Stereotypes and prejudices are not easily overcome. They are ingrained in us from an early age and from a place of security and comfort: home. The tendency to stereotype, which is present in all of us, is frequently reinforced by social customs, our education systems, and the media.

Race, religion, socio-economic class, lived geographic locations, and personal beliefs all contribute to the unique perspectives we take as creative professionals. The need to understand how these differences shape who we are and thus our approach to visual messages is an ethical component of the graphic designer’s professional duties. The need for graphic designers is urgent: for if these differences and the potentially skewed perspectives are not recognized, then slippage between accurate and faulty messages will occur in design works that can potentially influence a greater population. Sticks + Stones is an iterative collaborative project that applies this objective to design education.

Sticks + Stones project leaders aim to propagate knowledgeable, culture-savvy designers who have learned first-hand from an extraordinarily diverse group of peers about the insulting and potentially harmful effects of image misuse. For the 2010 iteration, the project leaders deliberately gathered design students from diverse geographical regions across the globe in order to provide first-person learning opportunities.

During the June 2010 iteration, students from China, Germany, Israel, Russia, Poland, England, Turkey, and the United States assembled in Berlin, Germany for a two-week symposium. During this time these students participated in discussions and symposium activities focused around the topics of culture, immigration/migration and representation. Project leaders deliberately challenged students to evaluate their beliefs of the “other,” recognize the limitations of their knowledge, and realize the need for professional research. Students collaborated on a series of corresponding design projects that were exhibited at the DesignTransfer gallery in Berlin that same month.

Berlin is a vibrant yet historically conflict-ridden city—an excellent backdrop for a curriculum addressing individual identity, propaganda, and the perpetuation of stereotypes, especially those as related to immigrants. Universität der Künste generously agreed to host the project symposium.

Students visited the House of World Cultures, the Jewish Museum, and the Bauhaus-Archiv, and took a guided tour of Kreuzberg, a neighborhood in Berlin that historically has a large percentage of immigrants, many of whom are of Turkish descent. (Germany’s strained relationship with Turkish immigrants is similar to the United States’ strained relationship to Mexican immigrants.) The information learned from these scheduled activities as well as the informal participant discussions influenced the overall exhibit.

The challenge of preparing effective, ethical messages increases as global culture continues to grow more ethnically complex. It is important for the future architects of our communication environment to experience first-hand that the designer is an agent of social influence. Sticks + Stones 2010 advances the following notion: design education should emphasize that the end goals of our work, whatever the immediate intent, must also be responsible to the larger societal context.

Opportunities for awareness and learning about ethical considerations of the design profession are limited outside a university setting. If college students are not exposed to these issues, then they will most likely conduct their professional career unaware of this essential knowledge. If students can learn to make a difference, the collective positive effect might also be felt globally.

Stereotyping works as an obstacle to change and transformation. Graphic designers can work to combat that resistance with awareness and new approaches to message making.

You can still visit these project pages to learn more about Sticks+Stones:

Sticks+Stones 2010 video

Sticks+Stones 2010

Sticks+Stones 2006

We are pleased to announce that Sticks + Stones was awarded winner of the Design Education Initiatives in this year’s Core77 Design Awards.

Core77 is a prominent online magazine and design space that that publishes and promotes design information. “Core77 provides a gathering point for designers and enthusiasts alike by producing design competitions, lecture series, parties, and exhibits.”

Core77 Design Awards is a global competition of design professionals and students. This year marked the inaugural year of the competition. “Recognizing excellence in all areas of design enterprise, the Core77 Design Awards celebrates the richness of the design profession and its practitioners. … For this first program, dedicated jury teams based around the globe gathered in eight countries to judge 15 categories of design practice.”

This year’s Core77 Design Awards competition marks the first time that design education has been recognized as an important category in a professional design competition.

During the online award presentation, Design Education Initiatives Jury Captain Dr. Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at Swinburne University (Australia), noted: “What pushed Sticks + Stones to the top of our list was how it promoted cultural awareness by working WITH cultural diversity as opposed to just working on or about cultural diversity. … Sticks + Stones hit a chord in the current global climate of racial and cultural tension, while helping graphic design avoid most of its really bad habits of stereotyping.

“Its philosophy of social democracy has the potential to foster transformation through the promotion of empathy, mutual understanding and social justice,” Dr. Tunstall continued. “This was the project that made us feel good, made us really feel good, and the idea of being able to promote the possibilities of this model and the expansion of this model for design engagement in an educational setting as well as educational content again is why it is at the top list in terms of this Core77 Design Award.”

Sometimes non-verbal facial expressions can say it all, as this video tries to prove. The Sticks + Stones students traveled around Berlin and asked others to look at a variety of images that referenced different cultural traditions, political beliefs and lifestyle choices. The viewer is seen reacting to a series of images, each seen at the bottom left corner of the video. The facial responses to these images were recorded as a way to reveal the viewers’ thoughts regarding these potentially controversial images.

The genesis for this project came from our symposium participants’ frustration at the inability to communicate verbally. In the absence of easy conversation, students relied heavily upon hand gestures, drawings and facial expressions. This project seeks to invoke the initial non-verbal reactions of the viewer to different visuals, exposing their hidden biases. These reactions are influenced by cultural backgrounds and reveal the differences that underlie our everyday judgments of the world around us.

As many students realized, this was not an easy endeavor. Inviting others to openly judge and visibly label them, was an exercise in risk, potential danger, and emotional turmoil. Todd Nelson, the first t-shirt wearer, was asked afterward, “Would you do it again?”

His answer was an emphatic No.

This initiative provides insight into the true nature of words. They can push us into action. We hope these t-shirts promote you to act: Carefully consider the words you use as they hold great power to heal or to wound, an idea in contrast to the nursery rhyme.

www.sticksandstonesproject.org/2006/