Design Enquiry: A Creative, Critical Community

We created Design Enquiry 4 years (and 4 volumes) ago because we understood that there was a great deal of high-quality writing on our course that very few people ever saw. Through these publications we have sought to bring our student’s writing, thinking and making to audiences beyond academia, and to inspire and encourage commitment to writing within the Graphic Design BA course at Camberwell College of Art. We envisioned this as a creative critical and community-building activity, one which could capture ‘discussions’, share collective thoughts and celebrate research. We explicitly wanted to pose writing as a form of ‘agency’ – a way of developing our contributors’ critical ‘voices’ – while imaging new futures for the discipline as a whole, tracking the multiple research concerns and interest of our students. We wanted to propose writing as a way of re-creating lost communities, building collective futures and producing a sense of hope by working together across multiple platforms, disciplines and cohorts.

To that end, and with 4 issues completed, the articles contained in these volumes offer multi-, inter-, trans- and meta-disciplinary perspectives on what graphic design can offer to our understanding of the world; becoming a ‘snapshot’ of the discipline, and giving rich insights into what concerns and inspires us as individuals and as a community. Throughout the pieces contained here, there is the same spirit of enquiry about what design might be able to do, and what subjects it touches upon and learns from. Across the 4 volumes, we can start to see how this nexus of concerns has shifted, mapping out the changing technologies, politics, social, ethical and environmental concerns of our time, and showing us how graphic design and its related fields engage with them.

Writing and language form communities; they literally build 'worlds'. Rather than a separate sphere, remote and estranged from practice, we understand writing as a central feature of our work, one which we wish to celebrate. In the process of producing Design Enquiry we investigate writing and editing skills, introduce students to peer review processes and explore with them how to facilitate the design and production of a publication which gathers the best of the writing undertaken on our course, while creating a strong sense of community around writing while engaging new publics.

Our publication continues in a new and evolving form each year. Each new cohort of students has been invited to edit, review, design and produce their work, showing how they understand the world round them through words and images.

The student and staff community which coheres around this high quality, peer reviewed publishing space is vibrant, inclusive, and supported by staff who are simultaneously its writers, editors and designers. These include the staff of the Graphic Design programme at CCW: Emily Wood, Peter Hall, Eva Sajovic, Kam Rehal, Jack Clarke, Amy Etherington, Nikki Wallace and Charlie Abbott (peer review and copy editing).

We are also grateful to our external reviewers and supporters, who bring rich expert knowledge. These include Adrian Holme, Dr. Hannah Lammin, Steve Rees, and Julian Walker, all of who have contributed peer reviews, and (in the case of Adrian Holme), valuable editorial guidance.

We also want to thank Alessia Borri (library support and guidance), Margherita Huntley (peer review and initial design). Our first publication was generously supported by a grant from the Teaching and Learning fund at CCW and has been supported by the programme since then.

We are grateful to everyone who has contributed their time and ideas to our journal of Design Enquiries and hope you enjoy the work contained.

Dr. Sheena Calvert & Jack Clarke (Design Enquiry Editors)