Professor Meredith Davis: Design Education Leader

When asked about design education, Professor Meredith J. Davis is not one to mince words. As she once said in an interview for ID magazine, “One of the things missing in most foundation [design] programs is the development of an attitude of inquiry. We give students these lifeless exercises as though they were real problem-solving activities… We fail to link these abstractions to reality because the real world is messy and ugly and doesn’t fit the formal considerations we’re interested in.”

Yet, Davis has not let the messiness of the world stand in her way of improving design education, and her efforts are well documented in the NCSU Special Collections Research Center’s recently processed collection, the Meredith Davis Papers , 1975-2014. Davis taught for over a decade at Virginia Commonwealth University before coming to NC State in 1989. She has been here ever since, serving for ten years as the chair of the Department of Graphic Design (now the Department of Graphic Design and Industrial Design), and four years as head of the interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Design program.

In fact, Davis was one of the early advocates of Ph.D. programs in design. As she stated in another interview for ID magazine, “One of the characteristics that distinguish a profession from a trade is a segment of practice devoted exclusively to research. Design is now developing such practices, and there are students for whom this kind of work is very appealing.”  In her former roles as the president of the American Center for Design and the founding president of the Graphic Design Education Association, Davis led national efforts to promote more Ph.D. programs in design.

Apart from higher education, Davis is also interested in the ways in which design can be used in educational reform efforts in K-12 schools, and the relationship between design and cognition. The Meredith Davis Papers contain examples of Davis’s published research on these topics, as well as presentation materials from the more than 140 lectures she has delivered nationally and internationally during her career. The collection also features the two interviews cited here and samples of Davis’s design work from the 1980s when she was principal in the graphic design firm, Communication Design. Many of Davis’s designs, including the safety brochure series for the Virginia/North Carolina Company (see above), have won awards on the national and international levels. The Meredith Davis Papers contain a number of these awards as well.

For all of her hard work, however, Davis does not appear to be stopping any time soon. She is contributing chapters to several graphic design textbooks that will be released in 2015, and she is currently under contract for a new book of her own that will be released in 2016. For now, though, researchers interested in her work and career can view the online finding aid for the Meredith Davis Papers here , or contact the Special Collections Research Center staff for more information.