Communicatheo

Idioma Original

Tradução Oficial

Javier Cancino Díaz

The Javier Cancino’s look, designer and educator, 47 years olds, on the vocation and teaching in Chile.

Max: Today, you have an intense teaching life.  How and when do you come about to it?

Javier: It was the year 2000, in the Andrés Bello University in Santiago de Chile.  I came to give an elective course that we named Editorial Workshop.  I was the Art Director of the Paula, Urban Culture and Faces Magazines.  They were important magazines in the printing media of the time in this country.  The most difficult part for me, before, was that the course was given on Saturday from 09:00 hours till 12:30 hours.  I thought I was not going to have any students.  This was a course after Friday nite “rolling (carrete).”  I saw it very difficult.  Moreover, it was only an elective which forces people to get up really early on Saturday.  However, it was a success.  I had a good number of very good students and besides, they never missed a class.  I think that was what made that they offered me the Graphic Design Vertical Workshop course.  However, even today it is called Editorial Workshop.

Max: Javier, per your opinion, what is the reason of giving so much importance to the education of a designer in a changing context.

Kerning, grid and counter forms. One of many jobs where Javier explores multiple resources harmonizing the page layout.

Javier: To me, this is not a so simple matter.  I am going to take the words of a great master of the Chile University, to whom I respect and admire very much, Mr. Guillermo Tejeda and later I will answer the question.

“Rehearsal is what is worthy, Montaigne so says it:  When you step into what you don’t know, then you start to rehearse.  Savater brings this phrase when recopying some of his essays.  Mostly, I often write rehearsing, ignoring where is it that I am going to stop, and that means making writing alive.  However, the universities or the context funds have a great interest in knowing exactly what is the conclusion we are reaching or a place we are reaching after a research, a text, a workshop, etc.  Many times, they are sending forms in which each mailbox is a decision excluding others.  Thus, there is no one to rehearse anything, and for that matter they are proud.  That is one of my greatest incompatibles with the established cultural system.  It’s as if the most important thing was going to demonstrate its own productivity before even starting, because this way, we are forced to a series of tasks which we need to know before hand that we might think it will know.  A wonderful order destroying the creation from the beginning.  An industrial, scientific system in which accounting is indispensable and creation just a minor detail.  Mine is the essay.”

When you walk towards what you don’t know is when you start to rehearse.

Therefore, I absolutely share this point with the graphic design study field.  In my workshops one rehearses, experiments, make mistakes, even I will try to say that this space is for pleasure and not business.

My students learn by doing and you need to be awake, observing, because today’s youth is different from my time; they are living something very distinct.

I propose things such as reading, understanding what they read, reflecting, and taking charge, and then proposing from that point of view.  Then it is born from an observation, concept, or idea, which comes out of the reading.

Max: Since you teach at three universities, do you think that the designers from the different schools graduate with a different market offer or a cultural gene is implanted resembling the Chilean designer.

Javier: mmm…! I will retake Tejeda’s words, “the universities have a great interest to know exactly what conclusion or place we will reach after studying design.  It seems as if the most important thing to do is to demonstrate their own productivity.”  In addition, here, I am going to change his words a little bit.  I said that is a horrendous order which destroys the creativity from its start.  An industrial system or scientific in which accounting is indispensable and creating is just a minor detail.  The schools are mostly concerned with something they call “labor competencies.”  Definitively, they are embedding in the students that they are also a sort of employment agencies and not a place where you acquire knowledge.  For me, graphic design and probably architecture are vocational careers; and at least in Chile, to work in these careers is becoming very difficult and its space is scarce for its development.  Therefore, I do not think the schools here are offering any difference from the market.  I think that the youth are finally making their own road, the echo to form collective or alternate jobs that sometimes are unsuspected.  I’m quite criticized by my “breakaway” position in which I see more anachronistic.  Many times, I said that we should carry the problem to its height, even though you may fail in your attempt.  The younger academics celebrate this position or those who get to know me more by entertaining that bet.

Definitely, they make believe the students that they are some sort of employment agencies and not a place where they go to acquire knowledge.

Detail of printed page designed by Javier.

—– End of part one—–

Communicatheo recommends:

Elliot Jay Stocks, Living the Design

—————————————-

Volunteer translation by Maria Tenorio

Maria Tenorio has a bachelor degree in Business Management and an MBA in Banking and Finance. She specializes in bi-directional English-Spanish translations. Particularly, the translation of commercial publications, legal work and the similar with utmost accuracy and fidelity and have translated voluminous documents (legal and financial) from Spanish into English. She also translates legal documents for Immigration purposes for friends and help other immigrants within the community with language barriers at schools, hospitals and the like. If you want to contact her for work, please write to joboard@communicatheo.com

—————————————-