For the Walker Art Center, Jon Sueda interviewed Joe Potts about his new alternative graphic design school, The Southland Institute:
The Southland Institute also asks what would happen if a study of the connections between a school’s curriculum and its institutional structure were themselves part of the educational experience. We are interested in examining what happens if part of an education that concerns itself with form, and the underlying structures of things, is about understanding and making visible the form(s) of the education and the educational institution itself.
This model (and in particular here we’re talking about higher/postgraduate art and design education)—a rigorous but curricularly nimble, lightly administrated, porously bordered, self-reflexive, and flexibly structured model that costs students less and pays teachers more—is a proposition built from pieces that are neither new nor unique, but it’s far from the norm, particularly in the United States.
I previously posted about The Southland Institute back in February. Here's a great comment on the relationship between teaching and design:
[P]art of what I think is so interesting about teaching is that it can be a relational space with varying degrees of structure and openness, fixed elements and variables. In certain ways I think of it as one of the most “alive” forms of design. So there’s a similarity maybe in terms of approach and rigor, and the fact that all three are alternative schools that deal with the formal, visual manifestation of language—in other words, typography. And then another similarity is that all of us are unaccredited, existing outside the sanctioned systems of higher education, and yet clearly are all born from an intimate familiarity with these systems.
