Diversity endangered. Academic design and writing at the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí

Abstract

This article offers an exploratory study about the role of academic writing in the first years of the Graphi-cal Design Degree. The authors carried out a case study in the Faculty of Habitat at the Universidad Au-tónoma de San Luis Potosí in Mexico with teachers of Architecture, Graphical Design, Industrial Design and Urban Design in order to know what graphic designers understand as writing, which function wri-ting performs in their disciplinary training, which literature they consider most important for teaching Design and how writing is assessed. Amongst the main findings of this study the authors observed that teachers use to put on the same level writing and grammar, data gathering, its organization in a paper and the final version of a text. The teachers prefer essays to academic article and the assessment is cen-tered on the contents of texts without taking into account the way to express those contents. The results also point out that the hegemony of academic writing in higher education threatens the core practices ofDesign, based on a visual language.