Talking about graphic design in this way sounds unusual but it isn’t a new hot take. The study of design as liberal art can be traced back to the 1920s with John Dewey’s The Quest for Uncertainty and Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus School. In 1994, design educator Gunnar Swanson wrote a 13-page essay on the state of graphic design education that makes the same case. Three decades later, people still view design as a trade despite its development as an interdisciplinary subject.
While I can’t deny that graphic design has blue-collar origins — think of the printing press, typesetting, sign painting, etc. — and requires technical training (look at the Adobe wizards), it is also a field that touches a wide variety of subjects and industries. Design Issues editor Richard Buchanan notes that “we have seen design grow from a trade activity to a segmented profession to a field for technical research and to what now should be recognised as a new liberal art of technological culture.” As Richard explains in his 1992 essay Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, thinking of design as part of the liberal arts repositions its study to be not just vocational but a mode of research, argumentation, and critical thinking.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has come to think of technology as hardware, a product you need to learn, a hard skill. When Richard Buchanan acknowledges design as technologia, he sees this not as a hard skill (product-based) but as a mode of thinking (systems-based): “This is not thinking directed toward a technological ‘quick fix’ in hardware but toward new integrations of signs, things, actions, and environments that address the concrete needs and values of human beings in diverse circumstances.” Design students may be familiar with this “design thinking” process, an iterative framework where designers approach problem-solving with a human-centred lens that integrates theory (often from the social sciences) with practice.
The liberal arts as an educational requirement in the West dates back to the Renaissance. To complement his artistic practice, Leonardo da Vinci studied astronomy, human anatomy, cartography, botany, paleontology, and more. Richard describes the development of liberal arts studies from the Renaissance to its peak in the 19th century as an “encyclopaedic education of beaux arts, belles lettres, history, various natural sciences and mathematics, philosophy, and the fledgling social sciences.” This “encyclopaedic” approach provided students with “an integrated understanding of human experience and the array of available knowledge” at the time.