An exhibition of Hiebert's design work, photography, experimentation, and teaching methods will open at the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery on April 27. The tools for expression, thought of as the array of formal possibilities for visual communication, need to be taught as vehicles for the transmission of content in which the relation between form and content is clearly interdependent. When tools are easily accessed as they are in drawing software, effect can easily subsume expression. Visual language literacy, not in terms of knowing a catalogue of formal effects or manipulations, but in terms of experiencing how form, by its shape, size, color, texture, placement or other attributes connects to another form is key to creating a perceptual relationship of interaction. Form and space working together is another vital aspect of this relationship.
Design always operates within parameters of limitation, whether given or self-imposed.
However, limitations are not usually deterministic or prescriptive. It works better to see them as means rather than ends, as openings rather than fixed boundaries. Stretching the sense of the range of possibilities within rules, even when they are somewhat arbitrarily self-imposed, prepares us for finding connections that might otherwise be missed. Professionals complain that time demands don't permit the luxury of creative experimentation. One reason for being as exhaustive as possible in school is to build a facility for seeing the potential in new projects without investigating all the possibilities concretely.