Rebellious Creative Making: A Meme-Making Studio Pedagogy

Rebellious Creative Making: A Meme-Making Studio Pedagogy explores the potential for meme-making to function as a heightened form of studio pedagogy in design education. It investigates how meme-making can effectively critique and challenge conventional design methods, inspiring students to be bold and take risks by considering non-conventional design processes and outputs. This dissertation begins with a brief introduction to the contemporary social and political impact of memes, linking them to art and design history to speculate on their potential in creative making. It then details a meme-themed workshop that was conducted to directly observe participants’ meme-making processes. Participants’ meme work, presentations, and interviews were closely analyzed to achieve an understanding of how their learning through meme-making differed from their previous experiences in design school. Participants’ meme works reflected a variety of design styles and topics pertaining to political, social, and personal issues. These works and the participants’ own responses suggest that the workshop functioned as a stress-free design-making process in which makers felt sufficiently relaxed to comfortably explore their desired topics and styles. As participants expressed themselves and their viewpoints through meme-making, they also felt healed from both their negative thoughts and experiences in life and, more specifically, their previous oppressed experiences with design education. The results of the meme workshop provide valuable insight into current issues of studio pedagogy in commercialized education institutions; these insights give way to potential improvements aimed at valuing the benefits of creative education beyond its practical purposes in pursuit of self-growth among learners.