Week 4
While working on a PowerPoint presentation this week, I thought about the role design was playing in the scholarly output I produced. I have no formal training in design, so I consider my design approach to be one of amateurism driven by instinct, abetted by technology, and constrained by the amount of time I have available to complete a project.
To illustrate: I had neither the time nor the skill set to create a good-looking PowerPoint from scratch. Thus, I went to templates. The presentation related to the Apollo 15 moon mission, and instinct told me to pick a theme that suggested outer space. I found a template close to what I wanted in the set of templates that came preloaded with my installation of PowerPoint. I could have searched for additional templates, but here the available time constrained my design choice. I decided to use the template that was close, and “make it work.”
Using a template means my design ideas are filtered through the work done by the designer who built the template. I cannot go so far as to call myself a collaborator with the designer of the template, but I would like to think that I am more than a freeloader. I locate template use in an ethos similar to that cultivated in the programming classes I have taken: yes, copying and pasting pre-existing code is lazy, but the culture does not frown upon it.
My point with this illustration is to suggest that with the technological tools currently available, scholars can make their presentations, websites, reports, etc. look decently well-designed without having to earn an additional degree in art or graphic design. Although I think that design in scholarship should primarily play the role of helping scholars to better communicate what they are trying to say, it is all the better if the work becomes aesthetically pleasing in the process.
As I mentioned earlier, I do not think that scholars need to be full-time graphic designers, but I do see a role for design education as part of standard undergraduate and graduate training. This could include something like a course designed around a book such as Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type. It could also involve training workshops on Word and PowerPoint that focus on features of the programs (such as templates) that can help with the design process.
I see design training becoming even more important for scholars as publication continues to move beyond print to the digital realm. While taking a course on web design, I became more aware of the ways in which the design of websites impacts how well they communicate. I also learned how design can help or hinder efforts to make websites accessible to those using screen readers and other assistive technology. If scholars plan to create and maintain their own websites or work in e-publications, they would benefit from design education.
In previous weeks, we have talked about collaboration as a distinguishing feature of digital humanities, and I see collaboration as something that could also aid scholars in keeping up with the changing demands for design. I would not expect each individual scholar to do all the design work alone on a project if the scholar did not want to. The design work could be handled by a collaborator who received appropriate credit. What constitutes appropriate credit for design work is something that the disciplines would need to establish as they continue the larger debate about how to credit collaborative work.
Although I think that scholars would benefit from design education and that design could play a larger role in scholarship, I do not think that design should be a major aspect of peer review for all scholarly works. Of course, it should be a major aspect if the project is design-focused or has a heavy graphical or visualization component. However, for projects that are more like traditional print works that just happen to have been transitioned to a digital form such as a web page or PDF, I think peer review would be better focused on the content and articulation of the ideas in the work. I am concerned that if design receives too much emphasis, scholars might be tempted to focus on flashy design to conceal shortcomings in their scholarship. That said, I expect that, in the long term, as scholars receive more design education, design will find its proper place for consideration in peer review since the design-educated scholars will also be the people doing the reviews.