Rhetoric and the Politics of Design

I elected to share an assignment I often use with my first-year writing courses: "Rhetoric and the Politics of Design." This generally is a mid-semester assignment in my course schedule. I ask my students to think critically about their surroundings. I emphasize that they should think critically about things they do not normally consider (e.g. bus stops, classrooms, pens, manuscript layout, etc). Initially, many of my students find this practice quite difficult.

Once we reach a point where my students are starting to get it, we talk about how rhetoric (and design) is often called into existence by an exigency, or rhetorical situation (see Bitzer's "The Rhetorical Situation"), and we start trying to think of the exigencies that call tangible things into existence (e.g. chairs, desks, cups, watches, etc). Then, we read Jennie Winhall's "Is Design Political?"and follow that reading with a viewing of Gary Hustwit's documentary about objects and designers: Objectified. 

After we've read Winhall's piece and watched Hustwit's documentary, we ruminate (marinate?) on the ideas floating around. We then do a Derridean deconstruction (though, I don't call it that because I don't  introduce them to Derrida) of objects that each student picked. We think about how objects and the rhetoric used to create them are political, and we deconstruct objects in order to see if we can ferret out the political of the designed.

I tend not to be super prescriptive in my assignments, and I like to let them flow organically for each class. Every class is different, so I try to keep that in mind when we work on things.

So, it ends--for now.