Critical Daily    Critical practice in graphic design

Dear minister of education, science, research, and sport of Slovak Republic,

My name is Kaisa Nurmsalu, I’m Estonian Erasmus student here in Bratislava and I would like to complain about some formalities I bumped into during my studies. I'm in third class at Academy of Fine Arts and Design, department of Intermedia and multimedia and one issue came to my attention recently. Students of the fourth class who are finishing their bachelor projects and applying for master studies have to overcome really difficult bureaucracy.

They are expected to print various papers and deliver them to the student office. It’s really embarrassing that in era of digital media there are still universities in your country that follow such old-fashioned and outdated methods. You waste enormous amount of paper and therefore you behave seriously un-ecologically which is a problem that we all should consider.

My intention is not only criticize but to offer some advice as well. As I already mentioned, I come from Estonia and at my home university we use Admission Information System (SAIS) – pretty similar to the one of yours – AIS. Many students and tutors complained about AIS, finding it difficult to interact and work with. I don’t know this system really well but I’m pretty sure it offers you possibility to get these papers done electronically.

If not, a bigger change is needed and it should be your ambition to make it happen – you need to fix your academic information system or find a new one. With our system, for instance, you can have everything done electronically – I’m enclosing some screens of it on which you can see applying for master studies. I suppose, Estonia is not that different from Slovakia in many things, let’s add this to that list!

Think green!
Kaisa Nurmsalu

This project was created during the course Critic – Critical practice in Graphic Design at Department of Visual Communication at Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Tutored by Katarína Balážiková. The course foucuses on practicing and developing individual or collaborative critical projects.