This semester I’m teaching a design class and I’m finding myself in new territory.  I’m constantly focused on making our projects to be meaningful and relevant. One very relevant project we were recently working on in class was designing a new cover for next years school agendas.   In a way the class was hired to a job with very specific criteria and functionality. Knowing this we took our task very seriously. Students broke off into small groups to work on their ideas, periodically regrouping to discuss design elements until we came up with something that we all agreed was aesthetically pleasing as good design. I feel the project was a huge success, used a collaborative design process, and helped students to become more familiar with Adobe InDesign.

One little bug  popped up in the process that brought me back to our copyright discussions in CoeTail. We started out our design process with a set of images that we owned.  At one point students wanted to use other images and began grabbing things off the internet without thinking twice. I quickly realized that in a class where we are constantly on the computer and we are working with layout and design that copyright needs to be addressed. As a matter of fact I should probably be addressing it in all of my art classes to some degree since appropriation is a common artistic practice.  With this thought in mind I have decided that the introduction to our next design project, which is t-shirt design, will begin with concepts of appropriation, copyright and remix culture. We have just finished creating our own personalized logos and have published them to our blogs.  Ownership of their own work and fair use of others are things that each of my students should be considering at this point.

This unit will be introduced to my students by addressing the issue we ran into a few weeks ago when images were taken from the internet for our cover project. The class will be broken up into groups of two, with each group researching one of the following topics and reporting back to the class.

• Explain copyright and who it is meant to protect.
• What is appropriation? Give 3 examples of famous artists using appropriation in their work.
• Tell us about Andy Warhol and one of the copyright lawsuits he was involved in.
• What are considered the fair use and artistic standards for artists involving copyright?
• Give two possible scenarios where copyright would affect us in Design class.

Once we have all been informed of each others topics we will take a closer look at our schools RUP. This will give the students time to not only review the RUP but also discuss what points in the RUP relate closely to our work in Design.

It is at this final point in the discussion that I will introduce students to Creative Commons, it’s purpose and how we should be using it from here on out. Creative Commons has two wonderful videos that I plan to share with the students to not only explain what Creative Commons is but also how they have contributed to the remix culture of modern artistic appropriation. The following is the first of those two videos. With help from the Creative Commons search engine we will be finding images to turn into remixed graphics on Adobe illustrator. Our final graphics should also be changed according to artistic standards of copyright so that they could be legally printed onto a t-shirt or submitted to a design company such as threadless.com.

I’m excited for students to do their own research into this topic and see how copyright enters the visual art world. I’m also excited to hear the discussions that might follow. This unit will being within the next two weeks in my class, stay tuned for updates.