"FROM CONFORMING TO SYSTEMS TO ESTABLISHING SYSTEMS: DEVELOPING STUDENT AGENCY THROUGH GRAPHIC COMMUNICATION DESIGN" Conference Paper

Authors:

Lemon Xueli Tang, Liu Meng Chen

The Glasgow School of Art

Abstracts:

Graphic Communication Design education frequently operates through project-based pedagogies in which students learn through making, critique, iteration and reflection. Yet the same structures that support learning can also encourage dependence on external validation, particularly when students seek precedents, tutor approval or apparently ‘correct’ visual outcomes before trusting their own design judgement. This paper examines how iterative supervision can support a transition from conforming to existing systems towards constructing, testing and questioning systems independently. It presents a collaborative reflective case study of UNSTONE, a project developed by Chen through a series of recorded supervisory conversations with Tang. Beginning as an exploration of cataloguing stones, the project developed into an invented classificatory system and interactive publication through which readers could reorder and reinterpret its contents. Thematic analysis of five supervisory conversations identifies four interconnected movements in the learning process: seeking external validation; recognising knowledge already emerging through making; using material experimentation as conceptual inquiry; and developing confidence in independent design judgement. Significantly, the project’s eventual transfer of classificatory authority from designer to reader mirrored a pedagogical transfer of decision-making authority. Drawing on reflective practice, scaffolding and ecological understandings of agency, the paper argues that student agency should not be equated with working without guidance. Instead, agency can be understood as an emerging capacity to frame questions, tolerate uncertainty, test alternatives and make situated design judgements. Design education can therefore support agency not by removing systems, but by enabling students to recognise, interrogate, construct and eventually remake systems of their own.