Visual Communication

I am reading Richard Sennett’s book Together. Sennett believes that “together” is a craft, where only practice makes perfect. The problem, according to the author, is that we are so rarely required to practice this “together” that we are on the verge of losing each other. As a solution and a way back, he brings up making and shows how practical work, side by side, can create community and bridge differences.

Most of those applying to our Master’s programme cite time and space as motives and just as many mention the longing for a context. This year, several of the graduating students have taken advantage of the opportunity to invite groups themselves and create new contexts. 

The students want to talk about the present, embrace it and conjure it. Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design is a place where we can sit next to each other and work with our hands, talk to our hands and talk with our hands, tell each other about what it is like to be human, fantasise together about the future, and in this way also contribute to a future.

Sara Teleman
Professor in Illustration

Visual communication is a subject and practice that builds on our near universal ability to interpret, empathise and understand through what we see. Visual language and meaning is in constant flux and development, and Visual communication contributes and responds. As the tools and terms of visual communicators become ubiquitous and with a constant background noise that ‘we’ face obsolescence an urgent question is where and how do we practice? We have to evolve, but at a human pace. 

In response to our students’ degree projects this year, I propose that the V of Visual communication is for Vulnerable. Vulnerable communicators are practicing from a space of sincerity and commitment, dealing with personal insights and narratives around, for example, masculinity, body shaming, immigration, or a desire to reorient a typographic practice toward craft, where AI is a co-pilot. In parallel to this perceived vulnerability is the courage students demonstrate in their year long investigations and a set of methods that have led them over the past year to this point, a beginning not an end.

Patrick Lacey
Professor of Visual Communication with a focus on Graphic Design