Learning Outcomes

Publication, Website

Learning Outcomes is a BFA thesis consisting of nine projects, each responding to one of the learning outcomes listed in the Thesis syllabus. I used the course structure as a creative framework—treating these academic goals not as limitations, but as prompts. The project consists of nine responses; one for each learning outcome, that are documented in one final book.

Learning Outcomes book cover.

The entire project is designed using only Arial Regular and content sourced through New School platforms in order to create a visual consistency and clarity of concept. The resulting “default” aesthetic reflects the idea of defaulting to institutional instruction.

1.

The first outcome reads “Conceive of ideas and learn to narrow and direct energies towards something that makes sense.” In order to document my ideation process in as much detail as possible, I maintained a written document of all the tangential events and interactions in and around my thesis class up until the point that I arrived at the idea for Learning Outcomes.

The first response is set directly in the final book, containing images of drafts and of professors with whom I spoke with throughout my ideation process.

The document is written as a subjective personal narrative of my struggles, judgements, and desires that led me to the project at hand, serving as an introduction to the rest of the responses. Alongside this internal monologue, this document divulges personal interactions with professors and classmates, the drafts and development of early thesis coursework, and the research into art history and design education that informed the learning outcomes concept.

2.

The second outcome reads “Develop a design process and working methodology.” In order to demonstrate my working methodology, I taught it to my peers. I held a workshop where I instructed friends and classmates to create versions of my own learning outcome responses.

Photos from the workshop.

This exercise became a litmus test of my own ideas for responses; if an idea was simple enough to teach, it was probably a good idea. This was therefore the last outcome I completed, once I had settled on the responses to the rest.

I first distilled each of my learning outcome responses into simple prompts; a sort of course syllabus in itself. I assigned each student one of the prompts and they were given two hours to complete their responses before presenting to the class. The responses varied in medium from traditional graphic design to spoken word and conceptual art.

3.

The third outcome reads "Demonstrate comprehensive awareness of design systems, critical thinking, historical awareness.” In order to demonstrate my historical awareness, I recreated Josef Müller-Brockmann’s iconic book, Grid Systems in Graphic Design, replacing its contents with archival images from 1961, the year it was written. All else, including its size, page count and grid system, was kept the same.

The books original cover was reduced to it’s iconic orange color and white grid lines.

In the original Grid Systems, Muller-Brockmann proposes a worldview reducible to calculable measurements and rectangular grids. The plain white grid on the book's cover becomes an emblem of this proposal and is replicated in my response. The images collected from the year 1961 present a more complex historical context, including alongside affirmations of Brockmann’s vision, instances of racism, rebellion, and violence unaccounted for in his narrow utopian worldview.

This recreation exhausts the original grid system of Grid Systems to present these diverse collections of images that escalate in compositional complexity over the course of the book.

Inner spread recreated in the final Learning Outcomes compendium.

4.

The fourth outcome reads: “Articulate design decisions and concepts for both their own work and the work of others using the language of communication design.” In order to direct design decisions using the language of communication design, I designed a multi-section book rearranging language from assigned course readings into instructions for design.

The cover of the book doubles as a bibliography for the language contained within.

For this response, I dug up the list of assigned readings from my “Core 1: Typography” course that comprised the canon of communication design writing. Of these readings, I chose six that felt representative of the whole. I dissected the six and picked out imperative phrases, nouns, and adverbial phrases from these readings in order to create a system to generate instructions using direct excerpts from these texts.

The book’s seperated sections allow readers to generate instructions from canonical design language.

This 3-section book allows readers to remix these excerpts and frankenstein their own instructions for creative projects “using the language of communication design.”

5.

The fifth outcome reads “Refine formal presentation skills.” And the simplest outcome deserves the simplest response. In order to present at the largest scale possible, I advertised my thesis in Times Square.

Photo by Olivia Rae Harris

On December 17th, I commissioned a Times Square billboard service to project this image in Times Square for fifteen seconds every hour for 24 hours.

6.

The sixth outcome reads: “Understand type as image and its use in conjunction with image to successfully convey a chosen concept or idea.” In order to understand type as image, I translated a text into images. For this exercise, I chose Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus Manifesto from 1919, which was provided as possible material for a “Core 1: Typography” project.

The book cover establishes the relationship between text and image explored throughout the book.

This book breaks this text into individual words and phrases, then assigns them each an image based on various modes of interpretation. As with the Brockmann book, all images were sourced through my New School JSTOR account.

Spread from the book.