JOURNAL

Destinations have been perceived and promoted as brands in the competitive tourism marketplace. Tourists develop an image before the visiting of a destination as well as an expectation based on pre-visiting experience. It has been found that destination images have an impact on the destination selection process of tourists. Information sources contribute to tourists’ decision-making has been recognized, and with the prevalence of the Internet, computer-mediated communication has become the dominant communication approach for destination marketing. Today, more and more people search for travel related information from the Internet, and it has become one of the prevailing media for tourism information search. Tourism organizations cannot neglect the significance of the Internet for destination marketing. In responding to the development of the Internet, tourism organizations are now integrating the new online technologies into their overall marketing strategies.

Traditional art and design curriculum revolves around instructing students and evaluating their individual projects without considering that a student’s future professional life and success will require that he or she function in a complex design environment with multi-faceted levels of relationships. Educators nurture, and the institution rewards, the ‘me’ designer while the professional world requires that a designer operates as ‘we’ and ‘us’. For the past nine years, Bernard Canniffe has developed classes that operate on a different paradigm—where students are forced out of their academic comfort zone to come to grips with complex, “real world” community issues, ultimately resulting in a greater understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of art and design.

The features of great design education are important to define, in order to achieve the contributions good communication design can make to competitiveness, innovation, and sustainability to strengthen an economy. Lisa Colley (Director Creative, Industries Innovation Centre) at the launch of the Australian Design Alliance was asked, “What do we need to change about design education in Australia?” Her suggested features of a great design education system included: consideration of design in Kindergarten-Year 12 (K-12) curricula, a design industry engaged in the curriculum process at tertiary level, living laboratories for collaboration opportunities, highly developed intern programs and design graduates with their degrees across faculties.

Communication designers, like all designers, operate in the generative yet problematic territory that exists between science and art. Their work is technical and instrumental, yet simultaneously imaginative, intuitive and creative. This is an activity of becoming through the poetics of the material. The relationship between the communication designer and client creates an intersubjective space in which new knowledge is both enabled through and accessed in materialised propositional artefacts. This knowledge is both experiential and tacit, formed in the interstices between designer and the other.

This paper focuses on how designers can contribute to enabling sustainable livelihoods in communities, especially communities of people with physical disabilities. This is a new area of design research and practice. The paper draws on a case study of the role and contribution of designers in one of the most disadvantaged communities in a semi-urban area of Thailand between 2007 and 2010. This was a collaborative project with nineteen community members with physical impairment in the Samutprakran province.