When I was going to grad school, the design department thought it would be a brilliant idea to create a new set of classes required of all design masters’ students — of which students in my graduating class were the guinea pigs. Three classes in all (one for each trimester) — they were intended to bring together students from various design disciplines and focus on history, processes, ethics, and design issues. A great idea in theory, but piss poor planning made the curriculum fall pathetically short. The first class was Design History, the least painful of all three classes; I have little to say about it except that I forgot pretty much all of it.
I’ll skip to the third class for a quick sec — Design Process. I was the only person to ever get out of taking it. I had heard what a psychotic “Design Nazi” the professor was and there was a class I really wanted to take instead — History of the Book. The only slot it was available overlapped with Design Process, so I put up a good enough case for History as a substitution. While I was having a fantastic time in History of the Book, I heard all my classmates bemoaning the Process class and telling me how they got Cs on their projects for having pages in their notebooks with dog-eared edges or using poorly color-coded tabs. Hello?? PSYCHO! Rumor had it that the crazy professor was livid about me subbing her class for something better and kept trying to force me to take it. HA!
The second class, Design Forum, I remember very well and liken the experience to a weekly root canal without Novocain. It was “taught” by an insipid garden-gnome-like professor who attempted to engage the class in banal discussions about design that only apply within the realms of academia and have virtually no application in the real world. Getting people to participate was like pulling teeth and the frequent painful silences were enough to make you want to pull your hair out. I recall a group project where we had to come up with a problem and solve it in some asinine way using design. My group had a volatile working relationship. Two girls — both named Sarah — hated each other’s guts and pretty much couldn’t be in the same room together without erupting into a shouting match. Needless to say we rarely worked together, our project sucked and nobody really cared. Each two-hour session made me feel a little deader inside. EVERYONE I spoke to complained about it, heralding it the WORST class of the century, but no one had the guts to mention it to Gnome Man or the department administrators.
I decided to take matters into my own hands. I skillfully crafted a letter outlining all the problems with the class, how much everyone hated it, and why it was an utter waste of everyone’s time. I consulted with some of my classmates, and they agreed with what I wrote. So I came up with a fake email address on hotmail under the nom de plume, George Glass — the name of Jan’s imaginary boyfriend on the Brady Bunch (I was particularly proud of the name). I sent the letter to the professor and waited. Sure enough, in the next torture session, he pulled out the letter and read it to the entire class, saying that the person who wrote it was a coward and that if more people really felt that way about the class, they would have mentioned something about it. I listened with a feigned concern, but inside I was pissing myself with laughter. Lots of people knew I wrote the letter, but no one owned up to concurring with it. I think most were afraid to speak up. Hell, I didn’t really have the guts to stand up and admit it was mine, especially after writing it under an alias — so I guess I was cowardly. But in general there was a feeling of apathy that purveyed the class. Who cares? It was just another drop it the bucket of annoying things to put up with, so why try and fight it?
Sometimes I wish I had more courage to face the things that are eating away at me. I mean, if something is bothering me, I have no problem complaining about it for hours on end, but when it comes to confronting the issue head-on, I’d rather hide behind a smile and pretend it doesn’t exist. I think a lot of people are that way. We accept the things we think we can’t change, but we have a lot more power than we give ourselves credit for. I know that for me, it’s something I’m trying to improve upon. I just need the gumption to stand up for what I believe in.
