While preparing for our group presentation tomorrow, for our Cultural Anthropology class, a group member asked me what my major is. I told her Graphic Design. She chuckled and replied, “Hmm, yeah, that has nothing to do with graphic design.” She didn’t mean it in a harsh way. It just got me to rethink this. It’s not a new concept to grasp that most people do not know how interrelated graphic design and anthropology are (as well as design and literature, sociology, etc). It just caught me off guard; sometimes I assumed it’s that simple to understand. So I am taking a step back to address this.
Anthropology allows us, umm… humans, to understand cultures and their development. Graphic designers design a way of transporting a message to the audience. This doesn’t just magically happen. Anthropology has an awesome process. It teaches us how to understand things objectively and evaluate with substance. It promotes weaving, crossing, interrelating and connecting the dots out of tons and tons of data. So, Anthropology and Graphic Design may not be connected at the hip like a VCR repair course and a VCR repairman, but they are closely related.
I think anything we harness has everything and anything to do with what we do. The things we learn in class, out of shitty experiences, out of successes, failures, and whatever, it connects to whatever it is we do. I digress. My point is, Kate and I had other choices of what class to take to fulfill our upper division requirement to graduate and we chose wisely. Education is only as valuable as we make it.