KPU graphic design students spread awareness of residential school history through projects

Graphic design students created infographics that explore the history of residential schools at Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Wilson School of Design.

The infographics were part of a final project for graphic design for marketing (GDMA) students completed for the GDMA 3100: Information Design course last semester taught by instructor Michael Cober.

Cober began teaching the course in 2017, and after his first year instructing it, he noticed the projects did not challenge or interest the third-year students.

He said he wanted to see design students use their skills for more challenging topics, which led him to redefine the course around the history of residential schools in Canada.

“I want to demonstrate how graphic design can be a way to educate, to inform, or to push back against preconceived notions and injustices in the world,” Cober says.

​In 2019, he officially launched and implemented the new project into the course.

Cober says students are now more invested and have produced meaningful, high-quality projects that allow them to use their complete skill set.

“I want part of that experience to be an emotionally hard project, and I find when that happens — when you make it hard — they tend to get more invested in the project, they feel more strongly about the project, and they tend to do, ultimately, better work,” Cober says.

“You can challenge students to do hard things — and they can rise to that challenge…. As designers, they have power and they can choose or decide, to some degree, where and how they use that power and for what.”

Gavin Ruim, a third-year GDMA student, took the course. For his project, Ruim created an installation featuring wooden panels engraved with quotes from residential school survivors. Ruim also included survivor interviews in his installation.

He says the project challenged him to prioritize, problem-solve, and handle the sensitive stories of survivors with care.

“I went through hundreds of stories, and it was incredibly difficult to narrow the scope down because I really wanted to include every single one that I came across. But for the sake of brevity, I couldn’t,” Ruim says, adding the project taught him how to adapt, be creative, and think outside the box.

“Whenever I felt like I was losing it, [I would] go back to the core idea of how do I represent these voices accurately and well? Also, being willing to adapt was a really big one, and changing things as needed because … we were responsible for 100 per cent of the physical artifact we made.”

Having the chance to honour and learn from residential school survivors was one of the most valuable experiences Ruim had during the project’s journey.  

“I think design has an obligation to people: to communicate information, to do it well, and to do it effectively.”

With years of running this assignment under Cober’s belt, students have gone on to win 34 national and international design awards for their projects from the course.

“It is very satisfying to see how many different students have won awards with this one project,” Cober says. “It’s satisfying to see when these students put these projects out into the world, they are recognized as being not just of quality, but of value.”

Cober says he will continue this project in the course, but he wishes he did not have to. He adds that the pushback from politicians who are diminishing the impacts of residential schools is keeping the project alive.

“I wish we had enough awareness and understanding of our impact collectively as Canadians on Indigenous people to not need it.”