What is design and designer?

When thinking of graphic design, we often think of digital tools such as the famous, expensive Adobe programs, as well as aesthetic visuals as products of such tools. Design, however, is beyond graphics in posters, digital interaction such as a mobile app, as well as physical toolkits. While Brazillians use the word “projeto” for the Anglophone word “design”, Vietnamese use the word “thiết kế”, Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary 設計 that has been Latinized since the French colonization. It means the act of planning a critical task for certain purpose, which takes a lot of time and effort to achieve impactful, political result. “Thiết kế đồ họa” which is graphic design in Vietnamese, however, is often reduced to business brands and merchandises, enforced by digitization and industrialization in Vietnam. 

In the graphic design education in the United States, definitions of design and designer are different among the student body whose backgrounds varied. After students have read and critiqued design practices, they used low-tech materials in visualizing their definitions of design as a practice, profesison, and field and envisioning themselves as designers of socio political commitments. From a pile of U.S.-sourced magazines, color markers, and glues, students created a zine from their understanding of design and designer.

Some of design students’ zines on design and designer:

Acknowledgement: I thanked design students for their agreements in being featured, including Shruthi Manikandan, Maria Gaitan, Casey Vargas, Phoebe Davis, and Kaitlyn Vong. I learned zine as a punk, sub-culture in Dr. Margaret Galvan’s undergraduate course, who encouraged me to be keen on low-tech materials in political, cultural expressions, besides Dr. Frederick van Amstel. Thus, this is my commitment to share what I know to prospective design students.