What’s the actual difference between Graphic Design courses at UAL?
As a tutor on the Foundation at CCW, I am often asked to explain the difference between Graphic Design courses at UAL. It seems that the students have a really hard time telling the courses apart using the descriptions on the website. This got me thinking about the way that we describe different Graphic Design programmes. How do the descriptions differ from course to course?
I could guess. But this is not really my style. Instead, I decided to analyse the course overviews of the four largest graphic design courses at UAL. What might they tell me about each course and how it approaches the subject?
To do this, I focussed on repeated words in each course description. I then delved a bit deeper into the context of those words in the original text.
A standard Saturday afternoon round these parts.
The differences
(I took some words out…)
The words design (18), practice/s (8), develop (8), graphic (7), work (7) communication (6), skills (5) and projects (4) appear across multiple courses. So, I’ve discounted them here in order to focus on the different words that are specific to each course. I’ll look at similarities in a bit.
CSM
BA Graphic Communication Design at CSM used 16 repeated words in their Course Overview.
They seemed to have 11 course-specific words:
graphic (6), design (6), communication (4), community (3), practices (3), course (3), contexts (2), bring (2), actively (2), discipline (2), way (2), across (2), areas (2), practice (2), focus (2), designer (2)
There’s an emphasis on being a designer at CSM. Notably an ‘interdisciplinary designer’ and ‘hybrid’ designer. The course ‘provides a community’, works ‘as a community’ and is ‘a community of students, tutors and practitioners.’ The course also references itself as ‘a space’ that ‘enables mobility’ and ‘is devised.’ This is unique to CSM. Chelsea is the only other course to mention the fact that it is a course. Camberwell only uses the word in the context of ‘course tutors’.
Other words centre on contexts and ways of working. What is unique is the discussion of what students themselves bring; ‘a diverse range of perspectives and approaches’ and ‘your own ways’ of working, thinking and ‘your own practice-based interests.’ ‘Actively’ is used twice, both in terms of teaching and learning.
CSM is also the only course to speak directly of a discipline. It does this more than once. Both in terms of the ‘discipline's core practices’ and redefining ‘the future of our discipline.’ Not the use of ‘our’, the discipline is collectively owned.
Camberwell
BA Graphic Design at Camberwell used 12 repeated words in their Course Overview.
Among those, they had 7 course-specific words:
design (6), work (4), contemporary (3), graphic (3), designer/s (3), projects (2), social (2), develop (2), workshops (2), photography (2), important (2), camberwell (2)
At Camberwell there’s an emphasis on being a ‘designer’ — both in terms of the staff (designer educators) and the ‘community’ of designers. Workshops feature as a way of teaching — through and in. If we delve deeper we see that workshops are also ‘shared (2)’ and are used to teach ‘skills,’ specifically in ‘typography.’
Important is used twice in the context of questions — important ‘to art and design’ and important ‘to you.’ While social is not a word that’s entirely unique to Camberwell, they are the only course that use it more than once. ‘Social’ is combined with ‘political’ in the context of ‘engagement’. ‘Social engagement’ is also described as being ‘at the heart’ of work in order to ‘face socially responsible creative challenges.’
Chelsea
BA Graphic Design Communication at Chelsea used 13 repeated words.
From that, I identified a 9 course-specific words.
creative (5), develop, (4) practice, (3), chelsea (2), design (2), live (2), projects (2), skills (2), create (2), using (2), build (2), world (2), network (2)
Creativity was top of the list for Chelsea. Creative tools and industries are both mentioned alongside creative risks, potential and the students’ ability to ‘creatively contribute to forming their future.’ Create also appears twice in terms of outcomes and practice.
Chelsea as a place is a point of focus - particularly it’s workshops and facilities. Live appears twice in the overview, always in the context of projects.
Using suggests a bit about the teaching methods and content, appearing twice in terms of lens-based media (distinctive to Chelsea) and live projects once again. Suggesting live projects are a teaching tool.
