Tyler Paige¶

I've been teaching about technology at Pratt's communications design MFA since 2021. Recently I've gotten it into my head that design education should be based around teaching students methodologies. In particular, I am interested in methodologies that use visual processes to digest the world. Basically, I just want to transcribe and share conceptual processes — similar to how to you might instruct someone how to approach typography.

This semester I am leaning heavily into that idea. We are working through several methodologies the students will use to develop a critical relationship to technology. Some of these are:

• Creating visual analogs of technological metaphors
• Identifying the image of a technology
• Tracing narratives in how technology constructs social reality
• Analyzing how visual language hides or shows power dynamics
• Creating visual forms for counter-narratives using parody, appropriation, inversion, and refusal

When the course is done, I'll share the materials here.

Recently I have been teaching a class about collectivity and collaboration for designers. It's been a really beautiful thing to watch students begin the semester saying “I hate group projects,” and end the term completely changed. Students are put into groups and tasked with making a project that results in a publication. Along the way, they learn concrete methodologies for organizing and sharing work, as well as political concepts about what it means to really be together.

In making the course materials, I have been playing with a motif that's derived from blasting up the saturation on anti-aliasing. As a result, emphasis is placed directly on members of the edge. Where typically anti-aliasing would blend a foreground and background, here instead the difference is exaggerated and made colorful. To me, this serves as a visual representation of a critical point that comes to us from Critical Art Ensemble: solidarity through difference.

This course is taught at Pratt’s MFA in Communications Design. It is based on a model designed by Kimi Hanauer and Asad Pervaiz, and indeed it continues to develop in part due to loving collaboration of our teaching affinity group.

I love teaching this class!

Just some simple slides I used to present my work at the Lubalin Center in spring 2025, talking about how working in education gives me the opportunity to use graphic design as artistic practice, somewhat divorced from its more traditionally commercial uses.

Recently I have been teaching at Pratt and at Rutgers. I’ve been collecting my teaching materials—sometimes tutorials, sometimes emotional workshops, sometimes art assignment—to a portal I’m calling “The Center for Dizziness and Balance.”

The throughline between my teaching and my creative practice is to find useful disorientations: misheard phrases that spark interest; quick glances at the clock when a second feels strangely longer; sudden vividness when a truism feels deep. Therefore, the name here is taken from a rehabilitation center seen driving 65mph down the Garden State Parkway—the center between dizziness and balance.

These are slides from a lecture I gave at Mason Gross School of the Arts, about what makes an interesting project on the internet