Textual and Visual Interfaces in Design Education

When art colleges moved into the university sector in the last quarter of the twentieth century the response of many art and design departments was to gain acceptance in the academy. Since writing was/is privileged as a means to analyse and explicate criticality, degrees were created that required extensive writing in traditional academic genres. This positioned writing (and in some cases theory) in a way that was viewed as restrictive by many in art and design. The current development and expansion of practice-based research degrees and the repositioning of art and design in the last RAE has led to a re-questioning of the role of writing in art and design education and a rejection in some quarters that writing should be constrained by academic conventions that arise from other disciplines/epistemologies. These developments create a space which enables us to explore afresh, textual and visual interfaces in art and design education.