Building, networks and worlds are words that appear more than once and frequently together. The worlds relative to the course being ‘creative’, ‘cultural’ and the ‘design world.’ Most networks relate to industry; the ‘professional design world’, ‘industry influences’, ‘alumni designers’ and ‘associate lecturers’.
LCC
BA Graphic Media Design at LCC used 20 repeated words.
From that, I identified a 14 course-specific words - the most overall.
graphic (4), design (4), year (4), media (3), skills (3), ideas (3), new (3), technologies (3), work (3), tutor (3), teaches (2),communication (2), confidence (2), range (2), introduces (2), visual (2), briefs (2), professional (2), theories (2), develop (2), portfolio (2)
Media appears three times, always with graphic (graphic media); not entirely surprising given the word is in the course title. There’s a stronger focus on skills here that are both ‘broad’ and ‘core.’ There’s repeated use of the word ‘ideas’ as ‘inspiring’, ‘central to the discipline’ and ‘personal.’ We see s similar focus on new specialisms and practices in line with ‘technologies’ that are mostly ‘new’ and/or ‘emerging.’
Very specific to LCC is the use of the word tutor who are ‘specialists’ ‘subject-specialists’ and the ‘support’ that ‘gives you the confidence to present your own ideas.’ LCC is the only course to place this much emphasis on the role of the tutor and ‘teaching.’ It would seem that this is the course that teaches you, through the tutors. Perhaps an obvious statement but worth noting the constancy with which it appears here.
The words ‘professional’ (content and position) and ‘portfolio’ appear here more than once. This makes the LCC overview the more traditionally focussed of the four; teaching graphic design through the acquisition of skills in a tutor-led environment.
The Similarities…
I mentioned earlier that certain words appear across multiple courses. What I didn’t mention is that they don’t appear consistently across all courses. In fact they show up across different courses in quite interesting ways. So if you’re still with me (well done), here’s the shared keywords by course.
I am going to omit ‘develop’, ‘work’ and ‘projects.’ Here, I’m assuming that these are the day-to-day of teaching and learning on Graphic Design courses. Students develop work and projects. I’m not sure it tells us too much about the defining features and focus of a course. If we omit those, we get down a more basic and arguably more fundamental picture.
You’ll notice that CSM comes across here as being the most unified, it doesn’t change from the first image to the second. Organised around three of the shared keywords it pretty much spells out the focus of the course; communication design practice.
Camberwell comes over as the purest in terms of the discipline. When you take out the outcomes and work on the course we simply get Graphic Design.
Chelsea, interestingly features only one of the three keywords in its title. Here we see an emphasis on the development of practice (like CSM) through skills (like LCC).
LCC focusses on skills in graphic, communication and design (although interestingly not media). With four of the shared keywords, this makes it a fairly complex proposition.
Arguably not as complex CSM and Chelsea who favour the term ‘practice.’ Which, as a term, is arguably not that straightforward to understand. Particularly for someone outside of art and design (read: new students).
Why bother?
Good question.
I had fun though.
In all seriousness, it highlights three things for me.
Firstly, the value of talking about things we can see. This is a theme for me.
Secondly, language matters. If we were to show three groups, say staff, students and prospective students, that second image would it align with their experience and understanding of the courses?
Finally, if we did this at scale, let’s say a whole school for example, what might it tell us? What might that picture tell us about the gaps between strategy and reality?
Not that I’m volunteering.
Sources + Methods
Course overviews were taken from the UAL Website. You can find the links in each course section in this blog. For the initial analysis I used Wordcounter, this gave me overall counts of individual words and bigrams and trigrams. I combined the data in Excel, exploring using Pivot tables and then visualising it using Flourish. The interpretative analysis is my own, as a design educator which may contains elements of bias in interpretation based on my experiences of working in some of the programs that these courses are situated in.