cava (to be linked soon).
Specifically his first point on teaching architecture, in which you could substitute “designers” for “architects” and “design” for “architecture” and it would still hold true.

1. Competent architects, not bad artists.
Teaching architecture should produce competent (or better) architects. Not mediocre (or lesser) artists. The fine arts are not architecture and architecture is not fine art. Wonderful architecture has the same emotive potential to enrich our lives for generations as does any art form. Architecture needs no outside validation from fine arts, literature, science or philosophy.

I especially love that last line. Design needs no outside validation, either.