Teaching Visual Communication Design Histories Through Critical Annotation and Public Archiving: A Story in Five Artefacts

Abstract

This pedagogical case study explores how participatory pedagogy might transform design history education. The study draws on 8 years of working with design history students to recuperatively document visual communication design history artefacts and practitioners. For 3 years, this experience focused on collaborating with students to contribute 1000+ entries directly to the People's Graphic Design Archive (PGDA), an online, crowd‐sourced archive of diverse design histories. Approaching self‐reflexive teaching praxis as action research, this article synthesises the work of writing personalised weekly responses to +/− 5580 annotated design artefacts. The qualitative, mixed methods approach combines auto‐ethnographic writing, document analysis and critically informed historical contextualisation. After interrogating what design history means and situating crowd‐sourced archival work within a disciplinary framework, the author presents five representative examples of designed artefacts that typify students' contributions to the PGDA. In conversation with each artefact, the author demonstrates shared pain points experienced by student archivists/future design practitioners: generalisations, potentially productive misunderstandings and/or lack of access. This approach is transformative in that it equips students to contribute to disciplinary knowledge production while building historical research and contextual interpretation skills into their process of professional identity development.