CHArt Eighteenth Annual Conference

John Calvelli, The Art Institute of Portland, Oregon, USA
Art History, Design, and the Digital Database

Developing a course in the history of graphic design for the Art Institute of Portland, a design school in Oregon, led me to consider a trans-disciplinary model of teaching design and art history that evaluates a disparate range of visual objects, and relies on a digital database for both course development and delivery.

I enlisted the help of my students with this task, creating a freeware application that would enable them to complete and submit weekly structured assignments which were subsequently added to the database for the course. For each assignment, they chose an image relevant to the historical period under consideration, and provided two statements, one on the meaning of the work and the other on its value, accompanied by a brief analysis and caption information. At the end of the course, each student received a small database of images, along with an application that they may use to build their own image collection. This paper will articulate the assumptions, development processes and results of this approach as a practical teaching strategy for both design and art history.

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