Design Enquiry: A Creative, Critical Community

Design Enquiry is now five years (and five volumes) old – they grow up so fast! At this first milestone, we reaffirm our commitment to writing within the BA Graphic Design course at Camberwell, continuing to provide a platform through which to share student's writing, thinking and making, to audiences beyond academia. We envision this as a creative, critical and community-building activity, one which can capture discussions, share collective thoughts and celebrate research. We explicitly want to pose writing as a form of 'agency' – a way of developing our contributors' critical 'voices' – while imagining new futures for the discipline as a whole. We want to propose writing as a way of re-creating lost communities, building collective futures and producing a sense of hope by working together across multiple platforms, disciplines and cohorts.

Over the course of these five years the context in which contributing students have been living, writing and making has become ever more urgent and challenging. For the university, it has perhaps never been so vital that we remain committed to engaging critically with the world in which we find ourselves. It is through language and through writing that we can give a name to injustices, build collective understanding, and reveal sites where ideas might become action.

To that end, and with five issues completed, the articles contained in these volumes offer multi-, inter-, trans- and meta-disciplinary perspectives on what graphic design can offer to our understanding of the world; becoming a 'snapshot' of the discipline, and giving rich insights into what concerns and inspires us as individuals and as a community. Throughout the pieces contained here, there is the same spirit of enquiry about what design might be able to do, and what subjects it touches upon and learns from. Across the volumes, we can start to see how this nexus of concerns has shifted, mapping out the changing technologies, politics, social, ethical and environmental concerns of our time, and showing us how graphic design and its related fields engage with them.

Rather than a separate sphere, remote and estranged from practice, we understand writing as a central feature of our work, one which we wish to celebrate. In the process of producing Design Enquiry we investigate writing and editing skills, introduce students to peer review processes and explore with them how to facilitate the design and production of a publication which might both generate a strong sense of community and engage new publics.

The student and staff community which coheres around this high quality, peer reviewed publishing space is vibrant, inclusive, and supported by staff who are simultaneously its writers, editors and designers. These include the staff of the Graphic Design programme at CCW: Emily Wood, Peter Hall, Eva Sajovic, Kam Rehal, Jack Clarke, amy etherington, Lynn Kiang and Charlie Abbott.

We also want to thank Alessia Borri (library support and guidance) and Sharon Young (academic support) for their ongoing and invaluable guidance offered to students, and we remain thankful to Margherita Huntley for the initial design of Design Enquiry. Our first publication was generously supported by a grant from the Teaching and Learning fund at CCW in 2021 and has been supported by the programme since then.

Finally, on behalf of the contributors, readers, reviewers, editors, colleagues, students and all involved or benefitting from the Design Enquiry, we would like to thank Dr Sheena Calvert for all of the work she has carried out over the last five years of this journal in her role as editor. Without this work, the writing you find here would have remained in the shadows of the university archives, unread and unused.

We are grateful to everyone who has contributed their time and ideas to our journal of Design Enquiries and hope you enjoy the work contained.

Jack Clarke & amy etherington (Design Enquiry Editors)