Making academic publishing more public

This presentation will follow directly on an article recently contributed to Design and Culture (10:3, 2018). In the article, I contribute to ongoing debates about what constitutes research for graphic design in context of the precarity and configuration of the contemporary university. I take specific issue with an academic system which rewards articles published, more often than not, in poorly designed and circulating journals and employing expert languages that only university-affiliated individuals have access to – and that only a small number of people will ever read. In this presentation, I would like to build upon this argument by considering the example of a publication that through its design-led approach experiments with the threshold between academic and wider publishing, and more broadly, between university and community. Soon to release its eighth issue, Urban Pamphleteer (http://urbanpamphleteer.org) was co-founded in 2013 by me and Ben Campkin as a collaboration between the University College London Urban Laboratory and the Central Saint Martins Graphic Communication Design Programme. Issues are organized around topical questions that concern researchers while also having immediate relevance to one or more specific communities. On the basis of this example, I will argue for a more assertive and in-depth engagement of university-based graphic and communication designers in academic publishing. This would position the field of graphic and communication design to make a greater contribution to the production of knowledge at large, in the context of its direct relationship to its form and circulation.