Teaching vs. Coaching in Visual design Programme. A collaborative approach based on self-learning & User-Generated Content

The research project was developed inside a multidisciplinary cultural environment: the students, graduated in technology courses or a psyhco-cognitive training, learn the basic knowledge of visual communication and design. Starting from a constructivist pedagogical perspective, the Visual Design class – held inside the Theory and Technology of Communication Degree Programme at Milano-Bicocca University – was designed to build up a global, immediate, direct student experience giving up with the traditional approach that separates a previous stage to learn guidelines and rules and a successive direct application. According with the constructivist theoretical approach the whole course of Visual Design was designed and improved during the years, exploiting the potentiality of collaborative dynamics of web 2.0 & social networks. The final goal was the immediate involvement of the students as leading subject in the manifold activities of the visual communication design. Classe’s activities were focused on retrieving, discriminating, elaborating, discussing, sharing, producing and disseminating cultural content on basic visual design main issues. Students – divided in team working on monographic issues like: the grammar of visual design, digital typography, the language of colors, use and meaning of images and so on – were supported in a self-development and self-teaching process through a collaborative approach. In this experiment, the role of didactics was to coach and to enable the learning process based on the experience, to gain the ability to discriminate between Internet sources and materials, or to propose theoretical or disciplinary point of views. The class was supported by a FaceBook Page to post links, videos, images and other stuff, where invited practitioners and experts shared in an open dialog the knowledge and professional experience. Seminars and interviews were other supports to discover, from leading contributors of the field the recent history of graphic design. The final assignment was to edit and publishing on a print-on-demand platform and ePublishing free distributors a professional – although User Generated – essay to directly implement in a real project the learned and shared principles and notions. The project will be prosecuted next year: the new class will use the edited eBoooks to learn the visual design principles and will be requested to improve and to enhance examples, bibliography and materials elaborated during the previous year.