In my mind, Sharon Poggenpohl is one of the very few design scholars and educators, that have earned my respect and admiration justly and through a yeoman’s commitment and hard work to aid students, graduate students, faculty colleagues, and practicing professionals to either apply sound available knowledge and tools for success or to develop them.
I cannot identify any other person that is invested so deeply in publishing papers that advance design practice and education. I once described her as another Emelia Erhardt, achieving at the highest levels in a male-controlled environment. She was one of the very first to do so, not as a design talker, filling the air with the typical nonsense of a persisting personality cult, but as a constructive critic, providing processes and procedures from which we have benefitted for nearly fifty years ever since. When it comes to work, who can challenge her prolific output? I have known her since 1976, through communication with Meril Wrolsteadt, and specifically, when she appeared in my office, on a very hot summer day in Chicago, to let me know in very uncertain terms, that she did not support my candidacy for the directorship of the ID, the Institute of Design, in Chicago. I appreciated her honesty and candor, and we collaborated immediately in a team-taught design course, which we delivered together the following semester, most likely to test out each other’s scope of competencies. Because I was learning so much from her, I have always looked forward to any collaboration with her ever since. I respect her very deeply and know that I cannot hold a candle to her amazing scope of knowledge.
About
Sharon Poggenpohl had obtained an MS from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1974 with a very strong intellectual research thesis on issues around Value–Value Creation, Transferral and Interpretation–which unfolded the subjects from a variety of significant perspectives. I was impressed. From the moment I read it, her thesis became my gauge in measuring the strength of theses at competing American communication design graduate programs. In my eyes, hers came closer to a solid PhD dissertation and therefore became a sound model for building the next responsible intermediate stage in thesis conception and explication. I have used her information for fifty years.
Over the years, we stayed loosely in contact. She was very kind in asking me to collaborate on several papers, efforts which I very much enjoyed, and from which I greatly learned and benefitted. But it is quite clear from all angles that she always performed the yeoman’s portion of all our efforts.
Starting with Merald Wrolstad’s Journal of Typographical Research, and continuing with when Sharon Poggenpohl joined Merald in a long-time collaboration, from which the Visible Language journal evolved, this journal provided the life-blood for my courses, because of the dire dearth of useful intellectual material published about and for the design profession. The journal’s papers provided the primary important classroom support.
It is my belief, that there are only a very few in the field of communication design who can beat her work record. I would link her easily with the likes of Christopher Alexander.
Poggenpohl is known for her work to develop graduate studies in design, through the edition of anthology and the publications of essays. These include the book Design Integrations.