Accused of being a cloistered atmosphere polluted by its own freedoms, the graphic design program at the Cranbrook Academy

of Art was certainly in the forefront of design criticism from the late 1970s through the 1990s. One might expect to find guerrilla theoreticians lobbing graphic cherry bombs at mainstream modernism, but, in fact, Cranbrook s influence did not come from launching manifestoes; it developed by creating a stimulating environment where graphic experimentation altered the conventional practice of graphic design. According to Katherine McCoy (b. 1945), chairwoman of the graphic design program from 1971 to 1995, the work done during that time can be loosely organized into three clusters of concerns : the expansion of modernism s formal language (1971 1979), a short middle phase characterized by high formalism (1980 1981), and a third, poststructuralist stage (1982 1995). Criticism notwithstanding, Cranbrook s explorations served as fodder for rigorous discourse that helped define and expand the profession during the 1980s. Although Cranbrook embraced the Bauhaus notion of unity between art and industry, as early as 1940, when Charles Eames became chairman of the department of industrial design and Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia were on the faculty, Cranbrook had replaced the rigidity of Bauhaus ideology with a more complex, eclectic approach in which personal directions were encouraged. It was in this context that Katherine and Michael McCoy became co-chairs of the design department in 1971. In what started out as a part-time position, Katherine was responsible for twodimen sional design and Mike the three-dimensional design of furniture, interiors, and products. How did the institution that Paul Goldberger described in the New York Times Magazine (April 1984) as part artist s colony, part school, part museum, and part design laboratory become an experimental crucible for American typography during the 1970s and 1980s without a plan, much less a manifesto? In this unstructured environment the focus and impetus for learning came directly from the students, who were highly motivated self-starters. We always encouraged students to read, explained McCoy (Eye, No. 16, Vol. 4). McCoy kept an ever-expanding department bibliography, but texts were not assigned; students were encouraged to research, ruminate, and formulate with an eye to developing their own conceptual strategies. Cross-fertilization was a way of life between departments (art, photography, and architecture) and people. Students worked cheek by jowl in studios with faculty and each other as dorm rooms and cafeterias became laboratories for high-spirited discussions. McCoy was reluctant to describe the evolution at Cranbrook as a progression. It was more like spontaneous combustion, but there was an overarching philosophy that confronted graphic design s traditional dilemma form versus content head on. Form is not the enemy of content, and form can become content as well as a container of content, she explained. For McCoy, her 1989 Cranbrook Design poster symbolizes this reconciliation and pluralism. Visually, word pairs stretch the length of the poster anchored to the center, their dialectic reinforced by color and layout. Layered beneath the word pairs are collaged image-fragments of student work, echoing the bilateral symmetry with two-dimensional design projects on the left and three-dimensional projects on the right.

The deepest information layer is the See-Read-Text-Image diagram that unites the poster formally, and semantically suggests multiple interactions between the elements. To structure the phases during her tenure at Cranbrook, McCoy used a simplified communication model based on a 1949 linear-progression schematic developed by Shannon & Weaver. Although Shannon s model was later replaced by more sophisticated ones, the sender message receiver chain identified the core elements of communication as a basic linear interaction. McCoy, whose background is in industrial design, came to Cranbrook as a problem-solver and modernist. In the early years, 1971 1980, the program focused on the message part of Shannon s equation, expanding the modernist notion of the transparent designer communicating a clear and precise message to an audience. The entire lineage of Swiss work was examined, from Karl Gerstner and early MllerBrockmann, Hans Neuberg and Emil Ruder to the later high Swiss of Ruedi Regg, Odermatt & Tissi, and Wolfgang Weingart s mannered Swiss. Despite this thoroughness, the Swiss vein was just one of many being explored at the time. As a result of working with Ed Fella, a self-taught commercial artist with a highly personalized graphic style, McCoy s modernist tendencies expanded to include an understanding and sympathy for the low end of commercial art and the vernacular.McCoy brought Fella into the program at Cranbrook to participate formally in critiques and informally in spontaneous interactions with students. This sparked investigation into other commercial vernaculars and books like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown s Learning from Las Vegas. In 1978, Visible Language, a scholarly journal devoted to exploring the role and properties of written language, dedicated a volume to contemporary French literary aesthetics and engaged Cranbrook in a collaborative effort to design the volume, titled French Currents of the Letter. Daniel Libeskind, head of Cranbrook s architecture department, worked with McCoy and select students, giving them a crash course in French linguistic theory. Deconstructionism, a term that would later become Cranbrook s albatross, is a part of poststructuralism, which, in turn, is a response to structuralism, an earlier movement in French literary theory. Led by Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism posited that signs, rather than being isolated elements with self-contained meanings, are culturally interdependent parts of an overall network whose meaning is derived from the relationships between the parts. Deconstructionism was introduced to the United States through the writings of Jacques Derrida, which were translated into English in the late 1970s. Derrida suggested that a cultural construction, such as an idea, a value, or a sentence can be disassembled, or taken apart, and decoded its parts examined for meaning. The parts can be reassembled into another whole that may, then, take on a different meaning. The rearrangement of the parts into various wholes opens a way of exploring the complex nature of signs and moves communications into the complicated landscape of multimeaning, layered contexts, thus marking a shift from binary, yes no signification to a more subjective, multidimensional interpretation of meaning. For the Visible Language project, McCoy and students Richard Kerr, Alice Hecht, Jane Kosstrin, and Herbert Thompson created a typographic analog to the text. The essays began with traditional layouts. Progressively the space between the words and lines was expanded and footnote material was repositioned to interact unconventionally with the text. The final essays appeared to be pages of floating words visually punctuated by black horizontal bands of marginalia that so dislodged conventional reading order that the viewer was forced into alternative reading patterns. Vertical and diagonal pathways opened up, causing words and phrases to reassemble themselves through new juxtapositions that

