When Aimée Morrison stood up on the first morning of DHSI 2012 to describe what she would be teaching in her multimedia design course, she got all 400+ participants salivating (a dozen of us with anticipation, the rest with envy), by announcing that we would spend our week applying the frosting to the DH cupcake. She also unleashed a metaphor that would be pretty much beaten to death over the next 30 minutes, and which, appealing as it is, radically understates the importance of design to any digital project. This is the first of three posts in which I make the case that design is not just decoration; it is as fundamental to digital humanities and digital pedagogy as writing is to traditional scholarship. Along with writing, design constitutes the medium through which our readers/users will engage with our projects. This point is especially crucial in digital pedagogy, where we need to consider students both as users of our materials and as designers of their own.
So let’s try a more nutritious metaphor. Yesterday for lunch, I bought a beautifully packaged Greek salad from the university library’s cafe. Through the clear plastic lid, I could see bite-sized chunks of cucumber and red and yellow peppers, enticingly sprinkled with bits of feta cheese and accented with glossy kalamata olives. As soon as I reached in for my first bite, however, I discovered that those tasty and colorful tidbits rested on top of one giant leaf of Romaine lettuce that had been wedged, uncut, into the bottom of the container.
This salad had major design flaws. It looked pretty, yes, but it failed to take into account the device I would be using (a flimsy plastic fork incapable of cutting vegetables), or my social media platform (a table, at which I sat face to face with people I had just met, and in front of whom I wanted to appear moderately dignified or at least competent - not distorting my mouth to wrap it around an oversized leaf, with salad dressing dripping down my chin). All this made it unnecessarily difficult to get to what should have been the salad’s main substance.
And yet I have to confess that I’ve been guilty of arranging course websites very much like that salad - and then feeling surprised and frustrated to find that my students had picked the fun stuff off the top and left behind the main material that I really wanted them to engage with.
This is not to say that students should never have to grapple with whole lettuce leaves on their own. But we do need to demonstrate the use of knives and cutting boards (or at least train them in delicate nibbling techniques) AND provide a space in which it is safe and expected for them to make a mess.
OK, enough with the salad. The point is, when we are designing digital resources for our teaching, we can’t just stuff all the materials onto the course website and assume that the students will learn from them. We need to design with their learning in mind. Whether we like it or not, our designs communicate values and expectations, and we can and should use design intentionally to promote the kind of engagement with course material that we want. This may be as simple as using layout to indicate which materials are most important; visually coding objects according to the kinds of tasks students are expected to do with them; etc.
When I come out of design class and meet the exhausted looks of my colleague who has been doing battle with GIS all day, I do have the slightly guilty feeling that I have been playing with pink sugar and sprinkles while he dutifully eats his vegetables. But I also know that I’m learning more than how to make unappetizing content into digital Little Debbies for my students. The principles illustrated on this page have helped me see digital delivery of course materials not just as an alternative to photocopying, but as a medium in which I can reinforce what I am telling my students about what kind of work I expect them to do.
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