Proposal for Change

Ok so for those of you who weren't at the group meeting after graphic design today, we basically discussed the pro's and con's of our program and deduced that most of the class would be on board for a good deal of change. 

That being said, we are looking to put together a full proposal to present to the professors and the administration. Since no one person should have to take on this task, it would be helpful if we could all just post our comments and ideas here, either in new posts or in the comments section. 

I'll go ahead and start off the discussion with a basic outline. Please add to it. 

The root of all our problems lies in class size. 

Currently we are split into two sections, each meeting for at most an hour and a half. Unfortunately that hour and a half isn't going to be enough for the amended class model that will include lectures, guest speakers, etc. 

Even if we all did attend class for the designated three hours, the space in room 357 could not accommodate us all. 

In order for us to get the quality three hours we all want, we need to be able to have three hours of class. 

In order to have three hours of class we need smaller class sizes. 

Smaller class sizes can be obtained by adding another 3 hour section to the Graphic Design program.  This could be with Craine or a new professor. 

I feel like it is up to the administration to figure that one out. 

Class should consist of more than critiques.

Critiques are great. They help us get valuable feedback on our work from our peers. No one is arguing that critiques are useless or should be done away with. The issue is that when you have only critiques, the once intended three hours of learning becomes about 10 minutes. We only stay in class for courtesy to our peers. 

Granted we can learn from each other by observing each others work, but we all know each other pretty well, and this becomes stale. Furthermore we only really need to observe each others work to gain from it, so wasting time huddled around a computer screen each week isn't teaching us much. 

We could be learning so much from each class. So much more than simply observation can give us. 

For example, assume we have just been given the Gather.com assignment. Along with the assignment could come a lecture discussing the differences of website design to print design. We could learn about logo design as well. This would be more than just examples of existing websites and logos, but rather an explanation of what should be achieved by this assignment. Researching gather.com and other sites would still be up to us, but we would have a better framework to work in, and would waste less time on off target designs. 

Ok no one wants to read a tome here, so I will leave the floor open for addition ideas and comments. Ideally this will blossom to the point that putting our proposal together will simply be a matter of copy and pasting. 

-Conor