“THE VISUAL CODE”: EDUCATING IN AN AGE OF VISUAL CULTURE Noam Topelberg 1 , & Jonathan Ventura 2 1 Teaching Certificate Program, Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University (Israel) 2 Design and Technology, Shenkar - Engineering. Design. Art. (Israel) Abstract Over the past two decades, we have been witnessing a veritable revolution in the ever-expanding visual and material culture studies. As a result of technological advances, visual texts have become the most common carriers of information and meaning as well as shapers of people's perception of reality throughout the world. To keep up with these current and future changes, new tools of visual literacy and critical thinking are needed for teachers and educators. We argue that implementation of such tools in teacher training programs, across all disciplines, is extremely important and can be used as catalyst to foster critical thinking processes and promote active and relevant teaching and learning. Moreover, with our unique approach, we offer a much-needed innovative perspective towards new and expanding visuo- material disciplines ranging from the myriad venues of design, through architecture to visual communication. Our study presents a tool developed for Design and Visual Culture curriculum taught in more than 250 high schools in Israel. This tool, we call "The Visual Code" aims to cultivate skills of deciphering visual codes through diverse visual texts. Our approach surpasses the classic and somewhat redundant focus on Art History and allows a much broader understanding of our visuo-material surroundings, ranging from smartwatches, through buildings and urban settings, to websites, apps, and digital service platforms. We suggest observing this rich world through three prisms, suitable for different types of training: semiotic observation, suitable for teaching an training students, teachers (on and pre-service) and pupils of all disciplines; hermeneutic understanding, triggering deeper observation, suitable for those specifically engaged in visual studies, such as art and design; and in-depth phenomenological interpretation suitable for practitioners, experts, and researchers in the various fields of art and design. During our research, qualitative questionnaires, and activity, as well as visual content analyses will be used in classrooms, teachers’ development courses as well as some academic courses to evaluate the impact of this tool on classroom discourse and learning processes. Keywords: Visual literacy, education, art, design, interpretation, meaning-making. 1. Introduction In our current reality, visual information exceeds its textual counterpart in quantity and sometimes even in complexity. In this fast, ever-changing reality, through all platforms of information, we are surrounded by countless visual representations. Thus, viewers and end-users (or design partners in contemporary parlance) must make an effort to decipher and understand cultural products in order to identify concepts, messages, logos, limited edition products, apps, digital services, graphic changes in user interfaces caused by software updates, and so on. This reality corresponds directly with what Roey Tzezana calls the "Revolution of Personal Production", a revolution in which "each person receives the power to create outputs, products, and objects, which in the past required an entire factory to produce, for his own use" (Tzezana, 2013, p. 13). This revolution stems from technological developments, which have changed our ways of thinking and creating. Computers, the Web, Smartphones, 3D printers and scanners, and now Artificial Intelligence (AI), are constantly advancing this revolution. In the past two decades, these means have become accessible to everyone, as early as childhood, and their use requires little or no learning. Combined with social networks, which allow for the rapid distribution and consumption of each person's visual information, this "Revolution of Personal Production" led to far-reaching changes during the first two decades of the 21 st century. As part of these changes, visual texts are created, distributed, and consumed, both by professionals and amateurs, across a variety of media and their modes of interpretation are changing as well. These deep processes are leading toward the establishment of a visual culture that increasingly pushes the written word in favor of the image and the video. But although the reality described above is known to everyone, the various calls for adaptations of the education systems to the 21 st century, such as the learning compass, presented by the OECD in "Education 2030", hardly consider the fact that reality is