Courses-Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt

When we try to answer this question, we must first give a definition of what communication design is. The foundation of communication design is tied to the foundation of the bourgeoisie, its developing self-awareness in the face of aristocracy, and the idea that it must be possible to shape the world according to one's own will. When it is no longer just one person who has the say, be it pope or emperor, the question of how to build paradise on earth has to be negotiated, convictions have to be generated, power has to be accumulated and secured, the people have to be brought into line. None of this is possible without communication, and communication cannot be left to itself. Communication must be designed.

We can say that this is actually an important part of our definition of what communication design is, starting in the Age of Enlightenment with "man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity," as the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it. Emerging from self-imposed immaturity requires education. This is also part of our definition that communication design has the task of showing people how things really are, following the arguments of scientists and, step by step, the so-called free press.

To put it as concretely as possible, the communication designer is certainly neither a scientist nor a journalist, but has tacitly worked on the idea that dominated the time; as a supplier or henchman, he has made a significant contribution to what we now call the Enlightenment. This happened in the eighteenth century. 

In the nineteenth century, communication design took on the task of communicating the set of values needed to balance the structure of the emerging bourgeoisie, to define the roles and tasks that the various members had to fulfill in order to ensure that power would remain with the bourgeoisie. The form of power that we now call "our way of life", a constantly readjusting relationship between economic prosperity and social conditions. 

The main tool for communicating the appropriate values for the different classes of the bourgeoisie (petty bourgeoisie, educated citizens, upper bourgeoisie) was and is the "magazine", publications (in the 19th and 20th centuries mainly in printed form), today also in digital form. The role of these magazines was to standardize the behavior of the bourgeoisie, a role now largely taken over by social media. 

In the twentieth century, communication design became more and more an advertisement for the commodities that were mass produced in order to be mass-bought and mass-used, and that were announced as the fulfillment of a paradisiacal form of being, at least temporarily entering an individual paradise, as long as you are on your shopping tour and as long as you are consuming - until you get bored. Communicating the narrative of entering this temporary paradise, which can be reentered by repeating the process of shopping and consuming (as long as one has enough money), became the main task of communication design. 

All in all, the promise was that the world would indeed be a better place if everyone in the world could share in the blessings of consumption. Step by step it became clear that we would have to pay an unimaginably high price for this, the destruction of our natural environment. It also became clear that the vast majority of people would not be able to share in the blessings of capitalism. The promised paradise had turned into the opposite for more and more people.

Today, as we have lost the certainty of an idea or ideology that claims to lead to a better future, communication design is shifting from enlightening, educating, informing, instructing how to behave, advertising the commodities you need to behave (in terms of being accepted and valued as belonging to a social hierarchy), to the need to share the subjectivized perception of a complexity that does not allow for prediction. Thus, the task that we have to share (for which we have to design communication) is how to deal with the unknown, the unpredictable, the unassignable, in order to ensure that our being together remains within a socio-political, and therefore economic, reality that we call democracy. 

Thus, the core competence required today is to be able to deconstruct the given problematic reality by dissecting the objects of that reality in order to gain the elements of a communicative composition that takes into account the unknown, the unpredictable, and the unassignable. Only when we consciously encounter the unknown, the unpredictable, and the unassignable together do we have the opportunity to find a real solution to the problems associated with it. In this course you will experience what this actually means on a creative aesthetic level and how to work on the respective compositions.