jarred conventional meanings. It offended almost everyone, drawing rage and ridicule from designers still committed to the modernist canon of simplicity, legibility, and problem solving. The investigation of formalist expression culminated in 1980 1981 with the high formalist phase. Here the emphasis shifted, in Shannon s model, from the message to the sender. The classic student exercise in typography, to take a semantically neutral message like a weather report or recipe and explore its presentation through typographic and compositional variations, had evolved into what became known as the label exercise. After some classic warm-ups, the projects started with a Yellow Pages ad or a product label that was subjected to visual analysis, typographic variations, and most controversially, subjective interpretations of the original object or ad. The designer was no longer just a translator, but a commentator, partner, and participant in the delivery of the message. The third, poststructuralist phase (1983 1995) grew out of a restlessness and dissatisfaction with mannered formalist manipulations. Although the Visible Language project in the late 1970s touched on deconstructionism, it wasn t until the mid-1980s, with the classes of 1985/87 and 1986/88, that an active interest in linguistic theories really flourished. Driven by student inquisitiveness, McCoy called this period the theory-oftheweek-club structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, phenomenology, critical theory, reception theory, hermeneutics, letterism, Venturi vernacularism, postmodern art theory. McCoy resisted, asked questions, and challenged both students and theories. As Jeffery Keedy, a student at the time, recalled (Eye, No. 16, Vol. 4) that McCoy kept saying, But what does it look like? How you do make it work as a design tool? She admitted to being skeptical at times, but always remained committed to the mutual search, if not the mutual conclusions. In the poststructuralist period at Cranbrook, the emphasis in Shannon s model of communication changed again, now from sender to receiver. The traditional notion that text was to be read (a linear, encoded, left-brained activity) and images were to be seen (a holistic, experiential, right-brain activity) was questioned. Text became cross-functional and took on an expanded capability to communicate beyond its functionality, moving into the realm of the illustrative (type as image), atmospheric, or expressive. Similarly, images could be read, sequenced, and combined to form more complex information patterns. Concepts like multiplicity, layers of embedded information, viewer-controlled text and imagery, and nonlinear progression, which were characteristics of Cranbrook s experimental design in the late 1980s, have become bywords of multimedia, the new graphic design frontier.McCoy saw graphic design as a pluralistic activity, one in which the components of Shannon s model still apply, but no longer in a linear fashion. The imperative was for integration and cross-functioning of all the elements. I think this approach fits modern society because the contemporary world is subtle and complex. Simple black-and-white dualisms no longer work. Is graphic design graduate school a hermetically sealed research and development laboratory or a pseudoprofessional environment with training wheels? Those who would attack Cranbrook for being the former need to consider the impact on the design profession of alumni like Lorraine Wild, Nancy Skolos, Tom Wedell, Lucille Tenazas, and Jeffery Keedy. Cranbrook didn t intend to launch a revolution in theory-based graphic design. In fact, Katherine McCoy didn t even want to teach. So why did she stay for twenty-four years? Because it is such a flexible situation. . . . If you want change you can change. The only real requirement from the administration is that you attract good students and produce strong graduates who find their way in the profession.