AWTP

The dis­cus­sion today began with a brief look at what we are actu­ally doing: A mani­festo or some­thing else. The ideal­ism and pos­sibly wooly words of the First Thing First pos­i­tions, while being aims that we broadly sup­port as indi­vidu­als, are not real­ist­ic and do not make a last­ing dif­fer­ence to the way in which Graphic design­ers are viewed.

Organisations with the pur­pose of pro­mot­ing, sup­port­ing, edu­cat­ing but ulti­mately jus­ti­fy­ing a pro­fes­sion might have more long term influ­ence. This idea led to com­par­is­ons of the pro­fes­sion­al world of archi­tec­ture and the world of the Graphic Designer. Could we have a Graphic Designers RIBA: RIBVIS? RIBDES? GESCOM?

Are archi­tects and design­ers in the same boat? There seemed to be some com­pel­ling comparisons.

It seems self evid­ent to us that the dis­cip­line or prac­tice of Graphic Design has evolved and matured over time and now in 2010 “it needs to grow up”. It may have messy edges but what job does­n’t; it seems to be true of oth­er pro­fes­sions that define them­selves through pro­fes­sion­al bod­ies. The job types that might fall under the Graphic Design umbrella con­trib­ute massively to the eco­nomy of this coun­try and those that buy and use our ser­vices should be aware of the what it is and we should­n’t be scared of shout­ing it loudly. Or from believ­ing ourselves and all the vari­et­ies of prac­ti­tion­ers are loftily above these kinds of structures.

We want to include all sub dis­cip­lines with­in the “visu­al com­mu­nic­a­tion con­tinuüm”. It should be an inclus­ive body: Membership it is sug­gest should have two routes — edu­ca­tion and an num­ber of years exper­i­ence and just exper­i­ence. Entry would be judged by a small pan­el of peers who avoid a sub­ject­ive crit­ic­al eye and assess that cer­tain cri­ter­ia have been met.

We dis­cussed real life issues that have affected us that might have been helped by being able to fall back upon the sup­port of an organisation.

Some sort of event to launch our organ­isa­tion could be staged and then we might des­troy stop the organ­isa­tion at the same time as we can­’t help feel­ing that i still does­n’t actu­ally resolve the prob­lems we see.

On the oth­er hand Rebecca sug­ges­ted that mem­bers also wear capes.