Milieu: Communication Design Discourse

Call for Co-Authors + Collaborators

It's common sense that conversations take more than one person. With that in light, Milieu is making a call for submissions to be featured here on Milieudiscourse.com, and potentially in future printed Milieu's.

These submissions can be articles, essays, visuals or whatever best works for you to communicate what you wish to talk about.

Interested? Email Milieu.

Milieu 3

Issue 3 is available for download or purchase at lulu.com

Issue 2

Is design school working? Yes? No?

If Milieu just jumped into that question in a manfesto-esque nature, we would be just dealing with me and some other authors opinions — not a conservation in any real way. To answer the question of design school working or not, we need to know why people come to design schools in the first place. People come to design colleges for certain intentions— and it's the implied agreement between the school and the student that a transaction will occur. I think we can make the assumption that if the students get what they want, design school delivered it's part of the bargain.

For Issue 2 of Milieu, I asked some of my fellow Communication Design students to finish this sentence:
Design School is worthwhile when…

This is the first step in this three part series on design education. Step two is to do a word search on all the posted responses to see if any patterns begin to appear and to visualize that as Issue 3, and then Issue 4 is to compared those general patterns to the rhetoric and related statics for designers (economic, social, educational etc.) to compare if what students want is what they are getting— and from all of this we can make a more substantial argument if design school is working or not.

Issue One

What is Communication Design? That is the question asked in the first issue of Milieu, Communication Design Discourse.

download the frist issue here: Download Milieu, Issue 1 (pdf)

comments, critiques, respones and debates are more than welcome.

Intro

Started as a idea over at a Blogger blog called Communication Ecology, Milieu is the result of the discussions that have resulted in a realization of the Graphic Design community— specifically the writings about it, which can be summed into two categories:

1) Production Discourse: How things are made, What's hot right now, etc., etc.

2) The Digital Revolution Discourse: The same generation of designers have been shaping the conversations for the last 20 years. Pick up a design book or magazine, the chance of finding Steven Heller in it somewhere is very high.

Milieu is nether of those.