Change is a constant in the field of visual design — and Meena Khalili embraces it. It’s what allows her, and her students, to be at the forefront of their field and to be ready for multiple career roles.
Khalili has been designing and playing with design tools since her childhood outside Washington, D.C. She pursued a BFA in communication arts and design, and later an MFA in design and visual communications, from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.
After several years in the agency world, she decided she’d try her hand at adjunct teaching. “I loved it,” she says, “and that fed into my first tenure-track position at Virginia State University.” After a few more stops, she has found a home at the University of South Carolina.
As an associate professor in the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences’ School of Visual Art and Design, Khalili is passing along her agility to students, preparing them for careers ranging from graphic design to product design in a world where their tools can change rapidly. She has also helped her school become just as agile as it reviews programs and courses regularly to adapt to change.
It’s a big part of why her students love her, and why she is a Garnet Apple Award winner. And she can speak from experience: Khalili has been a professional designer and now a professor during some monumental advances.
This spring, for example, Khalili incorporated artificial intelligence into her ARTS 346: Process and Systems course and made it more of a seminar/lab with honors students from all over campus.
“So we were still making and creating, as always, but we also discussed the weekly state of AI,” Khalili says. “What’s new in AI? Where is it going? And what are the concerns we’re hearing in the field and from incoming students?”
“We had to create an environment where using technology was not just OK, but also fruitful for them. And a big question was ‘Why are we using this?’ We understand the environmental impact and the workforce impact. So what’s the reason we are using AI for any specific task? How do we use it better? At the end of the course, students really felt empowered.”
We have to understand the place for AI. Let's really explore it to see how to be fruitful with it.
According to Khalili, it’s critical for designers to tackle new technology head-on in order to learn how it can fit into their careers.
“If designers are not at the helm in the conversation about AI, we are going to get steamrolled,” Khalili says. “I’m old enough to remember when it happened in the mid 1990s with AOL and the internet and desktop publishing and all that. And then people were really concerned with Adobe, and with digital cameras replacing many skills of photographers.”
But desktop publishing didn’t replace designers. “Designers who used desktop publishing replaced designers who didn’t,” Khalili says, “so we have to understand the place for AI. Let’s really explore it to see how to be fruitful with it.”
This kind of flexibility isn’t just important when working with new technologies. It also applies to what students are prepared for when they graduate from the School of Visual Art and Design. A big part of that is having a diverse set of talents upon graduation.
The design capstone course she teaches is a rigorous 16-week course in which student portfolios are reviewed constantly. In it, Khalili and her students talk a lot about what kinds of solutions they want to create in their careers. “Notice I didn’t say what kind of designer they want to be,” Khalili says.
That’s because diverse training leads to more career options. If you just look at a list of jobs in the field, you’ll see roles like graphic designer, digital designer, motion designer and animator. But Khalili’s students are doing all of those things.
“We want to make sure they don’t get pigeonholed. And please don’t pigeonhole yourself, right?” Khalili says. “What I think is special about our program is that we’re focusing on the student and on the kinds of solutions that they’re really interested in making.”
This student-success-first approach to the school’s programs of study, as well as to specific courses, is central to Khalili’s teaching approach, as well as to that of other design professors. So is a constant review process to make sure what’s being covered is as up to date as possible.
“When I got here in 2019, my design colleagues were excited about change. And so I helped to make that change, infusing it in our program and scaffolding our program to support new ways of teaching design,” Khalili says.
“And every course subsequent to those changes has — I hope — lived up to that expectation of ‘How do we teach design differently?’” Khalili says. “How do we center the student and the research and bring those two together for them in their first two years of college? How do we allow them, in their last two years, to be the designers they want to become, to be the solution makers they want to become?”
“And I would hope,” Khalili says, “that that was integral to my nomination for the Garnet Apple Award.”