Self-Authored Graphic Design: A Strategy for Integrative Studies

Graphic design is, by its nature, an integrative discipline. Problems and opportunities involving the human condition serve as communications challenges to designers, positioning the discipline of graphic design as the interface between problems and solutions, needs and markets, messages and audiences. Designers mediate, translate, and amplify the visualized environment, giving tangible form to the objects and experiences that inform, persuade, and entertain us. Throughout the design process, graphic designers must integrate various communicative elements: the content of the message with the expectations of the sender (usually within the context of a governing economic relationship), the perceptions of the audience, the subjective and objective qualities of written and pictorial language, the dissemination technologies of the media, and the designer's own particular vision.1 It is a high degree of engagement with this latter quality, often referred to as self-authored design, that empowers the graphic designer to be more involved with the generation of message content, and not merely its visual form. Within academia, graphic design, and self-authored graphic design in particular, occupies a unique position at the crossroads of various disciplines, offering many possibilities for integrative studies. Because graphic design is involved with the contextual structure of information, it facilitates a dialog between diverse disciplines and their specific codes of representation. The purpose of our essay is to introduce the concepts of self-authorship in graphic design education as part of an integrative pedagogy. The enhanced potential of harnessing graphic design's dual modalities the