Eye Magazine

Paul Elliman once spoke of a hypothetical online teaching environment that would embrace digital resources: ‘dictionaries, search engines, mailing lists, chat-rooms; along with a collection of scholarly (or not) web-links; a loose assembly of contributing texts, workshops, lectures, “slideshows”, notes and correspondences.’ Once these resources were collated, he suggested: ‘A content begins to take shape, presents itself as a space; people go there, a discussion begins.’ Elliman’s conception – articulated in an essay ‘Otherschools’ in 2002 and quoted in this anthology – was an attempt to imagine a new future of graphic design education that could transcend the confines of the institution.

Given the past year, one could be forgiven for forgetting that such dialogues – the kind that many academics have received from their higher-ups in myriad watered-down and bureaucratic iterations since the switch to online teaching in March 2020 – were already taking place before Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack became the centre of our educational universe. And perhaps it is even easier to forget, in such circumstances, that there are dialogues besides these that are crucial to the ways we envisage and challenge existing educational structures. In their anthology, One and Many Mirrors: Perspectives on Graphic Design Education, Luke Wood and Brad Haylock, with the help of the book’s various contributors, do no such forgetting …

Alex J. Todd, design historian and writer, London

Read the full version in Eye no. 102 vol. 26, 2021